Three Uighurs who fled from China to Turkey have described forced abortions and torture by Chinese authorities in the far western Xinjiang region.

They were speaking ahead of giving evidence to a people’s tribunal in London that is investigating if Beijing’s actions against ethnic Uighurs amount to genocide.

One woman said she was forced to have an abortion when she was six and half months pregnant, a former doctor spoke of draconian birth control policies, and a man alleged he was “tortured day and night” by Chinese soldiers while he was imprisoned in the remote border region.

They spoke to the Associated Press before giving by videolink to the independent UK tribunal, which is expected to draw dozens of witnesses when it opens four days of hearings on Friday.

The tribunal, which does not have UK Government backing, will be chaired by prominent human rights lawyer Geoffrey Nice, who led the prosecution of ex-Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and worked with the International Criminal Court.

While the tribunal’s judgment is not binding on any government, organisers hope the process of publicly laying out evidence will compel international action to tackle growing concerns about alleged abuses in Xinjiang against the Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic group.

One witness, mother-of-four Bumeryem Rozi, 55, said authorities in Xinjiang rounded her up along with other pregnant women to abort her fifth child in 2007. She said she complied because she feared that otherwise authorities would have confiscated her home and belongings and endangered her family.

“I was six and a half months pregnant. The police came, one Uighur and two Chinese. They put me and eight other pregnant women in cars and took us to the hospital,” Ms Rozi said.

“They first gave me a pill and said to take it. So I did. I didn’t know what it was. Half an hour later, they put a needle in my belly. And some time after that I lost my child.”

Semsinur Gafur, a former obstetrician-gynaecologist who worked in a village hospital in Xinjiang in the 1990s, said she and other female clinicians used to go house to house with a mobile ultrasound machine to check if anyone was pregnant.

“If a household had more births than allowed, they would raze the home. They would flatten the house, destroy it,” Ms Gafur said.

“This was my life there. It was very distressing. And because I worked in a state hospital, people didn’t trust me. The Uighur people saw me as a Chinese traitor.”

A third exile, Mahmut Tevekkul, said he was imprisoned and tortured in 2010 by Chinese authorities who interrogated him for information about one of his brothers. He said the brother was wanted partly because he published a religious book in Arabic.

Mr Tevekkul described being beaten and punched in the face during questioning.

“They put us on a tiled floor, shackled our hands and feet and tied us to a pipe, like a gas pipe. There were six soldiers guarding us. They interrogated us until the morning and then they took us to the maximum-security area of the prison,” he said.

The tribunal is the latest attempt to hold China accountable for alleged rights abuses against the Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim and ethnic Turkic minorities.

An estimated one million people or more — most of them Uighurs — have been confined in re-education camps in Xinjiang in recent years, according to researchers.

Chinese authorities have been accused of imposing forced labour, systematic forced birth control and torture, and separating children from incarcerated parents.

Beijing has flatly rejects the allegations. Officials have characterised the camps, which they say are now closed, as vocational training centres to teach Chinese language, job skills and the law to support economic development and combat extremism.

The hearings’ organisers said Chinese authorities have ignored requests to participate in the proceedings.

Boris Johnson is seeking to avert a Tory revolt over allegations of genocide in China by backing a compromise plan put forward by a senior Conservative.

The Government has been involved in a parliamentary battle over proposals to outlaw trade deals with countries that are committing genocide – a dispute taking place at a time when the Chinese authorities’ activities in Xinjiang are under intense international scrutiny.

Ministers have insisted that decisions on trade deals and international relations should not be matters for the courts.

But peers have refused to back down over amendments to the Trade Bill which would force ministers to withdraw from any free trade agreement with any country which the High Court rules is committing genocide.

The House of Lords reinserted the trade safeguard, proposed by crossbench peer Lord Alton, into the legislation after the Prime Minister was able to narrowly overturn it in the Commons.

The Bill returns to the Commons on Tuesday, with Conservative MPs demanding action – particularly in light of recent reports of abuses being carried out against the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.

The Government will back a compromise plan put forward by Sir Bob Neill, chairman of the Commons Justice Select Committee, which would put the matter in the hands of parliamentarians rather than judges.

