China has raised sanctions it imposed on the five legislators of the European Union in 2021, the EU Parliament announced on Wednesday.
The sanctions were imposed in retaliation against the alleged persecution of Uighur Muslims who live in the Chinese region of Xinjiang.
The president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, was at the head of the negotiations to raise the sanctions, a development which intervenes while the tensions between the EU and China have dropped themselves since the American president Donald Trump imposed prices in Beijing in April.
In a press release informing the main legislators of the breakthrough, Metsola said that “our relationship with China remains complex and multiple. The best way to approach it is by commitment and dialogue”.
The sanctions were part of a series of measures implemented by Beijing in 2021, in response to coordinated sanctions that the EU, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States imposed Chinese officials on alleged human rights violations against UYHGURS.
Five EU legislators were among the 10 European politicians and four organs accused of “distributing lies and disinformation” and “coarsely interfering in the internal affairs of China”.
Michael Gahler, Raphael Glucksmann, Ilhan Kyuchyuk and Miriam Lexmann, as well as Reinhard Butikofer, who is no longer a member of Parliament, were sanctioned by China.
They were prohibited from entering Chinese territory – a decision that led Parliament to arrest all official dialogues with China and have an investment agreement that EU legislators had been due.
Despite this, the sanctions have not dissuaded EU legislators from condemning China and the treatment of Uighurs, a Turkish Muslim minority from Xinjiang.
After the announcement, the main legislators insisted that the Beijing decision “does not mean that the European Parliament will ignore the persistent challenges in EU-China relations”, and promised that the Assembly “will remain a strong defender” of human rights.
The inter-parliamentary alliance on China responded to the lifting of sanctions with a warning farm, “to be clear, the abolition of certain sanctions by the totalitarian regime is not a favor that justifies EU concessions”.
Uings are a Turkish and majority Muslim ethnic group from Xinjiang. After decades of conflict on the abolition of their cultural identity, Beijing would have launched a brutal repression against Uighurs that certain Western governments consider a genocide.
China affirms that its measures, which included vocational training centers, were an attempt to eliminate extremism and prevent terrorist attacks.
