US House committee passes Uyghur Policy Act, again

[ad_1] The U.S. Home Overseas Affairs Committee this week accepted bipartisan laws to assist Uyghurs and different ethnic minorities topic to human rights abuses by China.

The Uyghur Coverage Act is the newest legislative effort to guard the rights of persecuted Muslim minority. The U.S. authorities has decided that China’s therapy of Uyghurs quantities to genocide.

The invoice is co-sponsored by 9 Republicans and Democrats led by Rep. Younger Kim and Rep. Ami Bera, who're the chair and rating member respectively of the Home sub-committee for East Asia and the Pacific.

<img data-chromatic="ignore" alt="Rep. Young Kim, R-Calif., speaks onstage during the 2025 Concordia Annual Summit on Sept. 23, 2025 in New York." class="c-image" loading="lazy" src="https://www.rfa.org/resizer/v2/MY74MYIJYVDQLAC5ECWPKK3SCI.jpg?auth=534a8e65cd6b10cb3516e00b2b791123a938132bd7ac18c4e31a87571b8ac841&width=800&height=533" srcset="https://www.rfa.org/resizer/v2/MY74MYIJYVDQLAC5ECWPKK3SCI.jpg?auth=534a8e65cd6b10cb3516e00b2b791123a938132bd7ac18c4e31a87571b8ac841&width=274&height=182 274w, https://www.rfa.org/resizer/v2/MY74MYIJYVDQLAC5ECWPKK3SCI.jpg?auth=534a8e65cd6b10cb3516e00b2b791123a938132bd7ac18c4e31a87571b8ac841&width=400&height=266 400w, https://www.rfa.org/resizer/v2/MY74MYIJYVDQLAC5ECWPKK3SCI.jpg?auth=534a8e65cd6b10cb3516e00b2b791123a938132bd7ac18c4e31a87571b8ac841&width=768&height=511 768w, https://www.rfa.org/resizer/v2/MY74MYIJYVDQLAC5ECWPKK3SCI.jpg?auth=534a8e65cd6b10cb3516e00b2b791123a938132bd7ac18c4e31a87571b8ac841&width=1024&height=682 1024w, https://www.rfa.org/resizer/v2/MY74MYIJYVDQLAC5ECWPKK3SCI.jpg?auth=534a8e65cd6b10cb3516e00b2b791123a938132bd7ac18c4e31a87571b8ac841&width=1440&height=959 1440w" width="800" height="533"/> uyghur-young-kim Rep. Younger Kim, R-Calif., speaks onstage throughout the 2025 Concordia Annual Summit on Sept. 23, 2025 in New York. (Getty Photographs for Concordia Annual Summit) The laws calls on the State Division to reply to abuses within the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Area – the Uyghur homeland inside China -- and push again on Chinese language Communist Occasion efforts to silence Uyghur voices, and to develop a technique to shut detention services and political reeducation camps.

It additionally requires the U.S. secretary of state to supervise human rights-related insurance policies to protect Uyghurs’ ethnic, non secular, cultural, and linguistic identities.

The Home Overseas Affairs Committee accepted the invoice on Tuesday. It faces numerous legislative hurdles earlier than it turns into legislation, together with passage by the total Home and Senate.

The laws was handed by the Home of Representatives in each of the previous two congressional phrases with out advancing additional.

The final Congress renewed separate laws, the Uyghur Human Rights Coverage Act, that licensed sanctions towards Chinese language officers liable for genocide towards Uyghurs. One other legislation, handed in 2021 and which has had probably the most affect, makes it unlawful to import merchandise used Uyghur compelled labor into the US.

Additionally this week, the World Uyghur Congress, the primary world umbrella group advocating for Uyghurs, stated it had filed a authorized grievance in Paris towards three French subsidiaries of main Chinese language firms: Dahua Know-how France, Hikvision France, and Huawei France.

The submission, made by distinguished French human rights lawyer, accuses the three Chinese language firms of complicity in crimes towards humanity perpetrated towards the Uyghurs by allegedly serving to to construct and keep a mass surveillance system.