Uyghur genocide committed by China was brought up at the Ethical Trade Conference in Norway
Concentration camp witness Sayragul Sauytbay detailed the Uyghur genocide, including forced labour, at the Ethical Trade Conference 2025. She called on the government to avoid complicity through trade with China in the ongoing genocide.
The Ethical Trade Conference 2025 was hosted by Ethical Trade Norway at Dansens Hus in Oslo on April 29, 2025, under the theme “Make Sustainability Great Again!” The conference marked the 25th anniversary of the organization and brought together over 300 attendees from business, labour unions, government, and civil society. Sayragul Sauytbay, Vice President of the East Turkistan Government in Exile (ETGE), spoke at the opening of the conference, Norway’s leading event for ethical and sustainable commerce.
Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh from East Turkistan and a prominent witness to the Chinese concentration camps, offered a pressing testimony regarding the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Chinese government against the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic ethnic groups. Drawing from her experiences as an educator forced into Chinese concentration camps, she detailed instances of mass internment, torture, forced labour, and indoctrination.
She pointed out that almost one million children from the Uyghur, Kazakh, and other Turkic communities have been forcefully removed from their families and placed in Chinese state-operated boarding schools and orphanages, where they undergo political indoctrination intended to erase their cultural and religious identities.
Sauytbay cautioned that without full transparency and ethical due diligence, continued political and economic engagements with China could render the government of Norway and Norwegian businesses morally and legally complicit in the atrocities committed by the Chinese state.
She asserted that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) serves as a key tool in China’s strategy for global domination, enabling the Chinese Communist Party to extend its authoritarian influence under the pretext of development and trade.
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