Ottawa’s reaction to a new Chinese law on ethnic unity is tepid and does not live up to Canada’s promise to stop foreign governments from threatening diaspora abroad, a Uyghur rights activist said.
The law, which Beijing enacted in early July, gives a legal basis for the Chinese government to prosecute people or organizations outside China if their actions are deemed to harm the progress of “ethnic unity.”
“It is a textbook example of transnational oppression,” said Mehmet Tohti, executive director of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project.
“Our reaction to China is fading away, day by day, week by week. And then we don’t hear too much about transnational repression or gross violations of human rights.”
China says the law promotes harmony among the country’s 55 ethnic groups, who make up just under nine percent of the country’s 1.4 billion population. The law mandates the use of Mandarin Chinese as the primary language in education.
The law says all Chinese citizens have a duty to “forge a common consciousness of the Chinese nation according to law and the constitution.”
It may impact minorities like Tibetans and Uyghurs, who have protested Beijing policies in the past, including through violent means.
Uyghurs are a largely Muslim minority group who have been the target of a long-term campaign of detention, and later incarceration, by China. While the short-term internment camps were said to be closed in 2019, thousands ended up in prison, where experts have said they were targeted for their identity and not for actual crimes.
Canada’s ambassador to United Nations agencies in Geneva, Peter MacDougall, listed the law along a series of issues that Ottawa is watching, in a June 16 statement to the United Nations Human Rights Council, responding to an annual report on human rights worldwide.
“We are also concerned about the ethnic unity law in China, and call for respect of the human rights of minorities,” he said, while also touching on unrelated issues in Afghanistan, Iran and Ukraine.
Tohti said he’s stunned Ottawa had nothing to say about the risks of the law being used to persecute people in Canada and elsewhere.
“It is a vague and very weak statement,” Tohti said. “The nature of Chinese transnational repression, that dimension is almost ignored. And that should be the key focus for Canada.”
Tohti said there is particularly a risk of China issuing arrest warrants that could see people arrested if they travel to countries with extradition treaties with China such as South Korea. Already, Hong Kong’s sweeping national security law has been used to issue bounties for activists abroad, including in Canada.
He said Ottawa should mount a global effort to protect Chinese dissidents from the law, but he fears the government has given up on publicly raising human rights issues ever since Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to Beijing in January.
Tohti noted the Carney government made transnational repression a priority when it hosted the G7 summit last year.
“We should be playing a leadership role. Now we almost drop all of this important leverage from our agenda, and so we are talking softly now. We don’t talk too much about China’s human rights,” he said.
In a statement, Global Affairs Canada added that it will contest various policies by various countries.
“Canada will continue to work with international partners to advocate for the promotion and protection of human rights globally, including the rights of minorities,” wrote spokeswoman Samantha Lafleur, adding Ottawa’s foreign policy is shaped by Canadians valuing diversity at home.
Since 2023, Canada has been pursuing a seat on the UN Human Rights Council for the 2028 to 2030 period.
Deputy Conservative Leader Melissa Lantsman called the law “oppression with a legal stamp” by the Chinese Communist Party.
“Beijing’s new ‘ethnic unity law’ is just the latest tool in the CCP’s playbook of control, from crushing minority rights at home to menacing Taiwan abroad. Authoritarianism doesn’t stop at borders with this,” she wrote on the platform X.
The European Union and the U.S. State Department have said they will not allow the new Chinese law to be applied within their territories. Canada has not explicitly said that.
When asked about American and European pushback to the law, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun did not explain why it includes extraterritorial applications.
