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The forced labor of anyone goes strictly against what I believe is a human right of rest and leisure. Freedom is a concept in which many minority groups fight for in many cases and is valued and considered a human right. Forcing work onto someone violates this right and I learn that still people are being enslaved.

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The finding by the Trump administration is the strongest denunciation by any government of China's actions and follows a Biden campaign statement with the same declaration.

A site in 2019 that is believed to be a re-education camp in Xinjiang. Credit... Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

WASHINGTON - The State Department declared on Tuesday that the Chinese government is committing genocide and crimes against humanity through its wide-scale repression of Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in its northwestern region of Xinjiang, including in its use of internment camps and forced sterilization.

The move is expected to be the Trump administration's final action on China, made on its last full day, and is the culmination of a yearslong debate over how to punish what many consider Beijing's worst human rights abuses in decades. Relations between the countries have deteriorated over the past four years, and the new finding adds to a long list of tension points. Foreign policy officials and experts across the political spectrum in the United States say China will be the greatest challenge for any administration for years or decades to come.

"I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uighurs by the Chinese party-state," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement, adding that Chinese officials were "engaged in the forced assimilation and eventual erasure of a vulnerable ethnic and religious minority group."

The determination of atrocities is a rare action on the part of the State Department and could lead the United States to impose more sanctions against China under the new Biden administration. President-elect Joseph R. Biden said last year through a spokesman that the policies by Beijing amounted to "genocide."

Other nations or international institutions could follow suit in formally criticizing China over its treatment of its minority Muslims and taking punitive measures. The determination also prompts certain reviews within the State Department.

The finding is the harshest denunciation yet by any government against China's policies in Xinjiang. Genocide is, according to international convention, "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."

Mr. Pompeo, State Department lawyers and other officials had debated for months over the determination, but the matter had gained urgency in the Trump administration's final days. As was common with most China policy, the issue of Xinjiang had long pitted administration officials against one another: Mr. Pompeo and other national security aides advocated tough measures against Beijing, while President Trump and top economic advisers brushed aside the concerns.

The Chinese government has rejected any accusations of genocide and other human rights violations in Xinjiang and often deploys the language of antiterrorism to defend its practices.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington on Tuesday night said in a long statement that "the so-called genocide in Xinjiang is simply a lie," adding that the overall population of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, as well as that of Uighurs, had grown from 2010 to 2018. In addition, it said, policies in Xinjiang are part of a fight against "terrorism and extremism," and "these measures have proved to well service Xinjiang's situation and produced notable results."

To deflect criticism from U.S. officials, Chinese officials have also taken to underlining some of the Trump administration's vast governance failures, including a death toll of more than 400,000 from the coronavirus pandemic and the deadly assault on the Capitol by a mob incited by Mr. Trump.

Some Uighurs expressed gratitude for the decision. "Today's determination of genocide is a signal of recognition to the long suffering of victims and survivors of the Chinese government's internment camps, like my brother Ekpar, and millions of Uighurs," said Rayhan Asat, a lawyer in Washington whose younger brother is imprisoned in Xinjiang. "It is the starting point on the road to justice, freedom and accountability for these atrocities."

Ziba Murat, a Virginia resident whose mother, Gulshan Abbas, is imprisoned, said, "This gives us hope that those who have attempted to water down what is happening with the destruction of our people can no longer hide their complicity."

Before the new condemnation from Washington, the strongest statement by a government entity declaring that China's actions in Xinjiang amounted to genocide came from a Canadian parliamentary subcommittee. Last October, the subcommittee concluded that the Chinese Communist Party was culpable of the crime.

Mr. Pompeo and senior State Department officials made the decision just days before Mr. Biden takes office. The finding could complicate his administration's dealings with Beijing, but it also offers a source of leverage. Mr. Biden's nominee for secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, said Tuesday at a Senate confirmation hearing that he agreed with the genocide determination and denounced the Xinjiang "concentration camps." He also asserted that China "poses the most significant challenge of any nation-state to the United States."

In the days before the decision, State Department officials had argued over whether China's actions in Xinjiang met the standard for genocide or whether they fell under crimes against humanity, which has a lower standard, said American officials familiar with the debate. Mr. Pompeo decided to use both.

One American official said the best rationale for the genocide label was the use of forced sterilizations, birth control and family separations to destroy Uighur identity.

Several State Department officials said the decision was rooted in trying to meet policy goals; they said they hoped the move would spur other nations to take a harder public line against China on this and other issues.

Some officials opposed to the action pointed out that the department never made a determination on whether the Myanmar government had committed genocide against the ethnic Rohingya Muslims, despite strong evidence of the crime. In 2017, the department said Myanmar had committed "ethnic cleansing."

Mr. Biden, a critic of China's human rights record during his decades in office, has used forceful language to describe its repressive policies. In August, he released a statement calling China's actions "genocide" and pressed the president to do the same. Mr. Trump, he insisted, "must also apologize for condoning this horrifying treatment of Uighurs."

