Press Release: UNGP Joins 55 Organizations Calling for Sanctions on CCP Officials

The Uyghur NextGen Project (UNGP) has co-signed an open letter alongside 55 other Uyghur and human rights organizations calling on the Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, and Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to sanction the Chinese officials named in the “Xinjiang Police Files.” The letter, organized by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), urges the Department of the Treasury and Department of State to sanction the Chinese officials implicated in the “Xinjiang Police Files”, as required by U.S. law under Section 6 of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020. 

Released on May 24, the “Xinjiang Police Files” contain thousands of leaked Chinese government documents detailing the ongoing mass internment and persecution of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Included in the files are 2800+ images of Uyghur detainees, the youngest of whom is a mere 15 years old. The files, which have been independently verified by regional experts, directly name a number of CCP officials:

Zhao Kezhi, Minister of Public Security in Beijing
Wang Yang, Head of the Central Xinjiang Work Coordination Small Group
Guo Shengkun, Head of China’s Political and Legal Affairs Commission
Hu Lianhe, Deputy Director of the Office of the Central Committee

These officials continue to oversee the systematic incarceration and criminalization of innocent Uyghurs with impunity. The United States Government has officially recognized this campaign of ethnic and religious persecution as a genocide since January 2021. UNGP urges the Biden administration to follow through on this designation by sanctioning the officials directly involved in implementing the genocide. There is both a legal precedent and moral obligation for the U.S. government to take such action.