Who we are

The Uyghur Solidarity Campaign UK (USC-UK) is building and bringing together support in the workers’ movement for the Uyghur people’s struggle for freedom.

We have now joined forces with other allies to become part of a new campaign, Workers Against the CCP! From now on, you will find the most up-to-date information via the WAC website and newsletter.

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The Uyghurs, a majority-Muslim people who mostly live in East Turkestan (ruled as part of China, “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region”), are facing persecution and genocide at the hands of the Chinese State.

In particular, we are campaigning for:

  • End the Chinese state’s mass internment of more than a million Uyghurs and other minorities in concentration camps, where torture, abuse and rape are reported.
  • End the state harassment and the suffocating surveillance that extends from public spaces to the home.
  • End the monitoring and severe repression of political, linguistic, cultural and religious expression.
  • End the mass separation of children from families.
  • End the forced labour re-education programmes in factories supplying dozens of global brands like Apple, Google and Nike.
  • End the genocidal use of forced contraception and sterilisation to suppress Uyghur births.
  • The democratic right of the Uyghur people to determine their own future.

There are many hard-working charities, NGOs, think tanks, journalists, and campaigners out there, working together for the Uyghurs’ human rights. Our campaign’s particular focus is on the support and solidarity we can provide, as workers. We are trade unionists, socialists, progressives, Labour Party members, and other labour movement campaigners. We take inspiration from our movement’s history of international solidarity, from the Scottish factory workers who grounded the dictator Pinochet’s fighter jet engines in 1974, to the French and Italian dock workers who just last year refused to move weapons bound for the war in Yemen.

The USC-UK was set up initially by activists from Finchley & Golders Green Labour Party working with members of London’s Uyghur community, organising regular protests outside the Chinese embassy on Portland Place in London on the 5th of each month (these are on hold due to COVID-19). We’ve also begun protesting – both online and on the high street – the big corporations whose supply chains are linked to forced Uyghur labour programmes.

We keep in close contact and collaborate with the World Uyghur Congress, though the two organisations are independent. Since we began, we’ve been joined by a broad range of supporters, including trade union branches and Labour MPs.

Please get involved and help us to keep growing! Keep in touch via our mailing list and social media. Find model motions to take to your union branch or local political party branch in the Resources section. And we hope to see you at one of our protests soon!