August 22, 2024, CAIR

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today said the Chinese government’s sentencing of Uyghurs in Xinjiang to a cumulative 4.4 million years in prison, as reported by Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program, is an attempt to erase Uyghur culture.

That report states in part: “Ultimately, the report outlines the need for urgent and resolute action from the international community that is befitting of an ‘authoritarian legalized genocide,’ bearing in mind that the precedence of genocide prevention today will have lasting consequences for the prevention of other genocides tomorrow.”

In a statement, CAIR Government Affairs Department Director Robert McCaw said:

“The sentencing of Uyghurs to a cumulative 4.4 million years in prison by China transcends mere legal absurdity; it’s an attempt to erase a people from the timeline of history itself.

“This new report requires an immediate and thorough investigation by the U.S. government and the international community, with escalated sanctions against China until every Uyghur is liberated from this unjust incarceration and the genocide targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities comes to an end.”

Earlier this month, CAIR welcomed a US ban on imports from five Chinese companies over their alleged involvement in Uyghur slave labor.