China | A timely reminder

Hacked files reveal more details about Chinese abuses in Xinjiang

They come as the UN’s human-rights chief tours the region

Images from the Tekes County Detention Center: The second set of images from September 2018 (Figures 15 to 18) shows the full pro-cess from police arriving on the scene, through the arrest of detainees using hoods, cuffs, and shackles, to the interrogation of an arrested detainee in a so-called tiger chair, with a SWAT officer standing at the ready. The timestamps encoded in the image metadata indicate that the process from entering the room to interrogating detainees in a tiger chair took only about four minutes

May 26th 2022

Thousands of documents and photographs shed new light on China’s abuses in the region of Xinjiang, where it is accused of detaining some 1m Uyghurs and other minorities. The cache includes mugshots of detainees, some as young as 14, and security protocols that describe a shoot-to-kill policy (after a warning shot) for anyone trying to escape from the government’s “re-education” camps. The files, which date from 2018, were reportedly hacked from police computer servers and released by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington. The leak came as Michelle Bachelet, the un’s human-rights chief, began a highly choreographed tour of Xinjiang.

This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “A timely reminder”