The bill, HR 3306, was introduced by Rep. Vicky Hartzler, R-Mo., and co-sponsored by Rep. Thomas Suozzi, D-N.Y., and now goes to the Foreign Affairs and Judiciary committees for thought, according to the congress.gov website.
Amid concerns about a quickly aging population, the government has begun promoting Chinese women to have more children, after abandoning its previous "one-child" policy. But authorities in Xinjiang have executed extremely restrictive new birth policies on Muslim ethnic minorities.
The text of the introduced bill was not open on the site.
The Uyghurs make up about 12 million people who live in the XUAR in the northwestern part of China and are mostly Muslim, talking their own language and being more culturally and ethnically resembling Central Asian nations, according to a BBC report.
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In January, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called out the Chinese Communist Party’s use of internment camps, forced labor, and forced sterilization of more than 1 million Muslim minorities, including the Uyghurs, in the XUAR as “genocide” and “crimes against humanity.”
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"After careful examination of the available facts, I have determined that since at least March 2017, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), under the direction and control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has committed crimes against humanity against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other members of ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang," Pompeo said in an Axios article Jan. 19.
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A March Congressional-Executive Commission on China report documented many of the abuses Pompeo explained.
“In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), the Chinese Communist Party has implemented a campaign of repression and control that, according to scholars and rights groups, constitutes crimes against humanity,” the report said. “Experts have documented a large network of mass internment camps in the XUAR in which authorities are said to have arbitrarily detained up to 1.8 million individuals from predominantly Muslim ethnic minority groups including Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Hui.”
China has rejected the claims but did affirm that crackdowns against Muslims were guaranteed to “prevent terrorism” and to seek out extremists.
It is the Uyghurs, they say, that is “waging a violent campaign for an independent state by plotting bombings, sabotage, and civic unrest.”
As far as the reports of detainment camps and the sterilization of Uyghur women to suppress the population, the Chinese government calls the claims “baseless” and “fabricated,” according to the BBC article.
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