Mr. Biden was referring to an account by John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump's former national security adviser, who disclosed in his memoir that the president told Xi Jinping, the leader of China, at a summit in 2019 to keep building internment camps in Xinjiang, "which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do." Mr. Bolton wrote that Mr. Trump had made similar remarks on a trip to China in 2017.

Mr. Bolton and other aides said Mr. Trump repeatedly ignored their recommendations to impose sanctions over Xinjiang to avoid jeopardizing trade negotiations with China. Mr. Trump has expressed little concern for human rights, and for most of his term publicly referred to Mr. Xi as a friend.

For years, Democratic and Republican members of Congress have urged the administration to take a more aggressive stand. An annual report released Thursday by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China said there was evidence that "crimes against humanity - and possibly genocide - are occurring" in Xinjiang. It stressed that budget legislation passed in December requires that the U.S. government determine within 90 days whether China had committed atrocities in the region.

Some lawmakers made a last-minute push for the Trump administration to issue a determination against China.

Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Tuesday that China had committed genocide, but stressed "this is an action that the Trump administration should have taken years ago, not as it is walking out the door - and not having given China a green light for its concentration camps, as Ambassador Bolton alleged."

In October 2019, the Trump administration blacklisted police departments in Xinjiang and several Chinese companies. It has since issued other sanctions, including against senior Communist Party officials. On Wednesday, it announced a ban on imports of products made with cotton and tomatoes from the area.

Understand U.S.-China Relations

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The State Department's determination further underscores how Xinjiang has become a central human rights issue for the United States and its allies.

China has for decades exercised heavy-handed control over Xinjiang's ethnic minorities, who make up more than half of the region's population of 25 million. For the largest groups, their Islamic religion and Turkic language and culture set them apart from China's Han majority.

Tensions sharply worsened from 2009, when Uighurs taking part in ethnic riots killed about 200 Han in Urumqi, the regional capital, after earlier tensions and violence. Chinese security forces began a sweeping crackdown. Attacks and more crackdowns occurred across Uighur towns in the years afterward, as well as in some cities outside Xinjiang.

Since 2017, Xinjiang leaders pressed by Mr. Xi have begun or stepped up policies intended to transform the Uighurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities into loyal, largely secular supporters of the Communist Party. The State Department determination said the Chinese government had committed "crimes against humanity" since "at least March 2017."

Security forces have sent hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and Kazakhs - possibly a million or more by some estimates - to indoctrination camps intended to instill loyalty to the party and break down adherence to Islam. The Chinese government has defended the camps as benign vocational training schools and disputed the estimates of inmate numbers, without ever giving its own. Former inmates and their families who have left China have described harsh living conditions, crude indoctrination and abusive guards.

The swelling camps drew growing international condemnation, including from human rights experts who advise the United Nations as well as the United States and other nations. Journalists and scholars began writing articles on the camps and a sophisticated high-tech surveillance system in Xinjiang in 2017, well before foreign governments started discussing the issue.

The indoctrination camps, however, have formed only part of the Chinese Communist Party's broader campaign to drastically transform Uighurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities. Other measures include labor transfers, schooling and cultural policies, and population controls.

Under Mr. Xi, Xinjiang has expanded and intensified longstanding programs to shift Uighurs and Kazakhs from rural areas to jobs in factories, cities and commercial farming. The Chinese government has said that these work transfers are entirely voluntary and bring prosperity to impoverished peoples. But some programs have set targets for the numbers of people relocated for work and restricted recruits from choosing or leaving their jobs - hallmarks of forced labor.

Schools have largely discarded classes in Uighur, pressing students to learn in Chinese. Uighur academics who have sought to preserve and promote their culture have been arrested, and Uighur-language publishing has been heavily curtailed. Officials have forced children into boarding schools, separated from their parents.

Programs in Xinjiang have also sought to stem the growth of the Uighur population by forcing women to undergo permanent sterilization or have birth-control devices inserted, Adrian Zenz, a researcher in the United States who has focused on Xinjiang, said in a report last year. Chinese researchers have challenged the numbers and conclusions in Mr. Zenz's report while not disputing that the government wants to bring down the population growth of Uighurs.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington said on Twitter this month that Uighur women had been "emancipated" and were "no longer baby-making machines." Twitter later removed the comment and told a reporter that the post had violated rules against "dehumanization."

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U.S. Says China's Repression of Uighurs Is 'Genocide' (Published 2021)

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The finding by the Trump administration is the strongest denunciation by any government of China's actions and follows a Biden campaign statement with the same declaration. WASHINGTON - The State Department declared on Tuesday that the Chinese government is committing genocide and crimes against humanity through its wide-scale repression of Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in its northwestern region of Xinjiang, including in its use of internment camps and forced sterilization.

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China has been accused of committing crimes against humanity and possibly genocide against the Uyghur population and other mostly-Muslim ethnic groups in the north-western region of Xinjiang.

Human rights groups believe China has detained more than one million Uyghurs against their will over the past few years in a large network of what the state calls "re-education camps", and sentenced hundreds of thousands to prison terms.

