US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks at a news conference on human rights at the State Department in Washington.
“We are going to have this UN General Assembly in the third week in September. We’ll do a number of gatherings, where our efforts will be to get other countries to sign up to help us call out this activity,” Pompeo said. In his speech, Pompeo charged that over the past two years in its western province of Xinjiang, China had “tried to brainwash coming on one million Uighur Muslims in internment camps … to renounce their culture and their faith.”
The Trump administration has been considering sanctions against Chinese officials, including Xinjiang’s Communist Party chief Chen Quanguo, a member of the Chinese leadership’s powerful politburo, since last year, but has held off amid Chinese threats of retaliation. The official, who did not want to be identified, said the tone of the speech would be dictated by the needs of the moment.