Germany urges China to allow UN officials to Xinjiang

Germany on Monday called on China to provide access to the UN human rights commissioner and international experts to Xinjiang province amid surfacing of evidence proving Chinese authorities inflicting atrocities on minorities Muslims community in the region.

"We demand that the Chinese side improve the human rights situation and provide access there to the UN human rights commissioner and international experts," German Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Adebahr said at a briefing.

Abebahr remarks come after International Consortium of Investigative Journalists- a global network of investigative journalists based in Washington- released The China Cables, which shows how Uighurs Muslims are locked up, indoctrinated and punished inside the detention camps. The Chinese government has consistently claimed that the detention centres in Xinjiang offer voluntary education and training.

The investigation has found new evidence which undermines Beijing's claims that the detention camps, which have been built across Xinjiang in the last three years, provide voluntary re-education purposes to counter extremism to the inmates who are detained without trial.

The leaked cache includes a nine-page memo sent out in 2017 by Zhu Hailun, the then deputy-secretary of Xinjiang's Communist Party and the region's top security official, to those who run the camps.

The instructions make it clear that the camps should be run as "high-security prisons", with strict discipline, punishments no escapes, and make remedial Mandarin studies as a top priority.

Guards should impose pervasive, round-the-clock video surveillance to prevent escapes.

Inmates were to be kept isolated from the outside world and held to a strict scoring system that could determine when they might be released.

The facilities were to be shrouded in secrecy, with even employees banned from bringing in mobile phones.

The leaked documents also revealed how the Chinese government uses mass surveillance and a predictive-policing programme that analyses personal data.