The Associated Press is reporting that China is using forced contraception, sterilisation and abortion [1] to suppress a Muslim minority people under its rule.
The report is based on a study by German researcher Adrian Zenz, from the US-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
He spoke to Australia’s ABC News [2] and told them China is engaged in the largest internment of peoples since the Holocaust so as to reduce the population of minority Muslims in the northwest province of Xinjiang.
He said that coercive methods are employed to suppress not only the cultural identity of the Uighur people in Xinjiang province, but also to engineer a reversal of their population growth.
He added that the policies match the United Nations’ definition of ‘genocide’:
The international response to the allegations of genocide, he said, has been wholly inadequate and shameful and added that both the United Nations and National governments have an obligation to investigate the evidence.
Meanwhile, as Ireland takes up a two year seat on the United Nations Security Council, a former vet and one-time chief economist at the Department of Agriculture, Ann Derwin, is to become Ireland’s next ambassador to China [3].
The appointment is unusual in that Ms Derwin is not a career diplomat and this is her first overseas appointment as an ambassador after moving to the Department of Foreign Affairs in 2017 from the Department of Agriculture where she was assistant secretary.