A human rights organization accused Chinese police on Friday of monitoring the mobile phones of people from ethnic minorities of Muslim origin in Xinjiang province, who can be questioned only because they have certain files saved.
According to the Human Rights Observatory (ODH) report, members of Chinese ethnic minorities of Uyghur and Kazakh Muslim origin will be subject to police questioning just for storing the Koran, Islam’s holy book, on their mobile phone, one of the about 50,000 media files from a list compiled by the Chinese authorities.
The making of this list is “another example” of “China’s abuse of surveillance technology in Xinjiang,” the non-governmental organization noted.
The files are automatically detected by two apps that authorities have required residents of the Xinjiang capital Urumqi to install on their mobile phones, according to Maya Wang, ODH’s acting director for Asia.
“Essentially these apps are checking this list, the main list, as well as monitoring other information,” Wang was quoted as saying by Radio Free Asia.
The data collected by Applications – dubbed Jing Wang Wei Shi and Feng Cai – and the main list examined by the ODH dovetails with other surveillance systems in Xinjiang, which Wang described as “multi-dimensional” and include Chinese government checkpoints and biometric data collection points.
“Human Rights Watch has repeatedly expressed concern about China’s approach to combating acts it classifies as terrorist and extremist,” the group said in a statement issued Wednesday.
“China’s anti-terrorism law defines terrorism and extremism in an overly broad and vague manner that facilitates prosecution, imprisonment, and other restrictions for acts that are not intended to cause death or serious bodily harm for political, religious, or religious reasons. or ideological”, reads the same note
The main list of media files is part of a large database of more than 1,600 Xinjiang data tables accessed by The Intercept in 2019, concluding that Urumqi police carried out surveillance and arrests between 2015 and 2019 based on on the information found in the database.
The list examined by the ODH was located in a different part of the same database and had not been previously reported or analyzed, the group said.
The ODH also found that over nine months between 2017 and 2018, police conducted almost 11 million searches on 1.2 million mobile phones in Urumqi.
The organization’s analysis found photo, audio and video files containing violent content, “but also other material that has no obvious link to acts of violence,” including common religious material, the group said.
The United Nations Human Rights Council must launch an investigation and governments must identify the technology companies running this surveillance apparatus and act to end their involvement, the non-governmental organization said in a statement.
“I think what happens in Xinjiang is very important for the future of China, but also for the way governments use these systems,” Wang said.
Source: TSF
