Condemning the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity being committed against Uyghurs and members of other religious and ethnic minority groups by the People's Republic of China.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution (H. Res. 317) condemning the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity being committed against Uyghurs and members of other religious and ethnic minority groups by the People's Republic of China, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H. Res. 317, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H. Res. 317, as amended, condemning the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity being committed against Uyghurs and members of other religious and ethnic minority groups by the People's Republic of China. And I was proud to introduce this resolution alongside my good friend, Ranking Member McCaul, and working collectively with him.

Mr. Speaker, I have said previously, and I will say this again, as an African American who has faced the brunt end of injustice for no reason other than the color of my skin and watched my parents suffer, I am very sensitive to the deep wounds of intolerance and oppression that many minority populations endure across the globe.

Again, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said: ``Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere'' and ``I refuse to be silent,'' another statement of Dr. King because silence can be complicity.

Dr. King called us all to be champions of human rights, not just here in the United States, but wherever human rights are under threat.

And we have seen grave human rights abuses in China. In Xinjiang, the Uyghur people and other ethnic and religious minority groups are subjected to systematic human rights violations that amounts to a genocide and crimes against humanity as defined by the Geneva Convention.

The crimes taking place against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang are horrific in their scope and severity. And we know of these atrocities because many survivors began speaking out at great risk to their personal safety and that of their families. They provided firsthand accounts confirming China's targeted campaign of repression. Meanwhile, journalists, scholars, and activists who have tried to uncover what is happening have been targeted and expelled.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee has heard harrowing accounts from survivors of mass internment, forced labor, torture, political indoctrination, suppression of religious practices, family separation, sexual abuse, and other inhumane practices.

During a hearing on May 6 of this year, survivor Tursunay Ziyawudun ended her testimony by imploring the members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Congress to act. And we are here today to do just that.

This resolution unequivocally declares that a genocide is taking place in the Uyghur region. I agree with that declaration and so do many others around the world.

This resolution is a clarion call, not just to every nation in the world, but to every person on this planet that the United States Congress will not remain silent, no matter how powerful the perpetrator.

We must continue to call out the government of the People's Republic of China for these atrocities and others all over the world and have them take all possible actions to bring this genocide and these crimes against humanity to an end.

I say to the world, we are starting with China. We are going all over the world. Human rights are on the front burner in the United States House of Representatives and clearly on the Committee on Foreign Affairs.

This is an important resolution. I close by saying I support and am glad to work with the ranking member, Mr. McCaul.

Mr. Speaker, I support this resolution. I urge my colleagues to do the same, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. McCAUL: Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Chabot), ranking member of the Committee of Foreign Affairs' Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I, too, thank Mr. McCaul for his leadership. It is my pleasure to work with him on this bill to get this to the floor and to pass it on this floor, the people's House, in a bipartisan way, sending a strong message together. That is what this does. So I thank him for his friendship, and I thank him for standing up, as he does, and working together in a bipartisan way.

Mr. Speaker, H. Res. 317, condemning the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity being committed against the Uyghurs and members of other religious and ethnic minority groups by the People's Republic of China is critical to demonstrating to those suffering in Xinjiang that they haven't been forsaken. And to the government of Beijing, we will speak out when it tramples the universal rights that every human being deserves.

It gives me hope that we are not the first parliamentary body that has deemed the PRC's action in Xinjiang a genocide. The parliaments of the U.K., of Canada, of Lithuania, among others, have already taken the right stand. We must support them. We must work with them and multilateral groups. We must encourage other nations and other people to speak out. But I am proud we are speaking out here today in the United States Congress, in the people's House. We will not be silent.

Mr. Speaker, I hope that all my colleagues will join me in supporting this resolution, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Let me thank the chairman for bringing this measure with me here today. I also want to thank him for his passion on this issue. We talk about human rights, whether it was the African Americans who were enslaved in this Nation to the Native-American Indians who were mistreated by this Nation to the victims of the Holocaust where the Geneva Convention came out with the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide and defined what genocide is after the atrocities of the concentration camps that were perpetrated by the Nazis--a war that my father fought in and bombed Nazi Germany, and I am proud for his service and the entire Greatest Generation.

And it is clear, the language, it says: ``targeting members of an ethnic or religious minority group for death or serious bodily and mental harm or taking steps designed to destroy such a group constitutes genocide.'' That is precisely what the Chinese Communist Party has been doing.

Since 2017, they have interned more than one million Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in an effort to wipe out their culture, to wipe out their ability to carry down to other generations by sterilizing them.

During their unjustified detainment, Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs and Kyrgyz and members of religious minority groups are forced to work in horrific conditions, they are deprived of food, and they are beaten. Their religious practices are suppressed. There are reports of families being separated and of sexual abuse, of forced sterilization, forced abortions, and even reports of killing to wipe them, quite simply, off the face of the Earth.

It is horrific to imagine that this is happening in this day and time, in this time that we speak, in this age. Mr. Speaker, it is clearly a genocide under the Geneva Convention.

These crimes are the moral test of our time and our generation. The world and certainly the Chinese Communist Party is watching. And that is why it is vital that we speak in a united voice with the current and prior administrations by calling these ongoing atrocities what they are, and that is genocide.

Genocide is not to be taken lightly. It is a term we reserve for history's most serious crimes against humanity. It is essential we get our response right, not as Republicans or Democrats, but as Americans, as freedom-loving Americans who stand up for human rights and against genocide. Because we have faced this test before, and we have not always passed.

