Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Senator Housakos’s motion, which is that the Senate call upon our government to impose sanctions against Chinese officials in relation to the human rights abuses and systemic persecution of Uighur Muslims in China.

I would like to thank Senator Housakos for raising this motion. The genocide of Uighur Muslims is and has been one of the most horrifying things happening in the world over the past few years.

In February of this year, during the first annual general meeting of the Canada-Uyghur Parliamentary Friendship Group, we heard the first-hand experiences of Golbahar, a Uighur woman who spent a year in one of China’s so-called “re‑education camps.” She was only working in China; she had come from Kazakhstan and was a business woman. She was not even a Chinese resident.

Golbahar recounted to us her suffering in a passionate and pained voice. She told us how she was kidnapped from her hotel while she was on a business trip to the Xinjiang region of China. Police took her passport and detained her. She was handcuffed, shackled and thrown in a small cell with 50 other women. She was starved, tortured and forced to memorize Chinese patriotic songs. If she spoke in her native Uighur language, she was sent to solitary confinement, a dark one-metre by one-metre cell with a hole for a toilet.

She said:

I have witnessed myself Uyghurs being beaten, electrocuted, needles inserted inside the nails or nails torn out and they came out half dead from those interrogations.

Golbahar told us that when she got sick and fainted, she was taken to a hospital and kept in shackles. These shackles weighed five kilograms each.