Suffolk Law student Mia Bonardi served as a lead writer on The Syrian Accountability Project’s (SAP) white paper, “The 2022 Winter Olympics and Genocide: A History of Enabling Atrocities and the Path Forward.”

She undertook the work as part of a team that also included students from Syracuse University; University of Michigan; and the University of Washington, St. Louis, under the direction of Syrian Accountability Project founder and project leader David M. Crane, founding chief prosecutor of the Special Court of Sierra Leone and a professor at Syracuse Law. SAP is a collective of international criminal prosecutors and practitioners who work with law students on international human rights matters.

Bonardi and her co-authors write that the goal of their white paper regarding the Uyghur ethnic group in northwestern China is to “recognize the genocide occurring in XUAR [Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region] against the Uyghur people, document the history of the International Olympic Committee enabling the violation of human rights and the perpetuating of genocide, track the legal framework for holding complicit parties accountable, and identify possible actions states and private entities may take to avoid complicity.”

The paper calls for import restrictions, revision of existing trade treaties, delisting of complicit corporations from stock exchanges. The paper also advocated for tariffs on goods resulting from Uyghur forced labor.

In March 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a report formally rebuking the Chinese government for “genocide and crimes against humanity” targeting the Uyghur ethnic group. Shortly after, the British parliament voted to declare that China was committing genocide against the Uyghurs. The XUAR, in northwestern China, has a population of nearly 22 million people, roughly half of them Uyghurs, in a land mass about one-sixth the size of the U.S.

Bonardi has two other forthcoming publications on this topic. The first, “More Problems from Hell: The Uyghur Genocide,” will be published in Syracuse Law’s Journal of Global Rights and Organizations in May 2022 and the second, “Trade and Genocide: The Fiction of Linkage” will be published in the International Trade and Business Law Review this spring. Suffolk Law’s International Law Student Association and Transnational Law Review as well as Syracuse Law’s Journal of Global Rights and Organizations and Syrian Accountability Project are co-hosting a zoom event on March 22, 2022,  from 1- 2 p.m. with Dolkun Isa, the President of World Uyghur Congress (UWC). Bonardi will moderate. The UWC is an international organization of exiled Uyghur people and groups.

Stadium image courtesy of joeywan, Creative Commons