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “The Government shares the grave concerns about human rights abuses in Xinjiang behind Lord Alton’s amendment and understands the strength of feeling on this issue.

“However, that amendment could embroil the courts in the formulation of trade policy and conduct of international relations and risks undermining the separation of powers.

“The amendment put forward by the chair of the select committee, which the Government will be supporting, addresses the concerns raised by the parliamentarians to take a stand on credible reports of genocide by a prospective trade partner while ensuring a specific duty on government to act.”

Sir Bob’s amendment would mean a debate and vote could be held in Parliament on credible allegations of genocide.

The first stage would be a report from a Commons committee setting out the claims of genocide, which would then prompt a ministerial response.

If that response was not deemed to be sufficient, the Government would have to provide time for a debate in the Commons, with similar arrangements in the Lords.

Meanwhile, Downing Street stressed the need for academics to comply with laws on international exports following reports that almost 200 experts are being investigated on suspicion of unwittingly helping the Chinese government build weapons of mass destruction.

The Times reported they are suspected of violating strict export laws intended to prevent intellectual property in highly sensitive subjects being handed to hostile states.

The Prime Minister’s spokesman said: “Exporters of military goods and those engaged in the transfer of military technology including universities and academics require a licence to export or transfer from the UK.

“It’s obviously vitally important that universities and academics comply with relevant export control but I don’t have anything further to add.”

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has called on China to allow the United Nations (UN) to visit a province where it is accused of “appalling” human-rights abuses against the Uighur minority group.

Mr Raab said reports of internment camps and women being forcibly sterilised in Xinjiang were “truly shocking” and that authorities in Beijing should permit the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit the sites.

The Chinese government has denied accusations of widespread abuse in the north-western province, mainly targeted at the Uighur minority group, including allegations of forced sterilisation, slave labour and mass internment.

Appearing on Sky News’ Sophy Ridge On Sunday programme, Mr Raab was asked what the UK Government was doing amid accusations that China was holding a million Uighur people in “re-education camps” and women were subject to forced sterilisation.

Mr Raab said the Government had recently announced measures that would make sure “we don’t have any British businesses that are either supplying to or profiting from the internment camps”.

Earlier this month, Mr Raab announced that firms will face hefty fines unless they meet requirements showing their supply chains are free from forced labour and will be given robust guidance on how to carry out due diligence checks to make sure they are not sourcing products tainted by the human-rights violations.

Speaking on Sunday, Mr Raab said: “I think it’s a shocking, truly shocking, set of circumstances in Xinjiang, against the Uighur Muslims.”

Mr Raab said 38 other countries had followed the UK’s lead in “criticising and condemning human-rights abuses” in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.

During the interview, Sky News presenter Sophy Ridge read to Mr Raab a tweet she said was sent by the Chinese embassy in the US discussing “eradicating extremism” and making Uighur women “no longer baby-making machines”.

She said: “I just want to be clear, we’re talking here about people being forced to have abortions, given injections to stop their periods, having surgery in some cases, so they’re unable to have children. Are words of condemnation and a few restrictions on British business really enough?”

Mr Raab replied: “It’s absolutely disgraceful. It’s appalling and shocking in the modern world, in a leading member of the international community, and, no, this isn’t enough.

“What China says is this is all lies cooked up by the West, and Britain a leading member amongst them.

“What we say is if you dispute the allegations and the claims and the reports, there’s a simple way to clear this up: allow the UN Human Rights Commissioner to visit and access and see these sites.

“We are pushing for an authoritative third party, like the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the UN, to conduct that visit.”

Mr Raab was also asked if he thought the treatment of the Uighur minority group in China was genocide and if the issue would be put on the agenda of the G7 summit that the UK is due to host in June.

He said: “I think it’s for a court to decide whether the very complex definition of genocide is met.

“But what is clear, frankly, whatever legal label you put on it, is that there are convincing and persuasive third party authoritative reports of serious violations of human rights on an appalling industrial scale.”

He said the UK was “excited” to work with the incoming President Joe Biden administration in the US on “making sure human rights and protecting democracy is on the agenda”.

