After blacklisting 28 Chinese government and business organizations, the United States continues to punish Beijing for its crackdown on Uighur Muslims. US President Donald Trump passed a law on Wednesday (June 17th) to penalize Chinese officials accused of "mass internment" of this minority.

It had been adopted, on May 27, by an overwhelming majority by the House of Representatives, after having unanimously passed the milestone of the Senate a few days earlier.

"This law holds accountable the perpetrators of human rights abuses and abuses such as the systematic use of indoctrination camps, forced labor and intrusive surveillance to eradicate the ethnic identity and religious beliefs of Uyghurs and others minorities in China, "he said in a statement.

China denies any ill-treatment and claims that the camps provide vocational training. In December, during a first vote on this law, Beijing had promised to make "pay the price" in Washington.

This law then risks further aggravating relations already strained to the extreme between the first two world powers, at the same time as the head of American diplomacy Mike Pompeo meets in Hawaii the high Chinese official Yang Jiechi, precisely to defuse these tensions.

Uncritical of concentration camps, according to Bolton's book

The bill repeats accusations already made by the American administration as by other Western countries and international human rights organizations.

Namely, that the Chinese government has perpetrated "serious human rights violations" in the northwest region of Xinjiang, by establishing "surveillance and mass internment of more than one million Uyghurs and members of the Kazakh or Kyrgyz ethnicities or other Muslim minorities ".

Randomly of the calendar, the American president signed this law the day when the press released large extracts from the explosive book of his former national security adviser, John Bolton. According to these extracts, the Republican billionaire has not always been critical of the Chinese repression.

"At the opening dinner of the G20 summit in Osaka in June 2019, only in the presence of the interpreters, Xi had explained to Trump why, by and large, he was building concentration camps in Xinjiang," writes John Bolton in this book to appear Tuesday. "According to our interpreter, Donald Trump said that Xi should continue to build these camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do."

With AFP and Reuters

The France 24 week summary invites you to come back to the news that marked the week

I subscribe

Take international news everywhere with you! Download the France 24 app

google-play-badge_FR