Tale of 'Uyghur Tribunal': Report fatally compromised by lack of objectivity and credibility

Whenever those who wish to diminish China and hinder its progress flex their muscles, they rely heavily on fake news. Down the ages, propagandists have recognized the value of the big lie. They know that if it can be repeated enough times some people may eventually come to believe it.

The serial fantasist, Benedict Rogers, for example, who has always had a very loose relationship with the truth, is a prime example. Since he founded his London-based propaganda outfit, Hong Kong Watch, in 2017, he has used it to spread fallacies about China, including its handling of religious extremism in the Xinjiang region, and to malign the authorities of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Indeed, many will recall how just last year he was spectacularly caught out while smearing the Hong Kong Police Force.

To recap, on Jan 11, 2020, the police arrested a female protester outside the UK's Consulate General, in Central. She was found with a can of spray paint and suspected of causing criminal damage. It transpired that she was part of a small group of people who had been mounting a static protest outside the consulate for several weeks, and the police explained that they had intervened after receiving a crime report from the consulate.

However, sensing a trouble-making opportunity, Rogers immediately weighed in from afar. He said he found it "extremely disturbing" that the police had acted as they did, and that their conduct was "unnecessary." He even called on the British government "to issue an urgent statement both in defense of the right to peaceful protest and its own boundaries and diplomatic protocols".

His lieutenant, Luke de Pulford, also chimed in, announcing that "it seems clear from the primary documents that this was inviolable UK land, and that the police should not have been operating there at all, except at the invitation of the consul general."

As usual, Rogers had not fact-checked before holding forth, but, as he hoped, his remarks were widely reported in the British media. However, and this was not in his script, the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, on Jan 14, 2020, put the record straight. It confirmed that its consulate had advised the police "of a potential criminal act being committed outside the consulate", as a result of which an individual had been arrested. It then added that the arrest had been made on land which "does not carry any special status under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations."

However, once the truth was out, nothing more was heard from Rogers, let alone De Pulford. No apologies of any sort were forthcoming, for either the police force, whose actions he had impugned, or the consulate, for having played fast and loose with its name, or the British public, for having fed them fake news. Indeed, far from learning from his blunder, Rogers simply carried on regardless, as his latest activities reveal.

On Dec 9, 2021, Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, chairman of the so-called "Uyghur Tribunal", delivered its "judgment". In June and September this year, the tribunal, which claimed to be an "independent civic body", conducted several days of hearings in London into alleged human rights violations in China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. Although the tribunal had no official standing, it was canny enough to give an impression of the type of objectivity normally associated with formal proceedings.

In its quest for legitimacy, the tribunal clothed its doings in legalese, and even dismissed those allegations it considered not to have been proved "beyond reasonable doubt". The outcome, however, was never in doubt, and China was duly adjudged "guilty" of enough "crimes" to keep Rogers and his ilk happy. These included torture, inhumane acts, and, crucially, genocide, which was exactly what they wanted to hear. Indeed, Hong Kong Watch is advocating a world boycott of the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing in 2022, and these findings, the timing of which cannot have been coincidental, will, it hopes, bolster its propagandizing efforts.

Thus, Iain Duncan Smith, the co-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), a Hong Kong Watch offshoot that specializes in whipping up anti-China sentiments in national assemblies, could not believe his luck. Clearly in seventh heaven, he immediately called on the British government to accuse China of genocide, something it has always refused to do, presumably because, as it explained to Parliament on March 18, "the judgment of whether genocide has occurred is for a competent court, rather than governments or non-judicial bodies".

Once the tribunal's judgment was delivered, Rogers rushed around trying to convince everybody of its bona fides. Whereas, for example, he told the Wall Street Journal that the tribunal was a "quasi-judicial body", he assured UCA News that it was "independent", and that its processes were "dispassionate". This fooled many people, and various media groups, including the BBC, CNN and The Guardian, took his assurances at face value, reiterating that the tribunal was "independent", which was central to Hong Kong Watch's game plan. This, however, was the stuff of fantasy, and was precisely why Rogers went into overdrive to bolster the tribunal's credibility.

Intriguingly, in none of his pronouncements did Rogers disclose his own links to Nice, which are long-standing. Indeed, it has now emerged that, when he launched Hong Kong Watch at Westminster on December 11, 2017, Nice was there at his side, but there is more. At an early stage, Rogers also tied Nice to Hong Kong Watch, by appointing him one of its patrons, alongside the likes of the former Governor, Chris Patten, and Lord (David) Alton, whose name is forever linked with the bogus inquiry in 2020 into the Hong Kong Police Force by the now-discredited All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong (APPG), of which he is a vice-chairman. That inquiry, as researchers discovered, was covertly funded by Stand with Hong Kong, an anti-police entity with close ties to both Next Digital founder Jimmy Lai Chee-ying and Hong Kong Watch, and its report duly condemned the police force, proving, once again, that "he who pays the piper calls the tune".

