On 21st April 2022, Bait Al Amanah hosted a closed-door roundtable meeting with the Uyghur Human Rights Projects (UHRP) to discuss the pressing issues and serious violations of human rights faced by the Uyghur ethnic group in Xinjiang, China, in addition to exploring collaborative efforts moving forward.
Omer Kanat, the Executive Director of UHRP, Louisa Greve, the Director of Global Advocacy of UHRP, and Zuhri Yuhyi, the President of Malaysia4Uyghur highlighted the systematic forced labour issues and lack of awareness and attention among the Malaysian public due to language barriers. This differs greatly from the strong response from all parties to the Palestinian cause. As such, collaborative efforts from think tanks and civil society organizations need to be made to increase grassroots support for greater advocacy to uphold the human rights of the Uyghurs.
Throughout the discussion, we explored several potential areas of work through collaboration to grow public attention towards the Uyghur repression and to produce evidence-based research materials for advocacy purposes.
We believe that Malaysia needs to speak up for Uyghurs in a diplomatic and constructive manner and find pragmatic ways to communicate its concern to various key stakeholders in China. This includes efficiently addressing the human rights violations through Malaysia's soft power approach while preserving our nation's strong economic, investment, and cultural relations with China.