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Abstract

The Chinese government has long engaged in the repression of ethno-religious minorities, including Turkic Muslim peoples in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Since late 2016, it has established a mass internment system, claimed to be for purposes of voluntary ‘education and conversion’ of people deemed vulnerable to ‘extremism,’ with an estimated capacity of up to a million. A growing body of evidence suggests that the inmates of such camps are at risk of physical and mental torture and that the system for ‘deradicalisation’ through internment is complemented by ever-tighter forms of Party-State surveillance and controls of everyday life in Xinjiang.

Scheduled for two days after the review of China by the Universal Periodic Review process at the Human Rights Council of the United Nations in Geneva, this seminar will present an opportunity to discuss recent developments in Xinjiang, as well as their domestic and international implications, from political, human rights and public international law angles.

Speaker biography

Rachel Harris is Reader in the Music of China and Central Asia at SOAS, University of London. Her research interests include intangible cultural heritage and the politics of identity; sound, body and ritual practice; and transnational cultural flows, with particular reference to Uyghur religious and expressive culture. She is the author of two books on musical life in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, and has co-edited four volumes, including the textbook Pieces of the Musical World (Routledge 2015)She led the Leverhulme Research Project Sounding Islam in China(2014-2017,), which used the medium of sound to understand the lived experience of Islam in China at a time of rapid social and political change. An edited volume Ethnographies of Islam in China and a single-authored book Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam are now under review. She is currently leading a British Academy Sustainable Development Project which aims to revitalise Uyghur cultural heritage in the diaspora in Kazakhstan. She is involved with various outreach projects, including recordings, musical performance and consultancy. On the issue of Xinjiang mass detentions, she wrote the widely noted piece ‘Securitisation and mass detentions in Xinjiang.’

Chair Biography

Jodie Blackstock is JUSTICE’s Legal Director and a barrister. She is responsible for JUSTICE’s legal and policy output aiming to strengthen the justice system across criminal, civil and administrative jurisdictions. She practiced as a barrister for five years before joining JUSTICE in 2009, with a mixed common law practice in England and Wales as well as constitutional law in Trinidad and Tobago. At JUSTICE she has held the roles of Senior Legal Officer and Director of Criminal Justice. She has conducted case interventions at JUSTICE before the UK Supreme Court, drafted a range of reports recommending improvements to the UK justice system, and briefed parliaments on legislative reform. She has also been engaged in a number of multi-country research and training projects on procedural rights in criminal cases, particularly on the right to early legal advice. She regularly contributes to seminars and training programmes on criminal and human rights legal developments, in the UK, Europe and internationally. She has spoken at conferences in China on the right to legal assistance and co-drafted a training programme for the Chinese National Legal Aid Centre for lawyers in delivering early legal advice. She is treasurer of the Bar Human Rights Committee, through which she has been engaged in, amongst other work, statements of concern regarding treatment of lawyers and human rights defenders in China. She also sits on the EU Law Committee of the Bar Council of England and Wales and the Criminal Procedure Rules Committee.

Discussant biographies

Eva Pils is Professor of Law at King’s College London. She studied law, philosophy and sinology in Heidelberg, London and Beijing and holds a PhD in law from University College London. She is author of China's human rights lawyers: advocacy and resistance (Routledge, 2014) and of Human rights in China: a social practice in the shadows of authoritarianism (Polity, 2018). Before joining King’s in 2014, Eva was an associate professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. She is an affiliated scholar at the US-Asia Law Institute of New York University Law School.

Niccolò Ridi is a Visiting Lecturer in Public International Law and International Investment Law at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, where he is also completing his PhD, and a collaborateur de recherche at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. His doctoral research deals with the idea of authority from prior decisions in international dispute settlement and makes substantial use of empirical and quantitative methodologies. More broadly, he is interested in the practice of international courts, the regulation of their jurisdiction, and their procedure. Niccolò holds a combined LLB/MA in law from the University of Florence and an LLM in International law from the University of Cambridge. He also is also an alumnus of the ‘Silvano Tosi’ Research Seminar in Parliamentary Studies. Niccolò has published on international dispute settlement, private international law, and international refugee law and is author, with Thomas Schultz and Jason Mitchenson, of ‘The Principle of Comity in Public and Private International Law’. He has done editorial work for a number of peer-reviewed journals.

Event details

SW1.18, First Floor
Somerset House East Wing
Strand Campus, Strand, London WC2R 2LS