At a time when authoritarian governments are assaulting international human rights law as never before, Argentina’s highest criminal court has taken an extraordinarily positive step. On June 18, the Federal Court of Criminal Cassation held that a case brought by Uyghurs against Chinese government officials for alleged crimes against humanity and genocide should proceed. While there are many challenges ahead, the court’s decision offers a critical source of hope to the victims and survivors who are seeking justice for Beijing’s ongoing atrocities in Xinjiang. It also refocuses the world’s attention on the Uyghur genocide, an issue often overshadowed by media coverage of atrocities and war crimes in other parts of the world, and enhances the prospect of legal accountability for responsible Chinese officials.
The Uyghurs — 12 million people of Turkic descent who have been reduced to a minority population in their own homeland, now in northwestern China — have long been a target of the Chinese government’s systematic discrimination and repression. Beijing has insisted that occasional outbursts of violence in what it calls the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) constituted a grave domestic terrorism threat, and in response, imposed harsh restrictions on and pervasive surveillance of culture, language, movement, and religion within the region. This trend has accelerated since Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping took power in late 2012. In 2014, authorities adopted a “Strike Hard Against Violent Extremism” campaign, vowing to show “absolutely no mercy.”
Beginning in 2017, and wholly outside of any legal process, Chinese authorities began arbitrarily detaining hundreds of thousands of people across the region, subjecting them to political indoctrination, torture, cultural persecution, and other forms of gender-related violence against women and girls. Contact with family members in the region and outside the country ceased as Uyghurs were disappeared into the shadows of what Beijing called “vocational training and education centers,” but which were widely recognized as concentration camps.
Beijing also stepped up its transnational repression against Uyghur activists outside China. In recent years, Beijing’s tactics have shifted, partly to create a veneer of legality to rebut international criticism, but remain no less abusive: it now instills region-wide fear through sham prosecutions in a legal system that serves as an instrument of Party power. To date, there have been few reports of releases from arbitrary detention facilities, leaving many victims forcibly disappeared. Such rights violations and State violence echo those committed by Argentina’s military dictatorship.
U.N. Response – or Lack Thereof
Since 2017, scholars, journalists, human rights organizations, a commission of independent legal experts, “people’s tribunals,” and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) have published detailed accounts of these violations, often based on the Chinese government’s own official documents as a primary source of evidence. Beijing furiously rejected these analyses. It dismissed, for example, the December 2021 “Uyghur Tribunal” verdict that found the Chinese government guilty of genocide as lacking legitimacy because the proceedings were neither U.N.-mandated nor conducted by a national court of a sovereign State. This independent tribunal of experts was convened by Sir Geoffrey Nice, QC, at the request of Uyghur civil society. The panel heard and examined witness and expert testimonies, as well as thousands of pages of evidence, including primary evidence from the Chinese government documenting its own culpability.
In August 2022, an OHCHR assessment of human rights violations across the region found that Beijing’s campaign of mass arbitrary detention “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.” That prompted several governments to push for a debate on the report at the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC) in October 2022. After intense lobbying by Beijing, the council rejected a debate by a vote of 19-17.
Some scholars have expressed concerns that the U.N. is being captured by powerful authoritarian States, and Beijing’s victory on that occasion was a powerful data point. Despite being a member State of the Human Rights Council — and therefore required to uphold the highest human rights standards — the Chinese government has prevented discussion through various strategies, including economic coercion against countries willing to bring China’s atrocity crimes to the U.N. agenda. Concerned governments, the Human Rights Council, and Volker Turk, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, have in recent years pressed ahead with accountability initiatives targeting other governments for various human rights abuses, yet are unwilling or unable to do so with respect to Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs.
Forward Momentum with Universal Jurisdiction
Against this backdrop, the ruling by the Argentine court marks a significant milestone for international justice. By invoking universal jurisdiction, the court’s decision paves the way for potential prosecution of Chinese government officials responsible for alleged crimes against humanity and genocide in Xinjiang, despite these crimes occurring outside Argentina’s borders. Universal jurisdiction allows States to prosecute severe international crimes such as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, irrespective of the nationality of the perpetrators or victims or where the crimes took place. This principle, established in the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which all U.N. member States have ratified, has previously been employed in landmark cases against figures such as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, as well as perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, and more recently in Germany against Anwar Raslan, a former Syrian intelligence official convicted of torturing detainees under the Assad regime.
Like Uyghurs who suffer from their own State’s violence, Syrians have long struggled for justice regarding Assad’s brutal crimes. The recent German court prosecution of Raslan underscores the tangible and practical benefits of successfully applying universal jurisdiction. Prosecuting Raslan offered Syrian victims a critical opportunity to be heard within Germany’s judicial system, simultaneously preventing him from finding refuge and ensuring accountability for his heinous crimes.
