Uyghurs urge International Olympic Committee to cancel Beijing 2022 Olympics

The World Uyghur Congress, a human rights group, has urged International Olympic Committee's ethics commission to personally make a ruling on a complaint the group filed to move the 2022 Winter Olympics from Beijing, The Hill reported.

The rights group that represents Uyghurs Muslims in China, has filed a complaint with the Olympic committee's ethics commission in August 2020 requesting the orgsation to reconsider holding the 2022 Olympics in China due to "verifiable evidence of genocide and crimes against humty taking place against the Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims by the People's Republic of China."

"It is vital that ethical issues are handled with transparency, independence, and fairness," Michael Polak, a London-based international human rights lawyer and head of Lawyers for Uyghur Rights, said in a statement.

"I was shocked at the scant response to our original lengthy and evidence-based complaint, which was to simply refer us back to the IOC Executive Committee, the very subject of our ethical complaint," Polak said.

He said the ban should act immediately or "risk the integrity of the Olympic's ethics procedures." Ban was appointed to lead the ethics commission in 2017.

There have been growing calls for a boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics in February next year.

After Beijing imposed the national security law on Hong Kong in July last year, calls for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing began. Those boycott calls have increased as criticism has intensified, South China Morning Post reported.

As part of its vote on the Xinjiang genocide, the Canadian parliament called for exploring moving the Winter Olympics, a proposal that Beijing fiercely rejected.

China will "seriously sanction" any country that boycotts the Beijing Olympics, the editor of the nationalist tabloid the Global Times warned.

China has been rebuked globally for cracking down on Uyghur Muslims by sending them to mass detention camps, interfering in their religious activities and sending members of the community to undergo some form of forcible re-education or indoctrination.

Beijing, on the other hand, has vehemently denied that it is engaged in human rights abuses against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang while reports from journalists, NGOs and former detainees have surfaced, highlighting the Chinese Communist Party's brutal crackdown on the ethnic community.

In the US, the previous Trump administration determined that China has committed genocide against Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang and said that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) must be held accountable for its acts against humty.

Last month, Canada becomes the second country to declare China's treatment of its Uyghur minority population a genocide.

Late February, the Netherlands Parliament passed a motion saying the Chinese treatment of the Uyghur minority is a "genocide".

The Netherlands became the first European country to take such a move. The motion, which is nonbinding, could encourage other European parliaments to advance similar statements, Politico reported.

( With inputs from ANI )