The Independent reports:

Mass re-education camps used to hold Uighur and other Muslim minorities in China are being run like “wartime concentration camps”, Amnesty has said.

Up to one million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other minorities have been arbitrarily detained in internment camps in the far-west Xinjiang region, according to human rights groups and a UN panel.

China maintains that it is detaining people guilty of minor crimes, and has sent them to “vocational centres” and that inmates are “grateful” to be there.

But Uighur activists have estimated up to 3 million people have been detained in the camps, Patrick Poon, China researcher at Amnesty International, told The Independent.

“The scale is scary. We haven’t seen in recent Chinese history that there would be such a scale of detaining people in camps in such huge numbers,” he said.

“So I think it’s legitimate for people to raise concern about how the camps are being run similar to wartime concentration camps. It’s comparable in scale.” [Continue reading…]