Mr Raab added: “As we preside over the G7, and it’s an exciting year for international leadership for the UK, that will be the case, and I’ve already talked with Nancy Pelosi, Speaker Pelosi of the House of Representatives, recently, including speaking to her over the Christmas period.”

Read more: Anger as China says it is freeing Uighur women from being ‘baby-making machines’

A Chinese official denied Beijing has imposed coercive birth control measures among Muslim minority women, following an outcry over a tweet by the Chinese Embassy in Washington claiming that government polices had freed women of the Uighur ethnic group from being “baby-making machines”.

Xu Guixiang, a deputy spokesperson for the Xinjiang regional government, told reporters that birth control decisions were made of the person’s own free will and that “no organisation or individual can interfere”.

“The growth rate of the Uighur population is not only higher than that of the whole Xinjiang population, but also higher than that of the minority population, and more significantly higher than that of the (Chinese majority) Han population,” Mr Xu said.

“As for the so-called forcing ethnic minority women in Xinjiang to wear IUDs, or undergo tubal ligations or abortions, it is even more malign.”

An investigation in June found that the Chinese government was forcing draconian birth control measures on Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, including IUD fittings, contraceptives, and even abortions and sterilisations.

The measures are backed by the threat of detention, with parents with three or more children swept into camps and prisons if they are unable to pay massive fines.

As a result, the birth rate in Xinjiang’s minority regions plummeted by over 60% in just three years, even as Beijing eases birth restrictions on the Han population ahead of a looming demographic crisis.

Twitter took down the Chinese Embassy’s January 7 tweet following protests by groups that accuse Beijing of seeking to eradicate Uighur culture.

Users complained the tweet was a violation of rules set by Twitter, which is blocked in China along with Facebook and other American social media platforms.

“China’s fascist government is now openly admitting and celebrating its use of concentration camps, forced labour, forced sterilisations and abortions, and other forms of torture to eliminate an ethnic and religious minority,” Nihad Awad, national executive director of The Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in an emailed statement.

China has been waging a years-long campaign against what it calls terrorism and religious fanaticism in Xinjiang and the embassy’s tweet referenced those polices, saying: “Study shows that in the process of eradicating extremism, the minds of Uygur women in Xinjiang were emancipated and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines.”

The tweet cited a study by Li Xiaoxia, a Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences researcher who has asserted that the birth control measures in Xinjiang are voluntary.

Ms Li’s papers in past years laid the theoretical foundations for justifying mass birth control measures.

In one 2017 paper, Ms Li said having many children was a sign of “religious extremism and ethnic separatism”.

Ms Li worried that predominantly minority districts were breeding grounds for terrorism, calling it “a big political risk”.

Monday’s news conference was the latest attempt by Beijing to deflect rising international criticism over its policies in Xinjiang, particularly over alleged forced labour and the detention of more than one million Uighurs, Kazakhs and others in prison-like centres for political indoctrination.

China says the centres are intended to combat extremism and teach job skills, but former residents and rights groups say they target Islam and minority languages and culture.

Elijan Anayat, another regional government spokesperson, said all those at the centres had “graduated” as of October 2019, countering reports that China continues to expand the system.

“With the help of the government, they have achieved stable employment, improved the quality of life and lived a normal life,” Mr Anayat said.

“At present, there is no education and training centre in Xinjiang.”

Read more: China: Newspaper blames West for encouraging Xinjiang extremists

We are currently seeing a change and shift in relations between the United Kingdom and the Chinese Communist Party. This on the back of a number of issues that have included Huawei, the Coronavirus crisis, aggressive postures against human rights activists in Hong Kong and the mass internment of Uighur Muslims.

For far too long, the Chinese Communist Government has been allowed to do what it likes under a policy of approachment by the then Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. David Cameron. However, we are now in a different place and China cannot be allowed to carry on its abuse of human rights, whilst it still maintains an aggressive policy against those who peacefully demonstrate against the Government’s autocratic policies. Let us also never forget the massacre of peaceful demonstrators in Tianenmen Square in 1989.

