Washington, July 21 (IANS) Over 50 Uyghur civil society organisations on Tuesday strongly condemned Beijing’s Law on the Promotion of Ethnic Unity and Progress (Ethnic Unity Law), urging the international community to take meaningful action to repeal the legislation.
According to a joint statement, the law, which entered into force on July 1, 2026, is not a “technical administrative measure” but a “legislative instrument of forced assimilation”. It noted that the legislation explicitly conflates the Chinese nation with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and demands that ethnic groups abandon their distinct identities in favour of loyalty to the Party, the Han-defined “motherland,” and “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.”
Under this framework, the organisations said, the Uyghur, Tibetan, Mongolian, and other non-Han identities are permitted to exist only insofar as they are absorbed into a single, CCP-defined Chinese nation.
“The law’s reach is sweeping. It entrenches Mandarin as the language of education, displacing Uyghur, Tibetan, and Southern Mongolian languages from the classroom and public life. It mandates the ‘sinicisation’ of religion, subordinating faith to Party ideology. It instructs parents and teachers to raise children in loyalty to the CCP rather than to their own culture, religion, or language,” read the statement.
“These are not incidental effects; they are the law’s stated purpose, and they build directly on policies that have already devastated our communities — mass internment, cultural and religious destruction, and the forced separation of children from their families,” it added.
The organisations expressed grave concerns over certain provisions in the law which stipulate that individuals and organisations outside mainland China who “undermine ethnic unity and progress” could be held legally responsible under Chinese law.
“This is a direct assertion of extraterritorial jurisdiction over people engaged in speech and activity that is entirely lawful in the countries where they live. It formalises, in statute, a policy of transnational repression against Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongolians, and Chinese dissidents in exile — and it is not a threat confined to diaspora communities alone,” the signatories stated.
“Any state that allows this provision to stand unanswered accepts, in effect, that Beijing’s jurisdiction extends into its own territory, over its own residents and citizens. That is a direct challenge to state sovereignty and to the rule of law itself,” they stressed.
The organisations called on the UN human rights experts and mechanisms — including the Special Rapporteurs on freedom of religion or belief, and the situation of human rights defenders, on minority issues, as well as Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and other relevant treaty bodies — to formally monitor and report on the implementation and extraterritorial application of the Ethnic Unity Law, and press Beijing to repeal it.
They further appealed to governments worldwide to publicly condemn the law, raise the issue directly in bilateral and multilateral engagements with Beijing, and adopt concrete safeguards against its extraterritorial enforcement for Uyghur, Tibetan, and Mongolian communities as well as other diaspora members residing in their jurisdictions.
--IANS
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