‘You’ve said Muslim lives don’t matter’: Outrage as a human rights lawyer accuses an ENTIRE Q&A panel of ignoring China’s treatment of Islamic minorities
- Human rights lawyer Diana Sayed accused Q&A panel of ignoring Muslim plight
- ABC program was discussing idea of sanctions against China over human rights
- Muslim Uighur minority are forced into re-education camps in China’s west
- Liberal Senate President Scott Ryan suggested sanctions wouldn’t work at all
- Labor’s foreign affairs frontbencher Penny Wong said dialogue was better way
An international human rights lawyer has sparked outrage after accusing an entire Q&A panel of ignoring the plight of Muslims.
Diana Sayed, a former campaigns co-ordinator with Amnesty International, was dismayed at the other panelists for questioning whether economic sanctions against China would force Australia’s biggest trading partner to stop oppressing Uighur Muslims.
‘What you’ve essentially all said on the panel here today is that Muslim lives don’t matter and that is exactly what you’ve said,’ she told the ABC program on Monday night.
International human rights lawyer Diana Sayed was dismayed at the other Q&A panelists for questioning whether economic sanctions against China would force Australia’s biggest trading partner to stop oppressing Uighur Muslims
Labor’s foreign affairs frontbencher Penny Wong (pictured), who had earlier suggested the need to raise human rights issues with China, shook her head in disbelief
Labor’s foreign affairs frontbencher Penny Wong, who had earlier suggested the need to raise human rights issues with China, shook her head in disbelief.
‘That’s not fair,’ Senator Wong interjected.
Ms Sayed, the Muslim daughter of Afghan refugees, doubled down on her assertion the other Q&A panelists had downplayed the psychological torture of Uighurs in China’s north-west Xinjiang region.
‘That’s what people are hearing at home, they’re hearing in the audience,’ she said.
‘And that is just so heart breaking to hear that and I’m just really disappointed because we have so many levers in the toolbox that we could be using to influence foreign policy.’
Moments earlier, Liberal Senate President Scott Ryan had suggested trade sanctions against China, over its treatment of Uighurs, would only hurt Australia without improving human rights.
‘The truth is that we would have very little impact upon China and enormous impact upon Australia so the effectiveness of the action we took would be virtually zero,’ he said.
Senator Wong, who is of Chinese descent, said the Labor Opposition had publicly and raised the issue of how Uighurs are treated in Parliament and in speeches, and privately with China.
‘We should ask those questions,’ she said.
Uighurs in China’s north-west Xinjiang region (pictured is Omir Bekali crying as he details the psychological stress endured while in a Chinese internment camp. He was interviewed in Kazakhstan)
‘The rule of law and human rights do matter but there is a reasonable question about effectiveness.’
A new BBC documentary has revealed how China is keeping thousands of Uighur children away from their Muslim parents before indoctrinating them in camps posing as schools and orphanages.
Boys and girls as young as three are taught to speak Mandarin, relinquish their religion and love the Communist Party of China in a systematic effort described by one expert as ‘cultural genocide’ in Xinjiang, the BBC reported.
Many of the children’s parents are believed to be both detained in the so-called internment camps across the vast region in far-west China, which has been home to ethnic Muslim minorities such as the Uighurs and Kazakhs for centuries.