China insisted on Monday that “arbitrary detention” or “re-education centers” do not exist in its far western Xinjiang region, rejecting concerns raised by a U.N. human rights committee that millions of ethnic Uighurs may be being held in camps.
A senior Chinese official told the U.N. panel Monday that such camps, referred to in Chinese government documents as “re-education centers,” were for “criminals involved only in minor offenses” to help them learn vocational skills and to reintegrate them into society.
He called the widely cited one million estimate “completely untrue” but declined to give an official Chinese figure for how many people are in the centers.
The camps in China’s northwest Xinjiang province have drawn international attention this year, as academic researchers used satellite photos and government construction bids to establish the vast scale of the program. China legal expert Jerome Cohen has called the internments the largest-scale detentions outside the judicial system in China since Mao Zedong’s “anti-rightist” campaigns of the 1950s.
The Chinese government has battled a sporadically violent, Uighur-led separatist movement in Xinjiang for decades. Chinese officials say the movement is an outgrowth of religious extremism and describe its members as terrorists.
Human-rights groups say the violence is in reaction to government-sanctioned discrimination against Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities and restrictions on their ability to practice Islam.
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