This Government is right in challenging and in stopping the influence of China’s Communist Government. Who would have thought that over a million people would be forcibly interned because of their religion in 2020? Who would have thought that a Government would restrict public access to information during the outbreak of a global pandemic? Furthermore, who would have thought that a policy of breaking the will of peaceful demonstrators in Hong Kong, would be enacted in 2020, with the eyes of the world watching?

China has, for far too long, thought it could do what it wanted. That time has come to an end. Unless, they realise the futility of their policies in the areas outlined, we should continue to hold the Chinese Communist Government to account at every step.

Turbulence in China’s restive far western region of Xinjiang has been caused by “external factors”, a state-run newspaper said Saturday in an editorial responding to calls by a group of U.S. lawmakers for sanctions on Chinese officials.

“Western accusations of Xinjiang governance seriously misled the extremists, making them believe they were launching religious Jihad and won sympathy and support from Western and international society,” said the editorial in the Global Times, a tabloid published by the ruling Communist Party’s People’s Daily.

“Some forces have slandered China’s governing efforts” in Xinjiang, the editorial said, accusing a “West-centred (value) system” of making “empty statements about human rights regardless of the purpose and effect of Xinjiang governance and the grim reality it targets.”

“Such empty talk inspires extremists, which meets the purposes of some Western politicians trying to undermine the governance achievements in Xinjiang and push the region into turmoil,” the editorial said.

Whether Xinjiang governance abuses human rights must be judged by whether its results safeguard the interests of the majority in the region, it continued.

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers called for sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for human rights abuses against minority Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region, saying it was being turned into a “high-tech police state”.

On Thursday, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a regular press briefing in Beijing that the United States did “not have the right” to make “unwarranted criticism” of China’s policies toward ethnic minorities.

A United Nations human rights panel this month said it had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uighurs in China were held in what resembled a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.”

China has said that Xinjiang faces a serious threat from Islamist militants and separatists who plot attacks and stir up tensions between the mostly Muslim Uighur minority who call the region home and the ethnic Han Chinese majority.

Hundreds have died in unrest there in recent years.

The Zion Church in Beijing, one of the city’s largest unofficial Protestant “house” churches, has operated with relative freedom for years, hosting hundreds of worshippers every weekend in an expansive, specially renovated hall in north Beijing.

But in April, city authorities asked the church to install 24 closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in the building for “security”, Zion’s head pastor, Jin Mingri, told Reuters.

“They wanted to put cameras in the sanctuary where we worship. The church decided this was not appropriate,” Jin said over tea in his spacious, book-lined office. “Our services are a sacred time.”

When the request was refused, police and state security agents started harassing churchgoers, calling them, visiting them, contacting their workplace and asking them to promise not to go to church, according to statements from the church and interviews with attendees.

China’s constitution guarantees religious freedom, but since President Xi Jinping took office in 2012, Beijing has tightened restrictions on religions seen as a challenge to the authority of the ruling Communist Party.

China’s religious affairs bureau and the public security ministry did not respond to faxed requests for comment.

The Chinese government says greater oversight of religious activities is needed in order to regulate believers and facilitate worship, as well as to prevent foreign forces from influencing China’s internal affairs using the guise of religion.

HOUSE OR OFFICIAL

China’s Christian believers are split between those who attend unofficial “house” or “underground” churches and those who attend government-sanctioned places of worship.

The unofficial establishments, which range from small living room-gatherings to large, professional operations like Zion, had in recent decades been tolerated by authorities.

They were often able to rent large spaces, though these are rarely identifiable from the outside. The only church exteriors in China adorned with steeples or crosses are officially sanctioned.

In February, new legislation increased oversight of religious education and practice, with harsher punishment for practices not sanctioned by the authorities.

In addition to being asked to install security cameras, some unofficial churches have been asked by police to take detailed lists of attendee IDs and phone numbers, churchgoers and activists say.

Some who push back have been visited by police and asked to switch places of worship to officially sanctioned churches, they added.

The Zion church, which occupies an office building floor that was previously a nightclub, is now being evicted despite previous verbal assurances from its landlord that it could rent the location until 2023, Jin said. The landlord could not be reached for comment.

