Thread by @WilliamYang120

From @hrw_chinese: " The Chinese government has used its justice system to sentence and imprison an estimated half-million people during the brutal crackdown in #Xinjiang." hrw.org/news/2022/09/1…

"While not all convicted prisoners faced political charges, the available figures indicate that the total number of people wrongfully imprisoned in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is much higher than generally reported based on earlier official figures."

"These formal prosecutions, in which many people received punishments without being tried, are distinct from the arbitrary detentions in the extralegal “political education” facilities.

“The Chinese government may have hoped that formally prosecuting people in Xinjiang would avoid the limelight of mass detentions in extralegal political education camps," said @wang_maya.

"But many of these convictions just add to the crimes against humanity of wrongful imprisonment against Uyghurs and other Turkic people," she added.

"The Xinjiang High People’s Procuratorate, which has continued publishing statistics, reported in February 2022 that a total of 540,826 people have been prosecuted in the region since 2017.

Given that China’s conviction rate is above 99.9 percent, almost all of these 540,826 people would have been convicted."

"The annual arrest and prosecution figures, published by the Xinjiang High People’s Procuratorate, closely track the Strike Hard campaign. At the start of the crackdown in 2014, annual arrest and prosecution figures in Xinjiang jumped by 96 percent and 59 percent, respectively."

"These figures then spiked dramatically in 2017, the year when the Xinjiang authorities escalated the crackdown.

While the 2020 and 2021 figures have since dropped, they remain elevated, and are comparable to those figures at the start of the Strike Hard Campaign, suggesting that it is continuing."

"Available evidence also suggests that the vast majority of the 540,826 people prosecuted most likely remain in prison.

Official statistics from the Xinjiang High People’s Court at the start of the government’s Strike Hard Campaign in Xinjiang showed a dramatic increase in the number of people given lengthy sentences."

"Prior to 2017, about 10.8 percent of the people sentenced received prison sentences of more than five years. In 2017, they made up 87 percent of the sentences. The Xinjiang High People’s Court has also not released new sentencing breakdowns."

@shahitbiz found that, based on a leaked list of prisoners in Konasheher (Shufu) county in Kashgar prefecture in southern Xinjiang, 99 percent of the inmates were given terms 5 years or longer in 2017, with an average of 9.24 years.

"Based on such information, an estimated half-million people in Xinjiang remain incarcerated in the region’s prisons since the escalation of the Strike Hard Campaign in 2017."

"@shahitbiz has documented that the Chinese government is concealing these verdicts from the victims’ relatives and lawyers – in rare cases where they had legal access – and from the public, despite an official commitment to make most court verdicts publicly available."

"An earlier Human Rights Watch analysis of 58 of those verdicts that were available suggests that many convicted during the Strike Hard Campaign had been imprisoned without committing a legally recognizable offense."

"@shahitbiz research also shows that in some cases the defendants were not in court when they were convicted, but in extralegal political education camps or pretrial detention centers, without having gone through any semblance of a criminal trial."

"Recent official speeches and government reports emphasize that “counterterrorism and stability maintenance” in Xinjiang have to be “legalized and normalized” (反恐维稳法治化常态化),...

... a term that appears to be an interpretation of President Xi Jinping’s speech to the Third Xinjiang Central Work Forum in September 2020."

“The Chinese government’s glossy narrative on Xinjiang attempts to turn fiction into fact, saying that everything has been going as planned, and that the Communist Party has quelled any unrest and is now providing economic opportunities,” said @wang_maya.

“Governments should reject this fairy tale, seize the momentum of the UN report, and strengthen their efforts to investigate and hold accountable Chinese officials responsible for crimes against humanity.”