EU staff reject use of Chinese giant Hikvision’s surveillance equipment over Uyghur repression

Thousands of workers employed on the European Union’s(EU) establishments have rejected the usage of Chinese video surveillance supplier Hikvision applied sciences in gentle of the corporate’s affiliation with China’s human rights abuses and particularly the oppression of thousands and thousands of Uyghurs.

President Cristiano Sebastiani of the main European Institution Trade Union, Renouveau & Democratie, representing hundreds of workers employed within the European places of work, wrote a letter to Johannes Hahn, Commissioner accountable for Budget and Human Resources for the EU Institutions on Wednesday relating to the thermal imaging methods utilized by the European Commission and the European Parliament, produced by the Chinese know-how big Hikvision, in keeping with a press assertion.

The Hikvision cameras have been positioned at entrances all through the European Parliament and put in within the European Commission’s essential places of work, the Berlaymont and Charlemagne buildings, the assertion famous.

The Chinese firm Hikvision has been accused of being linked to the oppression of Uyghurs and different Muslim minorities in East Turkistan, China’s Xinjiang province, together with offering surveillance tools used within the brutal “re-education camps”.

The Chinese authorities holds a 40 per cent controlling stake in Hikvision by way of the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corporation.

A leaked German Foreign Ministry report estimates that 1 million Uyghur in China are being detained with out trial. Ethnic Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and members of different Muslim minority teams are additionally being imprisoned, the report mentioned.

Sebastiani’ letter comes after German Member of European Parliament (MEP) Reinhard Butikofer, head of the European Parliament delegation to China, denounced that the usage of Hikvision know-how by the European establishments as “extremely worrying” since “Hikvision is a technology company which is deeply complicit in the terrible oppression of the Uighur people in Xinjiang which borders on genocide” and that the European establishments ought to “immediately create transparency and draw the adequate consequences: i.e. sever any direct or indirect business relationship with Hikvision.”

Also, Charlie Weimers, Swedish MEP from the European Conservatives and Reformists Group, mentioned that: “The EU should have no dealings whatsoever with a Chinese firm that is alleged to be involved in some of the most abhorrent human rights abuses in the world” and that “Nobel Prize winners should adhere to a higher standard.”

Svenja Hahn, German MEP from the Renew Europe group, addressed a letter to President European Parliament David Sassoli, saying that she discovered “it outrageous that European taxpayers’ money has been used to purchase monitoring equipment from a company that with their products enables mass surveillance, oppression of minorities and massive breaches of human rights”.

The use of Hikvision know-how by the European establishments has provoked sturdy reactions from EU establishments workers as properly they usually have expressed their discontent at having to come back head to head with an organization accused of contributing to human rights violations in China.

Concerning the administration of private information, the spokesperson of the European Parliament confirmed that “the equipment is neither connected to the Parliament’s computer network nor records any data”.