Jin does not expect to be able to find a landlord that would rent the church another suitable location.

RARE PROTEST

There are roughly 60 million Christians in China, most of them Protestant, with about 10 million Catholics, according to independent estimates.

The Vatican and Beijing are locked in talks to resolve a decades-long dispute over appointing bishops in China that, if resolved, could make underground Catholic churches official, with Holy See-approved bishops.

On July 23, more than 30 of Beijing’s hundreds of underground Protestant churches took the rare step of releasing a joint statement complaining of “unceasing interference” and the “assault and obstruction” of regular activities of believers since the new regulations came into effect, according to a copy of the statement seen by Reuters and confirmed by Jin.

“We call on the government to respect history and the current situation of house churches, respect the means and practices of religious work, and respect citizens’ basic freedoms and rights to believe,” the letter said.

Wang Yu, a prominent rights lawyer who has defended Christians from harassment and was recently baptised at Zion after years of worship there, said she believes the pressure on believers is an attempt to force the church to close.

“The authorities hope numbers will dwindle till it becomes impossible to continue, but in recent months ever-more churchgoers have been attending service,” she said.

Wang fears, however, the situation will worsen, given the authorities have started describing the church as a “cult” when pressuring churchgoers. In one of its statements, Zion also says authorities have called the church a cult.

“Being labelled a cult was how it all started for the Falun Gong in 1999,” Wang said, referring to the spiritual movement the Communist Party banned that year.

The new regulations have increased government pressure on the churches to “sinicize” – to be culturally Chinese and submit to oversight from the Communist Party – but many have resisted, saying this would be a fundamental betrayal of their faith.

“House churches believe that our spiritual needs and the content of our faith is ruled over by God,” Pastor Jin said.

“What we need is the freedom to believe. Without this, it is not real faith.”

British foreign minister Jeremy Hunt accused Google on Thursday of abandoning its moral values by failing to remove child abuse content while launching a version of its search engine in China that will block some websites.

The British government has repeatedly criticized online platforms such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook for failing to remove abusive material or sexual content posted online even after they were notified.

“Seems extraordinary that Google is considering censoring its content to get into China but won’t cooperate with UK, US … in removing child abuse content,” Hunt said on Twitter. “They used to be so proud of being values-driven.”

Alphabet’s Google plans a search engine in China that will block some search terms and websites, two sources told Reuters earlier this month, in a move that could mark its return to a market it abandoned eight years ago on censorship concerns.

Google said in a statement they agreed with Hunt that child sexual abuse was “abhorrent and must be removed, that’s why we co-operate with governments to fight child sexual abuse online”.

Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand invited major technology companies to attend a meeting on tackling child abuse and extremism on their websites, but the firms declined to attend, the Daily Mail reported on Thursday.

Google said they did offer to send an executive to the conference.

In January, Prime Minister Theresa May used an address at the World Economic Forum in Davos to say investors should use their financial power to force internet firms into taking more responsibility for stopping militants and paedophiles using their platforms.

Google, which quit China’s search engine market in 2010, has been actively seeking ways to re-enter China where many of its products are blocked by regulators.

Leading human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have urged Google not to bow to censorship demands in China because by doing so, they allege, the company would be complicit in the repression of freedom of speech.

Search terms about human rights, democracy, religion and peaceful protests will be among the words blacklisted in the search engine app, which The Intercept website said had already been demonstrated to the Chinese government.

The project, code-named “Dragonfly”, has been under way since the spring of 2017, the news website said.

Police in riot gear stormed an apartment in southern China on Friday where about 40 student activists and others supporting factory workers seeking to form a labour union were staying, according to activists who said they received a video of the raid as it was taking place.

The video footage, which was shared with Reuters, showed police armed with shields and helmets bursting into the activists’ accommodation and scuffling with the occupants.

The footage appeared to show an apartment where the students were staying in Huizhou, near the southern city of Shenzhen, that had been previously visited by Reuters. The video could not be independently verified.

It was not immediately clear what happened to the activists. Calls to police in the area and five activists who had been staying at the apartment went unanswered. Labour activists in other parts of the country who are following the case and had been in touch with various activists on the scene said they were unable to contact them.

