UPDATE - Trump signs Uyghur bill into law amid frosty China ties

ADDS DETAILS THROUGHOUT

By Michael Hernandez

WASHINGTON (AA) - US President Donald Trump signed legislation Wednesday that calls for him to impose sanctions on Chinese officials for Beijing's crackdown on the minority Muslim Uyghur ethnic group.

The legislation "holds accountable perpetrators of human rights violations and abuses such as the systematic use of indoctrination camps, forced labor, and intrusive surveillance to eradicate the ethnic identity and religious beliefs of Uyghurs and other minorities in China," Trump said in a statement.

Congress sent the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 to Trump in May.

It calls for Trump to submit to Congress a list of senior Chinese government officials who are engaged in or responsible for serious human rights abuses and mandates the State Department report to Congress on human rights abuses in Xinjiang, including individuals detained in forced labor camps.

But Trump signaled he would not be accepting the bill in its entirety, saying it "purports to limit my discretion to terminate" the penalties and said his administration would treat that component "as advisory and non‑binding."

"My Administration will make appropriate efforts to comply with section 6(g) of the Act by notifying the relevant congressional committees before terminating sanctions with respect to a person under the Act, but it will not treat the provision's requirement for advance notice as binding to the extent that it interferes with the President's conduct of diplomacy," he said.

China's Xinjiang region is home to around 10 million Uyghurs. The Turkic Muslim group, which makes up around 45% of Xinjiang’s population, has long accused China's authorities of cultural, religious and economic discrimination.

Up to 1 million people, or about 7% of the Muslim population in Xinjiang, have been incarcerated in an expanding network of "political re-education" camps, according to US officials and UN experts.

In a report last September, Human Rights Watch accused the Chinese government of a "systematic campaign of human rights violations" against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

According to the 117-page report, the Chinese government conducted "mass arbitrary detention, torture and mistreatment" of Uyghur Turks in the region.

China denies the allegations, maintaining the camps are vocational training centers.