Even more significantly, evidence collected during Raslan’s trial can serve as valuable precedent in future criminal proceedings against higher-ranking Syrian officials, and potentially can inform cases involving victims elsewhere, such as Uyghurs. Unlike a people’s tribunal, which operates independently of State judicial systems, universal jurisdiction derives enhanced legitimacy through the use of an established national legal framework. These credible proceedings are difficult for governments — whether Rwanda’s, Syria’s, or China’s — to reject out of hand.
Hurdles Past – and Pending – in Argentina
Since the Uyghur complaint was first filed with the Federal Criminal Court of Buenos Aires, known as in August 2022, multiple actors in Argentina have attempted to obstruct the proceedings. The lead prosecutor initially shelved the case, citing the rationale that a universal jurisdiction was pending in Turkey concerning a criminal case filed by Uyghur victims. Turkish law only permits a Minister of Justice to initiate an investigation into an international crime; no universal jurisdiction proceedings have been launched in Turkey. Thus, in 2024, the Argentine Federal Court of Criminal Cassation ruled that the lower court erred in its decision and the case could move forward.
Despite this decision, lower courts had nevertheless refused to implement the ruling or advance the investigation, siding with the prosecutor and demanding judicial confirmation from Turkey regarding the non-existence of such a case, and wrongly deciding that the victims lack standing. The Court of Cassation went even further and ruled that the lower court judges who had wrongly decided the case should be removed, and that new judges who would review the case in light of the Court of Cassation’s decision would be appointed.
The Cassation Court’s latest judgment, which remanded the case to the original court, now allows a criminal investigation to go forward. Victims will finally have their voices heard in the Argentine courts. While these proceedings may take years to complete, they revive the Uyghur case, allowing victims to gather further evidence, especially concerning responsible Chinese officials who are traveling abroad. At the prosecutor’s request, the Federal Criminal Court of Buenos Aires could also issue an international arrest warrant for responsible Chinese officials, including senior leaders, similar to those issued in February for 25 Myanmar officials, including the former pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, in a case brought by a Rohingya advocacy group.
Additionally, the Argentine courts could issue an Interpol Red Notice — a mechanism Beijing has frequently exploited to persecute dissidents. Unlike China’s misuse, Argentina’s Red Notice would legitimately serve its intended purpose by facilitating international cooperation to apprehend individuals genuinely implicated in serious crimes such as genocide and crimes against humanity. Lastly, the Rohingya case has demonstrated that accountability has a ripple effect — Argentina’s bold judicial action could prompt parallel developments at the International Criminal Court (ICC), potentially prompting the ICC to address fresh evidence of genocide that emerges as the Argentina case proceeds.
The case in Argentina is not the first time that litigants have attempted to hold Chinese officials accountable under the principle of universal jurisdiction. In 2006, a monk named Thubten Wangchen, along with two NGOs, brought a case in Spain targeting senior Chinese leaders, including former Presidents Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, for grave human rights violations in Tibet. Relying on Spain’s universal jurisdiction laws, the case advanced through the Spanish courts and culminated in 2013 with arrest warrants and indictments against several Chinese Communist Party officials for alleged acts of genocide. The Chinese government responded with intense diplomatic and economic pressure, threatening Spain’s bilateral relations with Beijing. In 2014, the Spanish parliament passed legislation significantly narrowing the scope of universal jurisdiction, limiting it to perpetrators involving Spanish nationals or residents, and, as some scholars argued, effectively removing universal jurisdiction as a tool of accountability. This legal change effectively shut down the case and blocked any further judicial action against Chinese officials.
In Argentina, potential sources of similar influences are evident, with China’s significant economic strength potentially hindering the achievement of justice. As a participant in China’s Belt and Road Initiative for infrastructure investment and in the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa organization that aims to challenge the G7, Argentina maintains strong financial ties with Beijing and has indicated its intention to continue these relations under President Javier Milei. The country has also previously acquired Chinese military equipment, further strengthening bilateral ties. If tensions escalate between Argentina and China over the court case, Argentine authorities may prioritize economic interests and halt the proceedings before any indictments or arrest warrants are issued.
At a legal and political level for now at least, the fact that the case has been accepted exemplifies that international human rights law and proceedings — both under sustained global assault — can still have positive, real-world implications. And it’s doubly powerful that that holds true for one of the world’s most powerful governments, one that has come to expect impunity.
Argentina’s judiciary, shaped by its historical struggle against authoritarianism and atrocities, has now found itself becoming the center of universal jurisdiction cases. After the favorable ruling of the Argentine Federal Criminal Court’s first chamber in the Rohingya case, victims from Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Gaza, and Russia are asking the court to investigate crimes committed by leaders in those countries. The judiciary has once again risen to the challenges of demonstrating that, regardless of whether the perpetrator or the victims are Rohingya or Uyghurs or others, the courts are capable of independently reviewing a case based on its merits.
There is no doubt a long way to go before Xi Jinping or Chen Quanguo, the former Chinese Communist Party head of the Uyghur region and primary overseer of these abuses, and other Chinese government officials are summoned to the defense table. But the Argentine court’s decision is more than symbolic. It represents a courageous commitment to justice and serves as a crucial reminder that international law retains potency, even against the most influential violators.
