US blacklists Chinese, North Korean firms for human rights abuses, threatens sanctions

The United States (US) on Friday rolled out numerous human rights abuses, threatening sanctions for senior officials and government in eight countries, which include a Chinese firm producing facial recognition technology to a giant cartoon studio in North Korea.

Acknowledging International Human Rights Day, supported in part by Britain and Canada, the sanctions target officials accused of abetting the crackdown on anti-coup protestors in Myanmar, the oppression of Muslim Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region and political violence in Bangladesh under the guise of a war on drugs.

According to the US Treasury Department: “Our actions today, particularly those in partnership with the United Kingdom and Canada, send a message that democracies around the world will act against those who abuse the power of the state to inflict suffering and repression.”

The US stated that China’s artificial intelligence company SenseTime, and two ethnic Uyghur political leaders in Xinjiang, Shohrat Zakir and Erken Tuniyaz, took part in sweeping oppression of Uyghurs.

Zakir was the chairman of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China from at least 2018 to 2021, and Tuniyaz is current acting chairman.

Zakir has defended the prison camps as “education centers” that teach people Mandarin and “the true meaning of religion.”

But international rights organizations have called them a central tool in the Chinese government’s “genocidal” policies towards Uyghurs.

“The mass detention of Uyghurs is part of an effort by (Chinese) authorities to use detentions and data-driven surveillance to create a police state in the Xinjiang region,” the Treasury said.

The Treasury said SenseTime’s facial recognition programs were designed in part to be used in Xinjiang against Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities, more than one million of whom have been incarcerated in prison camps.

The move put new pressure on SenseTime, which was preparing to list its shares in the coming week on Hong Kong’s stock market in an initial public offering.

The company, which Washington says is part of China’s “military-industrial complex,” had already been placed on the US Department of Commerce’s blacklist in 2019 because its technology had been used for mass surveillance in Xinjiang.