Rally for Uyghur Freedom

799 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017,New York NY 10017

22 March, 2021

Description

Rally calling on the President to combat the Uyghur oppression through diplomacy and economic pressure. Background: UN and US officials estimate that millions of Uyghur people are imprisoned in Chinese concentration camps and used as slaves for forced labor – primarily because of their ethnicity and for practicing Islam. Former inmates report enduring torture, forced sterilizations, humiliation, and denial of religious freedoms. Rally Purpose: This rally will communicate to the President that we believe the moral benefits of fighting the Uyghur oppression — freedom for millions of people — outweighs the potential diplomatic and economic consequences. Organizers: Shabbos KestenbaumUyghur Rally Mission Statement: In response to the millions of Uyghur people unjustly imprisoned in Chinese concentration camps: 1) The Secretary of State from the previous administration recently classified the Uyghur oppression as a genocide. The new Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, recently stated that he personally agrees with this classification. We call on Secretary Blinken to officially renew this classification as a matter of State Department policy. Furthermore, we call on the Secretary Blinken, with the authority of the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”, to file a suit in the International Court of Justice against the People’s Republic of China for their acts of genocide. 2) We call on the President to, as described in the recently proposed bill Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, identify all foreign people who knowingly engage in or facilitate the forced labor of Uyghur people and to prohibit their transactions under the authority of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. This will help combat the Uyghur oppression through economic means. 3) The US recently banned cotton and tomato imports from the Uyghur region in China. Due to the enormous scale of these concentration camps, we call on the Secretary of the Treasury to, under the authority of the Tariff act of 1930 section 307, prohibit the importation of all goods made in the Uyghur region unless clear and convincing evidence is provided to demonstrate that these goods were not made with forced labor. This will help prevent the exploitation of Uyghur slave labor.