Canada Imposes Sanctions on Eight Chinese Officials Over Human Rights Violations

By Tenzin Chokyi

DHARAMSALA, 12 December: Canadian foreign minister, Mélanie Joly announced sanctions against eight former or current Chinese senior officials involved in grave human rights violation in the country on International Human Rights Day, as stated in Global Affairs Canada news release on 10 December, coinciding it on the International Human Rights Day.

“The sanctions announced today respond to Chinese government-led repression of ethnic and religious minorities in China, including in Xinjiang, Tibet and against those who practise Falun Gong,” the report states. 

Expressing condemnation of human rights violations around the world, the statement details China’s abuse of human rights by arbitrarily detaining “more than one million people in Xinjiang since 2017, many of whom were held in camps and faced psychological, physical and sexual violence.” 

The statement also highlights China’s use of “forced labour, arbitrary detention and restrictions on their rights to freedom of religion or belief, expression, movement and association” on Tibetans to suppress their human rights. 

In addition, the news released condemns China’s elimination efforts of “Falun Gong practise in the country through arbitrary arrests, forced labour and torture” since 1999. 

Canada’s Foreign Minister called on “the Chinese government to put an end to this systematic campaign of repression and uphold its international human rights obligations.” 

The sanctions are imposed under the Special Economic Measures (Republic of China) Regulations enacted in 21 March 2021 against Chinese officials and Chinese entity in response to their gross and systemic human rights violations.  

Among the eight sanctioned Chinese officials, it included Chen Quanguo, former Chinese communist party Chief in the Xinjiang region, and Wu Yingjie, Communist Party head in Tibet between 2016 and 2021. Wu was earlier sanctioned in 2022 by the United States department of treasury under the Global Magnistky acts for human rights abuses in Tibet.   

The eight individuals, as per the sanction measures, will face “dealings prohibition, an effective asset freeze, on listed persons,” among others. “The individuals listed in the Schedule to the Regulations are also inadmissible to Canada under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act,” it says. 

These sanctions follow a series of Tibet advocacy efforts by Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) in collaboration with the Canada Tibet Committee (CTC)and other organisations. On 10 Une this year, Canada’s House of Commons unanimously passed a motion condemning the Chinese Communist government’s “policy of systemic cultural assibilation against the Tibetans” while recognising the Tibetan claim to “self-determination”. 

Under Xi’s rule, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has embarked on a full-fledged mission to dilute and eradicate the identity of Tibetans and Uyghurs, replacing it with the doctrine of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Xi’s rigorous sinicization projects in Tibet include state-run boarding schools across the region, which various human rights groups have described as “colonial boarding schools.”

Tibet Action Institute reported one million Tibetan children — an estimated 80% of all Tibetan children — are now being taught in Chinese state-owned boarding schools, where Tibetan has been replaced by Chinese as the medium of instruction. The report finds that these boarding schools operate in a manner similar to colonial schooling systems in Canada, the United States, and Australia in recent history.

In response to the sanctions, China expressed its opposition and condemns Canadas’s decision, according to the China state-run media outlet Global Times on 11 December.  In complete disregard to numerous well-documented reports on China’s human rights violations, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning extolled China as a champion of human rights during a press conference held yesterday. 

In skewed logic, the spokesperson counter-attacked Canada for its known and acknowledged history of abuse of against its indigenous people. In other words, China, lacking both facts and truths denied its repressive policies Tibet, Xinjiang and towards its own people like those of Falun Gong practitioners and dissidents. 

Mao Ning described Canada’s sanctions as a typical move of “thief-crying-stop-thief”, which, inadvertently or not, acknowledges that China is indeed a “thief”— irritated by being called one by another.