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Paris raises the tone against Beijing on the eve of the sino-european summit

Emmanuel Macron finally spoke about the Chinese repression on the Muslim Uighur minority, ahead of the Sino-European summit on Monday

France’s head of state took too long to correctly designate evil. Asked by thirty French deputies in July about the systematic repression by the Chinese authorities against the ethnic minority of the Uighurs, Emmanuel Macron remained silent but ended up responding on September 6 to the author of a letter on the subject, deputy Aurélien Taché. The French President mentioned in his reply the testimonies and documents on “internment camps, mass detentions, disappearances, forced labor, forced sterilizations, destruction of the Uighur heritage and in particular its places of worship, surveillance of the population and more generally all repressive system established in the Xinjiang region”, writes Le Monde today. Practices that Macron considered “unacceptable” and that France condemns “with the utmost firmness”.

“This is a step in the right direction, observes Deputy Aurélien Taché to Le Monde. “But, in addition to diplomacy, we are at a point where there is a matter for demanding international justice.” For his part, MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, very committed to the defense of Uighurs, welcomes this “semantic reorientation, after a shameful silence for three years” by the French President. But he would like France to go even further. “In the European Parliament we have been fighting for a long time for specific sanctions against those responsible for the repression in Xinjiang. But nothing happens at the European Council. There is a Franco-German consensus not to offend Chinese leaders ”, he criticizes, in statements to the French newspaper.

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