A series of police files obtained by the BBC in 2022 has revealed details of China's use of these camps and described the routine use of armed officers and the existence of a shoot-to-kill policy for those trying to escape.

The US is among several countries to have previously accused China of committing genocide in Xinjiang. The leading human rights groups Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have published reports accusing China of crimes against humanity.

China denies all allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The Chinese government - speaking after details of the Xinjiang Police Files were published - said the peace and prosperity brought to Xinjiang as a result of its anti-terrorism measures were the best response to "all sorts of lies".

Who are the Uyghurs?

There are about 12 million Uyghurs, mostly Muslim, living in Xinjiang, which is officially known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

The Uyghurs speak their own language, which is similar to Turkish, and see themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations. They make up less than half of the Xinjiang population.

Recent decades have seen a mass migration of Han Chinese (China's ethnic majority) into Xinjiang, allegedly orchestrated by the state to dilute the minority population there.

Uyghur activists say they fear that the group's culture is under threat of erasure.

Where is Xinjiang?

Xinjiang lies in the north-west of China and is the country's largest region. Like Tibet, it is autonomous, meaning - in theory - it has some powers of self-governance. But in practice, both regions are subjected to major restrictions by the central government.

Xinjiang is a mostly desert region and produces about a fifth of the world's cotton. Human rights groups have voiced concerns that much of that cotton export is picked by forced labour, and in 2021 some Western brands removed Xinjiang cotton from their supply chains, leading to a backlash against the brands from Chinese celebrities and netizens.

In December 2020, research seen by the BBC showed that up to half a million people were being forced to pick cotton in Xinjiang. There is evidence that new factories have been built within the grounds of the re-education camps.

The region is also rich in oil and natural gas and because of its proximity to Central Asia and Europe is seen by Beijing as an important trade link.

In the early 20th Century, the Uyghurs briefly declared independence for the region but it was brought under the complete control of China's new Communist government in 1949.

The UK parliament declared in April 2021 that China was committing a genocide in Xinjiang.

A UN human rights committee in 2018 said it had credible reports that China was holding up to a million people in "counter-extremism centres" in Xinjiang.

The UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the files contained "shocking details of China's human rights violations".

Earlier, leaked documents known as the China Cables made clear that the camps were intended to be run as high security prisons, with strict discipline and punishments.

People who have managed to escape the camps have reported physical, mental and sexual torture. Women have spoken of mass rape and sexual abuse.

Anti-Han and separatist sentiment rose in Xinjiang from the 1990s, sometimes flaring into violence. In 2009 about 200 people died in clashes in Xinjiang, which the Chinese blamed on Uyghurs who wanted their own state. But in recent years a massive security crackdown has crushed dissent.

Xinjiang is now covered by a pervasive network of surveillance, including police, checkpoints, and cameras that scan everything from number plates to individual faces. According to Human Rights Watch, police are also using a mobile app to monitor people's behaviour, such as how much electricity they are using and how often they use their front door.

Since 2017, when President Xi Jinping issued an order saying all religions in China should be Chinese in orientation, there have been further crackdowns. Campaigners say China is trying to eradicate Uyghur culture.

The Xinjiang Police Files, which all date from before 2019, shed further light on Uyghurs being punished for alleged crimes that took place years ago. Many appear to have been targeted for their mobile phone use, for listening to "illegal lectures" or not using their phones enough, which is regarded as a sign the user is trying to evade digital surveillance.

What does China say?

China denies all allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang. In response to the Xinjiang Police Files, China's foreign ministry spokesman told the BBC that the documents were "the latest example of anti-China voices trying to smear China". He said Xinjiang enjoyed stability and prosperity and residents were living happy, fulfilled lives.

China says the crackdown in Xinjiang is necessary to prevent terrorism and root out Islamist extremism and the camps are an effective tool for re-educating inmates in its fight against terrorism.

It insists that Uyghur militants are waging a violent campaign for an independent state by plotting bombings, sabotage and civic unrest, but it is accused of exaggerating the threat in order to justify repression of the Uyghurs.

China has dismissed claims it is trying to reduce the Uyghur population through mass sterilisations as "baseless", and says allegations of forced labour are "completely fabricated".

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Who are the Uyghurs and why is China being accused of genocide?

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China has been accused by the US of genocide and crimes against humanity against the Muslim minority group.

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In Xinjiang China, Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic group, are being subject to imprisonment in concentration camps where they are forcedly labored and victim to other acts of violence such as torture, sexual violence and sterilization. Products such as cotton and tomato from Xinjiang are bein produced under the use of forced labor of the imprisoned ethnic groups.

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In most ethnic cleansings, victims are put through horrible living conditions and often subject to forced labor and slavery.

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"The Jews were ordered to get off and onto waiting trucks. The trucks headed toward a forest. there everybody was ordered to get out. They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks." (Wiesel, 6)

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"Everyone has the right to leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay."

Under this right, I understood this as no one shall be forced to work or overworked. A worker is worked a reasonable amount to which the person has time for themselves and family. Along with holiday, respective of all religion, which they will be payed as stated and given reasonable time for their celebration.