Uyghur Groups Write to Dahua’s American and Canadian Executives: “You should resign”
December 9, 2022
Re: Complicity in the Uyghur Genocide
Dear Dahua (and Lorex) partners,
We write to urge that you decouple from Dahua. Dahua is actively, knowingly harming the safety and well-being of millions; in this letter we explain why.
Dahua bears responsibility for destroying at least hundreds of thousands of lives. A mountain of evidence shows that Dahua, in partnership with the Communist Party of China (CCP), has worked to terrorize and destroy the Uyghur people, and other ethnic and religious groups in China. Without Dahua’s technology and direct participation, the CCP could not have targeted Uyghurs at such staggering scale; the importance of Chinese surveillance companies like Dahua is recognized in multiple reports, including recently that of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Dahua is not simply a passive supplier that ‘does not control how its technology is used’, contrary to what you might have been told. As the CCP sketched its plan to destroy millions of lives, Dahua held the pen. We encourage you to read and reflect on the brief selection of investigations attached to this letter, which clearly establish these facts.
The people we speak of are our mothers and fathers, our brothers and sisters, our nieces and nephews, our neighbors and our friends. Millions, even children, have been placed in concentration camps, where they have been tortured, raped, ‘reeducated’, sterilized, and are often never seen again. Even avoiding the camps offers no escape: The Uyghur homeland (Xinjiang) itself has become an open-air prison, with sophisticated mass surveillance governing every person’s every move.
Instead of taking accountability, Dahua’s only response is to outright lie; we expect this includes privately to industry partners and its own employees. Just last month, an investigation found irrefutable evidence of Dahua’s Uyghur/ethnicity-targeting AI – a key tool used by police in China against Uyghurs, based on 2017 government guidance co-authored by Dahua – but Dahua only repeated its years-long lie that it has no such products.
In light of Dahua’s actions, and Dahua’s clear unwillingness after multiple investigations over several years to take accountability or stop assisting in the genocide – after being repeatedly asked to do so – we are asking Dahua employees to resign from the company, and partnered companies to terminate business ties.
We thank you in advance for your consideration, and welcome any questions.
Sincerely,
- Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project
- Uyghur Human Rights Project
- Uyghur American Association
- Campaign for Uyghurs
Related reading:
Los Angeles Times – Major camera company can sort people by race, alert police when it spots Uighurs
BBC – AI emotion-detection software tested on Uyghurs
BBC – Xinjiang Police Files: Inside a Chinese internment camp
MIT Technology Review – The Chinese surveillance state proves that the idea of privacy is more “malleable” than you’d expect
TechCrunch – ‘Always on and watching’: A former Xinjiang prisoner describes life inside China’s detention camps
The Guardian – ‘There’s cameras everywhere’: testimonies detail far-reaching surveillance of Uyghurs in China
2/10/2021 US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations – Letter To Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos On Dahua technology
November 28, 2018 – Evidence of Dahua’s Involvement In Xinjiang Surveillance
11/06/2020 VOA Chinese – New evidence shows that Dahua Technology is an important promoter of Xinjiang Skynet