The raid is the latest step by the Chinese authorities to clamp down on a growing labour movement in the southern province of Guangdong that started brewing last month when workers at a welding machinery company, Jasic International, were fired when they tried to create a union.

Labour activism is viewed as a challenge by the ruling Communist Party, which opposes independent unions and punishes protesters.

On July 27, police detained 29 people, including laid-off workers, their families and supporters. Fourteen people remain in detention.

Since then, support has poured in, with about 50 labour activists, most of them students, travelling to Guangdong to back the workers.

An activist who shared the footage of the raid with Reuters said the raid Friday took place just after 5 a.m. The activist, who declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the footage, said the images were received directly from students in the room when the police entered.

GROWING PRESSURE

Pressure had been mounting on the activists.

In interviews with Reuters a day before the raid, 15 activists involved in the Jasic case described a multi-pronged effort to force them to disengage from the workers’ cause.

The authorities have flown many of the young activists’ parents to Guangdong and put them up in hotels to undergo “training sessions” about how to raise their children, according to interviews with several students.

Authorities lectured the parents on text messages to send to their children. They also arranged to have parents show up at various places where their children were, including the apartment and shopping areas where protests have been staged, they said.

The Ministry of Education issued a notice five days ago to universities across the country telling them to stop students from travelling to Guangdong to participate in the protests, according to screenshots of messages sent by universities to students.

The universities gave a range of explanations to students about why it was unsafe for them to go to Guangdong including an approaching typhoon and the risk of being recruited into a pyramid scheme, several students said.

Reuters was unable to verify the order and the ministry did not respond to faxed questions.

The hashtag “What’s up with Guangdong?” started trending on Weibo as the Ministry of Education notice spread.

Several of the students’ university advisers had apparently also flown to Guangdong to try to persuade them to leave, according to some of the activists.

The protests have spread to Beijing where, on Wednesday and Thursday, a group of 20 students, activists and two worker representatives from Jasic submitted petition letters at the headquarters of the All-China Federations of Trade Unions and the All-China Women’s Federation.

The U.N. rights chief said on Monday that U.S. President Donald Trump bears “a heavy responsibility” for how the media is portrayed and that his remarks could have a knock-on effect that could hurt journalists in other countries.

U.S. newspapers across the country ran editorials last Thursday defending freedom of the press in response to President Donald Trump calling some media organizations enemies of the American people.

“To label the press in this way is very worrisome,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said in a wide-ranging interview days before his four-year term ends.

“The President should be aware that a heavy responsibility lies on his shoulders when it comes to the way in which the media is being portrayed,” Zeid said, speaking to Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France Presse in his Geneva office.

“Because it also has a demonstration effect, other leaders in authoritarian settings will do same thing. We’ve seen now how they mimic President Trump and so what could already be a difficult situation in other countries becomes even more difficult for the press to operate and for journalists to uncover stories and for lawyers to do their work and for human rights defenders to do their work,” he added.

Trump’s comments reflect a view held by many conservatives that many media outlets distort, make up or omit facts because of a bias against them. The Republican president has said he supports the principle of press freedom, but has described much of what the media publishes as “fake news”.

VETOES, CRISES

Zeid has been outspoken about human rights violations, earning rebukes from the United States and its ally Israel, as well as China, Myanmar, Hungary, Syria, and his native Jordan.

On Monday, he criticised world powers in the U.N. Security Council – singling out the United States, Russia and China – for casting vetoes and preventing resolution of crises or their being referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

“And I think that has to change, in the end the organisation can collapse at great cost to the international community and to international peace and security,” Zeid warned.

“The threats to the system altogether are very real.”

On China, he called for access to the far western region of Xinjiang following reports by activists and independent U.N. rights monitors this month about mass detention of Muslim Uighurs.

China has rejected allegations raised by the U.N. panel that 1 million Uighurs may be held in internment camps in the restive region, but said that some people underwent re-education after being deceived by extremists.

“As with all countries, the request is let us in or else we will assume the absolute worst,” Zeid told Reuters.