December 9, 2025 | UHRP
For Immediate Release
Contact: Omer Kanat +1 (202) 790-1795
The Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) marks the fifth Uyghur Genocide Recognition Day by calling on governments, businesses, and civil society to move beyond symbolic recognition and take sustained, enforceable action to end atrocities and deliver justice for the Uyghur people.
“Uyghur Genocide Recognition Day is a solemn reminder that the Uyghur people continue to face systematic cultural erasure, mass surveillance, arbitrary detention, and forced assimilation,” said Omer Kanat, Executive Director of UHRP. “Recognition without action enables impunity. Governments must match their words with policies that end complicity and impose real consequences for these crimes.”
The independent Uyghur Tribunal concluded in 2021 that the Chinese government has committed genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples in East Turkistan, providing one of the most authoritative legal assessments of the atrocities to date.
Since then, the Chinese government’s repression has continued through mass arbitrary detention, forced labor, family separation, restrictions on religious practice, and the systematic destruction of Uyghur cultural and religious life. Uyghur forced labor remains deeply embedded in global supply chains, implicating major industries and corporations. While public awareness has increased, enforcement, transparency, and corporate accountability remain insufficient.
International recognition of the Uyghur genocide has continued to grow since the Uyghur Tribunal’s landmark judgment. Formal determinations have been made by the United States and legislative bodies in Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Lithuania, Czechia, and Ireland. Additional parliaments and international bodies have issued strong findings of crimes against humanity and serious human rights violations.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) concluded in 2022 that China may be committing crimes against humanity, while the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery found that some forced labor practices may amount to enslavement. In 2021, UHRP coordinated a joint statement by more than 50 genocide prevention organizations and experts concluding that China’s treatment of Uyghurs “meets the threshold of acts constitutive of genocide” under the Genocide Convention.
UHRP urges governments to fully enforce import bans on goods produced with forced Uyghur labor, expand and rigorously apply targeted sanctions against Chinese officials and entities responsible for abuses, and close loopholes that allow tainted goods to enter global markets.
UHRP calls on governments to uphold their legal responsibilities under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention and to take all necessary steps to prevent and punish the ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people.
