GENEVA—As delegates convened in Geneva for the sixty-first session of the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council in February, High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk opened the session with a keynote address on the unshakeable nature of the international human rights system in the face of ongoing conflicts and mass atrocities. He spoke about the need for a stronger commitment to justice and accountability, including the “need to increase the cost of breaking international law.” The high commissioner is right to champion greater accountability. Action on this should start by pursuing greater accountability for China’s treatment of Uyghurs, who are suffering under repression both at home and abroad.
For the past decade, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has subjected Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic groups living in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) to an unprecedented campaign of mass arbitrary detention, forced labor, surveillance, enforced sterilizations, and torture. My family has been directly affected: My brother Ekpar Asat, a tech entrepreneur and participant in a US State Department visitor program, was imprisoned a decade ago this month.
Advocates of Uyghur rights—myself included—have rallied the world to put an end to the atrocities. A first step is acknowledging that China’s ongoing atrocities against the Uyghurs have far-reaching ramifications. Well beyond the XUAR, the Chinese government is attempting to reshape international legal norms to promote what international legal expert Tom Ginsburg has termed “authoritarian international law.” The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), in a landmark 2022 report, declared that the widespread and systematic persecution of Uyghurs may constitute crimes against humanity. The US government, global human rights organizations, and fifty legal experts have determined that crimes against Uyghurs may constitute a genocide under the UN Genocide Convention.
This brutality reached beyond China’s borders; the PRC’s long arm of transnational repression extends to Chinese dissidents, pro-democracy activists, and Uyghur diaspora communities around the world. Representing the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Litigation Project, I have worked in collaboration with a team of New York University Law School students, including Eva d’Amato and Anna Lebrun, to analyze the international legal ramifications of China’s ongoing atrocities in Xinjiang and its relentless campaign of transnational repression. It was this work that brought me to Geneva.
How does transnational repression manifest?
The PRC, in coordination with willing governments, detains and forcibly repatriates Uyghurs who fled Xinjiang to escape the PRC’s atrocities. In the past decade, PRC officials have coerced Uyghurs and other Turkic people abroad to return to the XUAR, only to detain them indefinitely. In this effort, China sought to diffuse authoritarian norms within multilateral institutions and even use China-led regional bodies, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and its client states to harass, arrest, and detain Uyghurs and other Turkic people living in Central Asia. This week in Kazakhstan, nineteen people—young and old—were sentenced for protesting China’s atrocity crimes and speaking out about relatives who vanished in Xinjiang. Their punishment, reportedly carried out at Beijing’s behest, is a stark reminder that international condemnation alone is not enough to stop governments from capitulating to Chinese pressure and violating international law.
Even in democratic countries, Uyghurs have been threatened that if they do not spy on other Uyghurs living abroad, they could lose contact with their family members or their family members could face punishment. Constant harassment, intimidation against activist and diasporic communities, and coercion of foreign government officials has had a chilling effect.
In February 2025, for example, the Thai government forcibly returned forty Uyghur men to China after these men endured inhumane conditions and degrading treatment for ten years in Thai immigration detention centers. Beijing had declared the Uyghur men a security threat and demanded that they be returned to China, even as human rights groups warned that they would likely face incarceration, torture, or death. The Thai government ultimately bowed to Chinese pressure, with Thai officials claiming that they feared retaliation from China if the Uyghurs were sent to other countries that had offered to resettle them. The forty men’s health and whereabouts are currently unknown.
The forced repatriation of forty Uyghurs from Thailand to the PRC represents only a single instance of an international phenomenon that is growing in both severity and scale. Arrests and forced repatriations of Uyghurs have occurred in Malaysia, Cambodia, and Egypt, as well. These arrests constitute arbitrary detention with no legal basis. They violate international covenants as well as governments’ obligations to refugees. Under customary international law and international human rights law, for instance, the principle of non-refoulement prevents governments from transferring individuals to another country or jurisdiction where they would face a risk of serious human rights violations or abuses.
How to respond to transnational repression?
Democratic states that are committed to upholding international law and multilateral institutions should systematically document and monitor third-country involvement in transnational repression. These states should also employ both international and national accountability mechanisms against offending states and individuals. Such actions could help prevent the Chinese government from exploiting its coercive economic power and convey a clear message that collaborating with oppressive regimes to persecute minorities will not be tolerated. States that assist in these actions must recognize that they are violating customary international law by supporting crimes against humanity and genocide perpetrated by the PRC.
Some notable steps are already being taken. In March 2025, the US State Department imposed visa restrictions on several current and former Thai officials involved in the deportation of Uyghurs. More action is needed. To effectively deter cooperation with the PRC’s transnational repression of Uyghur refugees, countries committed to upholding human rights standards should adopt a coordinated and targeted sanctions policy. Such a policy should, for example, look into potential sanctions on Kazakh officials responsible for targeting those individuals speaking out about China’s treatment of Uyghurs.
To build on existing efforts, the international human rights system should leverage accountability measures and political pressure to increase the diplomatic costs on the Chinese government for continuing its mass atrocities. Even as Beijing has systematically co-opted UN mechanisms to silence criticism of its human rights record—including blocking access of Uyghur rights and Chinese dissident groups to the UN, surveilling activists near UN facilities, and promoting state-linked entities that echo the PRC’s claims—states must demonstrate moral clarity on the Uyghur issue. States that have expressed support for Uyghur rights and have opposed the PRC’s authoritarianism should work to shape counter-norms and combat Beijing’s growing authoritarian multilateralism. This means that despite the UN’s effective institutional capture, democratic states along and civil society actors must keep engaging with international accountability mechanisms and highlighting the evidence collected by human rights groups. They should also continue calling for an independent UN commission of inquiry to monitor the situation in Xinjiang and for a follow-up to the 2022 OHCHR report.
On a domestic level, security measures must be aligned with international standards for human rights protections. The Chinse government has used spyware, diplomatic channels, and proxy actors—often locally-based individuals or groups—for surveillance, harassment, and physical attacks against the Uyghur diaspora. States should establish policies to deter these practices, including implementing sanctions and travel bans on individuals, groups, or companies known to be engaged in or assisting the Chinese government’s transnational repression.
As I returned from Geneva after convening a high-profile event featuring UN experts and advocates, I left with the very question I asked at the UN forum: who does the UN serve? To me, the prolonged atrocity sends a loud message that the UN has not served Uyghur victims, as opposed to other crises, where the UN has established country-specific mechanisms or special rapporteurs to maintain international attention. The failure of the international community—including multilateral institutions—to hold the Chinese government to account has only allowed the atrocities to intensify. The silence only fuels more repression against the Uyghurs.
