Earlier today, I spoke in the urgent question called by my friend Member for Wealden, Nus Ghani MP, on the treatment of Uyghur women in Xinjiang detention camps.
Yesterday, the BBC broadcast harrowing footage of Chinese state-orchestrated abuse against Uyghur women on an unprecedented scale, and we were all shocked by what we saw.
As Nus has rightly said, these horrifying stories add to the huge and growing body of evidence detailing atrocities perpetrated by the Chinese authorities in Xinjiang—atrocities that may even be genocidal. These horrors have led the Board of Deputies of British Jews to compare the plight of the Uyghurs to the Holocaust.
Many Carshalton and Wallington residents have raised this issue with me, and one of the most distressing aspects of the treatment of the Uyghurs is the sickening online propaganda suggesting that they are somehow happy with or, indeed, responding well to their so-called re-education.
I was grateful to the Minister for confirming that the Government is developing an online harms regulatory framework, which will establish a new duty of care to ensure that social media companies have processes in place to deal with this sort of online disinformation and harmful content.
Watch my question above, or read the transcript of the full debate here.