On June 4, 2021, moreover, Rogers disclosed that it was he who had introduced Nice to the Uygurs, some 2½ years previously, and they clearly liked what they saw. In June 2020, according to the tribunal's website, Dolkun Isa, president of the "World Uyghur Congress", "formally requested that Sir Geoffrey Nice QC establish an independent people's tribunal to investigate 'ongoing atrocities and possible genocide' against the Uygurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic Muslim populations". Nice, of course, jumped at the opportunity.

The "World Uyghur Congress" (the Congress), founded in 2004, receives much of its funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Washington-financed NGO that has been called "the CIA's regime-change arm" and promotes America's foreign policy objectives around the world, including in Hong Kong. In 2019, for example, the NED gave US$380,000 to the Congress and some, at least, of this will have ended up in the tribunal's coffers. As the tribunal itself acknowledged, whereas crowdfunding raised nearly GBP250,000 for its financing, there was "an initial amount of US$115,000 dollars donated by the World Uyghur Congress", and the implications of this must be clearly understood.

Through the money it pumped into the Congress, via the NED, the US had a direct interest of its own in the outcome of Nice's ostensibly independent tribunal, in exactly the same way that Stand with Hong Kong had a direct interest in the outcome of Alton's ostensibly independent APPG inquiry into the Hong Kong police. The tribunal, moreover, had itself disclosed that it was launched "on 3 September 2020, with assistance from a non-governmental organization, the Coalition for Genocide Response" (CGR), of which few had previously heard. At this point, however, the pieces of the jigsaw start to fall into place.

The CGR was actually founded by the Rogers' protégé and Hong Kong Watch advisory board member, Luke de Pulford, who, interestingly enough, is also linked to Stand with Hong Kong. And who should be the patron of the CGR but none other than David Alton, the Hong Kong Watch patron, who saw the tribunal as a means of reprising his role in the APPG scandal of 2020.

Thus, on Sept 23, 2020, in the House of Lords, Alton, who was subsequently sanctioned by China, asked the British foreign office minister, Lord (Tariq) Ahmad, if the government would "welcome" the initiative to set up the "Uyghur Tribunal", and "cooperate" with it. Although Ahmad's reply was non-committal, the tribunal subsequently thanked the government for fast-tracking visas for foreign nationals to attend its hearings. Given Alton's links with Hong Kong Watch, and, through Hong Kong Watch, to Nice, his fellow patron, the extent to which Hong Kong Watch was involved behind the scenes in the tribunal's work can only be imagined, particularly as Rogers, as has now been discovered, also doubles-up as an advisor to the "World Uyghur Congress".

What all this shows, therefore, is that Rogers had a vested interest in having Nice's report taken seriously, and this explains why he took to the airwaves so vigorously to promote it. The tribunal, however, was anything but "independent", and one striking feature of the whole affair has been Nice's penchant for churning out reports critical of China.

In 2019, assisted by his Uygur tribunal's vice chairman, Nick Vetch, he chaired another China-critical inquiry, called the "China Tribunal". Its report accused China of forced organ harvesting from prisoners, something China vigorously denied, with its embassy in London expressing the hope that "the British people will not be misled". Since Rogers had signed Nice up for Hong Kong Watch very early on, he was clearly impressed by his anti-China credentials, and he will have been delighted that his pick has contrived to come up with not one, but two reports that have sought to put China in the doghouse.

However, as China clearly had Nice's measure, and would have been aware of the involvement in his tribunal of the likes of the NED, Alton and Rogers, directly or indirectly, it would have been very strange indeed if it had accepted his invitation to participate in what must have appeared to be a kangaroo court. Thus, China's Foreign Ministry Spokesman Wang Wenbin said the tribunal was "neither legal nor credible", and called it "just another anti-China farce".

Indeed, Nice, along with another member of his tribunal, Helena Kennedy QC, was sanctioned by China, on March 26, for allegedly having "maliciously spread lies and disinformation" about the situation in Xinjiang, and, if he was any way serious about securing China's participation, he would, to dispel the appearance of bias, have recused himself from the tribunal. After all, in any legal proceedings worthy of the name, quasi or otherwise, justice must be seen to be done, as Nice must have known.

Although the modus operandi of the tribunal, which included such universally disapproved of practices as asking leading questions of witnesses, reading untested allegations into the record, and deploying hearsay evidence, left much to be desired, it was the lack of independence that fatally undermined its conclusions. The tribunal's ties to, for example, Hong Kong Watch and the NED, meant that its report is devoid of credibility, and little more than a propaganda tool. It is little wonder that China gave the whole thing a very wide berth, and any other country that believes in fair play would undoubtedly have done the same.

The author is a senior counsel, law professor and criminal justice analyst, and was previously the Director of Public Prosecutions of the Hong Kong SAR. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.