Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Alicia Kearns told the UK government to “get a grip on China issues” on Thursday after a minister defended a potential visit of Xinjiang Governor Erkin Tuniyaz.
MPs urged the government not to give him a visa and to ramp up sanctions against human rights abusers in China.
Tuniyaz, governor and deputy Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretary in Xinjiang, had served as the region’s deputy governor since 2008.
The U.S. Treasury department sanctioned him in 2021 under the Global Magnitsky Act, saying more than a million Uyghurs had been detained in Xinjiang during his tenure.
“We understand from the Chinese Embassy that the governor of Xinjiang may visit the UK next week. To be very clear he has not been invited by the UK government or by the FCDO and we have no confirmation that he will in fact travel,” he said.
Docherty said Tuniyaz is expected to travel on a diplomatic passport but had not been granted a visa yet.
He also said that if Tuniyaz does visit, the governor will not be “dignified with a ministerial meeting,” but officials are prepared to offer a meeting because he has not been sanctioned in the UK.
Docherty said it was “institutionally the judgment of the FCDO that we are better off not denying ourselves the opportunity to send extremely robust and strong messages of condemnation of the brutality that’s been carried out by the Chinese state in Xinjiang.”
The FCDO’s plan to grant a meeting to Tuniyaz was met with strong oppositions from MPs.
Kearns said it “simply is not good enough” to approve an “official visit to one of the masterminds of this genocide.”
In December 2021, an independent people’s tribunal in London, led by Sir Geoffrey Nice, KC, ruled that the Chinese communist regime had committed genocide against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the far-west Xinjiang region.
The U.S. government has recognised that the Chinese regime had committed “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” against Uyghur Muslims since January 2021, as did the UK Parliament and a number of other legislatures around the world, but the UK government has so far resisted the pressure to label the abuses “genocide,” citing successive governments’ policies that only a “competent court” can make such designations.
“Exactly what is the position is the government taking? Because there is no legitimate reason to allow this man, Erkin Tuniyaz, into our country. [The] only meetings with him should be in a courtroom,” Kearns said.
“So will the government now sanction him as well as [former Xinjiang CCP Secretary] Chen Quanguo, the butcher of Xinjiang?”
Kearns said the UK has to refuse to meet Tuniyaz as “EU countries, like-minded, already announced they will not meet with this man when he comes to Brussels.”
Urging the government to bar Tuniyaz from visiting and introduce a sanctions regime for Tibet, Kearns said: “This is wrong. I’m sorry but the government has to get a grip on China issues.”
Former Conservative Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, who secured the urgent questions session, criticised the FCDO for being “very weak,” calling the potential meeting “a propaganda coup for the Chinese government.”
He also said internment camp survivors were “absolutely appalled to hear that a foreign office official will meet this individual.”
The plan was initially reported in The Guardian after the FCDO emailed Uyghur groups asking them to submit their views.
Referring to Tuniyaz, Duncan Smith said “a man that absolutely declares nothing is going on is hardly likely to be bothered by a Foreign Office official telling him, ‘now now you’ve got to stop this.’”
Labour’s shadow foreign minister Catherine West said the plan to meet Tuniyaz is “deeply worrying.”
“Is the meeting essential to the UK–China relations? I don’t think it is. And I fear that this planned visit to the UK highlights the serious lack of political leadership at the Foreign Office,” she said.
“The minister knows the views of this house and should have made it clear that this meeting was ill judged and inappropriate.”
Brendan O'Hara, the Scottish National Party’s spokesman on human rights, said “the government has just simply handed a propaganda gift to Beijing” by agreeing to meet Tuniyaz and that the government’s position on the CCP has been “appallingly weak.”
“Given that, hitherto, they have failed to move Beijing one iota in its treatment of the Uyghur people, why does the minister believe that allowing this man to come to the United Kingdom and to meet FCDO officials will suddenly change things?” he asked.
Rahima Mahmut, UK director of the World Uyghur Congress and executive director of Stop Uyghur Genocide, told The Epoch Times in a statement that she is “incredibly hurt” the FCDO agreed to meet Tuniyaz.
Referring to the Xinjiang region as “East Turkestan,” a name preferred by Uyghur nationalists and rejected by the CCP, Mahmut said, “Uyghur people living in exile in this country have family members that have been violated, imprisoned, and tortured on Tuniyaz’s watch.”
“Brave women survivors that testified about brutal sexual violence during the Uyghur Tribunal were forced to watch as their family members in the region were herded on stage for a ‘press conference’ in which called the women that testified liars and frauds—this cruel spectacle happened under Tuniyaz’s watch,” she added.
“The U.S. government has sanctioned him, whilst the UK has welcomed him with meetings with British government officials.
“Officials like Erkin Tuniyaz are Chinese Communist Party puppets, installed in their positions to carry out a genocide.
“It is ridiculous to suggest that polite meetings with the FCDO will convince him to change course on directives that come from straight the top.”
