In a statement, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote,

“For the past four years, this Administration has exposed the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and called it what it is: a Marxist-Leninist regime that exerts power over the long-suffering Chinese people through brainwashing and brute force.”

“Our exhaustive documentation of the PRC’s actions in Xinjiang confirms that since at least March 2017, local authorities dramatically escalated their decades-long campaign of repression against Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups, including ethnic Kazakhs and ethnic Kyrgyz.”

Adding that, “PRC authorities have conducted forced sterilizations and abortions on Uyghur women, coerced them to marry non-Uyghurs, and separated Uyghur children from their families.”

Pompeo says that these crimes are “ongoing” and include the “arbitrary imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty of more than one million civilians, forced sterilization, torture of a large number of those arbitrarily detained, forced labor, and the imposition of draconian restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement.”

Pompeo believes that genocide is “ongoing,” and calls on all appropriate multilateral and relevant juridical bodies to join the United States to hold the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party accountable for these “atrocities”.

Before leaving, Pompeo says that he has directed the State Department to continue its investigation into the “ongoing atrocities” occurring in Xinjiang. 

Pompeo ends his statement with a warning to the rest of the world if the CCP is not held accountable for its actions against the Uyghur people.

“If the Chinese Communist Party is allowed to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against its own people, imagine what it will be emboldened to do to the free world, in the not-so-distant future.”

Read the full statement here.