Our response to the Uyghur genocide should be an example of our character in this Congress, rather than a stain on our history.

This humanitarian crisis is about more than just U.S. foreign policy toward the People's Republic of China. It is about the legitimacy of the post-World War system designed to stop these atrocities whenever and wherever they are being committed.

And it is about how we stop the CCP from contaminating consumer supply chains with slave labor. It is about how we stop using cotton sourced by the Uyghur homeland and picked by those without a voice. It is about stopping shipments of hair. It is about how we convince our private sector to act morally, consistent with our American values.

So let me just say, I, again, thank the chairman. This is probably one of the most important bills to come out of the committee this year. I am proud to have introduced it, and I am so proud to have the chairman's support. I thank him for cosponsoring this resolution and all of our colleagues on the committee who support our efforts to condemn these atrocities.

I urge the entire House of Representatives on this vote, because China is watching and the Uyghur Muslims are watching, to join us as we speak in a united voice and condemn this genocide by supporting this measure.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, let me say in closing, I again thank Chairman Meeks, my friend, who has been in strong support of this legislation. We pride our committee in doing what is right by the country. We try to take the politics out of it as much as we can. And as Eliot Engel often said, it stops at the water's edge, and this is no exception.

Mr. Speaker, this is a historic day. Congress is rarely in vote or declared genocide on another people, but it is very appropriate today to do so. And the international community is watching, and China is watching this right now. They are watching this on C-SPAN, and the world knows that the United States stands for higher moral values, and we stand for human rights.

And that is why this bill was introduced, and the lives of over a million people depend on it. Think about that. A million people in internment camps, concentration camps, being exterminated, depend on this legislation. We pass a lot of things in this Congress but it is very rare you can pass something like this that condemns this kind of moral atrocity and call it to the world so the entire world can see it for themselves what is, in fact, happening. And when Congress speaks, the world does listen. And when we speak as Americans in this Chamber, not as partisan politicians, they listen. And I know they are listening today.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H. Res. 317, legislation which condemns China's genocide against the Uyghurs.

As ranking member of the Committee of Foreign Affairs' Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation, I strongly support this legislation and I commend both the chairman of the committee, Mr. Meeks, and the ranking member, Mr. McCaul, for their leadership on this particular issue.

They have been stressing this. They have been pushing this. They have been speaking out on this for quite some time now, and I am very pleased to see this come before the floor today. It is far beyond the time that action needs to be taken on this.

Mr. Speaker, the consistent undermining of human rights, perhaps the Chinese Communist Party's most fundamental challenge to the free world. China's totalitarian government, they have no use for human rights. Their bloody history demonstrates that. Relative to political freedom in China, one sees abuses from Tiananmen Square to Hong Kong. Freedom of speech? The great firewall shuts that down. Freedom of religion? The CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, persecutes Christians; they persecute the Falun Gong; they persecute Tibetan Buddhists; and they even want to dictate who the next Dalai Lama will be.

And the Chinese Communist Party has taken this campaign to a whole new level in Xinjiang where the Uyghurs are subject to forced labor, to torture, to sexual abuse, to religious persecution, and to onerous restrictions in every facet of their lives.

Over a million people, the vast majority of them Uyghurs, are in concentration camps today currently. While we are here, they are in concentration camps in China. The hallmark of genocide is the intent to destroy, to eliminate an entire people, and that intent is clear here. The Chinese Communist Party is snatching Uyghur children from their parents, imposing severe birth quotas on Uyghurs. They are conducting forced abortions. They are sterilizing a sizable percentage of the population against their will, and up to 80 percent in some areas of Xinjiang forced sterilization is occurring right now.

As a result of all this, the birth rate in Xinjiang fell by 24 percent--one out of four--in 2019 alone. This is genocide, and it is high time that the world got serious with the PRC, the People's Republic of China, about what they are doing to the Uyghurs. They have been doing it to a whole range of groups for a long time, but it is particularly brutal when it comes to the Uyghurs, and American businesses have to make sure that they are not profiting by this essentially slave labor, whatever businesses those are.

So there are things that we can do here in the United States but, ultimately, it is up to the PRC and it is up to the world to shine a light on this because this is happening right now. A million people or so are in these gulags right now.

Mr. Speaker, I again thank our leadership, and this is bipartisan leadership. It is Republicans and Democrats actually working together on this, and it is good to see that happen.

So again, I thank Mr. Meeks and Mr. McCaul for doing this.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to shed light on the horrific genocide that Communist China is committing against Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities.

Right now, over one million Uyghurs are enslaved by the People's Republic of China in the Xinjiang region, where they are subjected to horrific human rights atrocities like forced sterilization and abortions, slave labor, and even execution.

Communist China is actively attempting to wipe out an entire people group, and the United States must not allow it.

A few months ago, I--and other members of the Foreign Affairs Committee--heard directly from Ms. Tursunay Ziyawudun, a survivor of a CCP's concentration camp. She told us harrowing stories of the horrific atrocities she suffered through.

It was absolutely heartbreaking. I cannot imagine my wife or daughters being subjected to an environment like that.

Today's resolution sends the message directly from the United States to the Chinese government, that they must immediately end their ongoing crimes.

I applaud Republican Leader McCaul and Chairman Meeks for their work to address this heartbreaking atrocity.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.