Asahi Shimbun on August 11 reported that Gay McDougall, a member of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, cited estimates on August 10 atthe start of a two-day regular review of China's record including Hong Kong and Macao, and said that 2 million Uyghurs and Muslim minorities were forced into "political camps for indoctrination" in the western Xinjiang autonomous region. A Chinese delegation of some 50 officials made no comment on her remarks at the Geneva session.

Separately the Washington Post on August 10 said that 'first-of-its-kind courtroom testimony' has corroborated allegations that the Chinese government has built a network of internment camps in western China where Muslim minorities are held without charge for “reeducation.” It cited the case of  Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national, who had crossed from China’s Xin­jiang region to Kazakhstan without proper papers after being forced to work at a camp where around 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs were being held for indoctrination. She told a court last month in Zharkent, Kazakhstan packed with Kazakh villagers that “In China, they call it a political camp, but really it was a prison in the mountains.”A few tight-lipped Chinese diplomats sat through the proceedings.