The World Uyghur Congress announced a pioneering legal action on Monday against three French subdivisions of the Chinese telecommunications giants Huawei, Hikvision, and Dahua to hold them accountable for providing Beijing with surveillance technology to facilitate the ongoing Uyghur genocide.
Under dictator Xi Jinping, China has implemented policies that international human rights experts have recognized as genocidal to ethnically cleans East Turkistan, which Beijing refers to using the Mandarin colonialist name “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” (XUAR). Among the measures the Communist Party has taken to eliminate the indigenous Turkic populations of the region, primarily the Uyghur ethnic group, have been the imprisoning of millions in concentration camps, the forced sterilization of entire Uyghur villages, and the effective outlawing of the local religion, Islam, and indigenous culture.
The United Nations warned in a report in February that China has also expanded the state-sponsored enslavement of East Turkistan’s indigenous population in factories nationwide, along with imposing similar programs on the indigenous population of Tibet.
The World Uyghur Congress (WUC), which advocates for the rights of Uyghur people around the world, detailed in a press release on Monday that it had sued the three Chinese technology companies in French court charging them with playing a role in crimes against humanity currently taking place in the Uyghur homeland. The complaint specifically accused them of being complicit in “aggravated servitude,” organized human trafficking, genocide, and crimes against humanity.
Years of evidence spanning back nearly a decade indicate that Huawei, Hikvision, and Dahua – all of whom have close relationships with the Chinese communist regime – have developed surveillance technology to help repress Uyghur people and enriched themselves through selling China advanced cameras and other surveillance technology to monitor the Uyghur population.
Huawei is one of China’s largest telecommunications companies and has a record of offering totalitarian surveillance products to repressive regimes around the world, including socialist Ecuador under Rafael Correa and, more recent, the Afghan Taliban. In 2020, a report by the research organization IPVM revealed that Huawei helped develop a “Uyghur alert” system in which cameras would be trained to identify anyone walking by who was ethnically Uyghur by their facial features, helping China track the lives of the millions who live in East Turkistan.
The revelation resulted in at least one high-profile embarrassing for Huawei when French soccer star Antoine Griezmann dropped it as a sponsor, urging the company to “take concrete actions as quickly as possible to condemn this mass repression.”
The Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) has documented evidence of Dahua and Hikvision investing in the creation of similar surveillance technology targeting Uyghurs specifically. Hikvision, the largest surveillance tech company in the world, reportedly began signing lucrative deals with the Chinese government in 2016 to provide surveillance products in East Turkistan. China has flooded East Turkistan’s cities with cameras in every public place, and inside and around areas such as mosques and marketplaces.
“Under these ongoing public security projects, Hikvision supplies and develops mass surveillance systems with facial recognition capabilities across the urban areas … including in concentration camps and mosques,” the UHRP details in its profile of the company.
Similarly, Dahua, which the UHRP notes is second only to Hikvision in size as a surveillance company, has established subsidiaries all throughout East Turkistan and received significant tax breaks for its efforts there. Like Huawei and Hikvision, Dahua offeres products that offer “real-time Uyghur warnings” and helped identify alleged “hidden terrorist inclinations” in random people.
“Dahua recently confirmed it sells ‘skin color’ analytics and defended them as ‘a basic feature of a smart security solution,'” the UHRP noted in 2023. Dahua has nonetheless denied that it has helped with “targeting any specific ethnic group.”
“This submission is an important reminder to all companies complicit in the Chinese government’s genocide that they bear legal responsibility,” WUC President Turgunjan Alawdun said on Monday. “We are confident that the French judiciary will take this matter seriously.”
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Huawei, Hikvision, and Dahua were all banned from operating in the United States in 2022 as national security risks, though experts have warned that they sold thousands of pieces of equipment, including cameras, throughout the United States before the policy was implemented. The companies have continued to keep their businesses afloat despite being identified as national security threats in the West and accused of aiding the largest ongoing genocide on the planet today.
Huawei has thrived, claiming in late March to have documented a major 22.4 percent increase in revenue in 2024, reportedly the result of growing sales at home.
“In 2024, the entire team at Huawei banded together to tackle a wide range of external challenges, while further improving product quality, operations quality, and operational efficiency,” rotating chairwoman Meng Wanzhou said in March. Meng was famously detained in Canada on charges of violating sanctions on Iran in 2018 and traded for Canadian hostages in 2021.
Hikvision, meanwhile, has fared less well financially but remained a surveillance giant and exited some of its business in East Turkistan, as has Dahua.
