China tightens anti-terror rules in volatile Xinjiang

Beijing: Battling frequent terror attacks by Uyghur militants in Xinjiang, the volatile region has adopted China’s first provincial-level anti-terrorism rules, including “re-educating” ring leaders and hard-line radicals.

The new regulation is based on China’s Anti-Terrorism Law, giving detailed instructions on how to deal with terror activities, including keeping hard-line radicals away from other prisoners and re-assessing convicts’ risk level before they can be released from prison.

The regulation is based on China’s Anti-Terrorism Law that was designed to better suit the situation in Xinjiang. It was approved by the autonomous region’s legislative body on Sunday and went into effect yesterday, state-run Global Times reported.

Xinjiang is the first provincial-level region in China to have released a regional interpretation of the Anti-Terrorism Law since it was implemented on January 1 this year.

The region has been haunted by terror attacks in the past few years that took hundreds of lives. China had blamed at Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) for the violence.

The regulation stipulates that prison authorities must re-assess the risk level of convicts of terror-related crimes six months before their release.

The assessment reports will be submitted to local courts, which will decide, within a month, whether a convict requires further re-education upon leaving the prison, it said.

Ringleaders of terror organisations, those who incited others to commit crimes while serving jail terms and those who resist education with violent tendencies must be confined in solitary and kept away from other prisoners, it said.

Clause 51 of the regulation states that those who have twisted the concept of “halal,” which usually only applies to food, and expand the concept to all aspects of social life may be subjected to fines of less than 10,000 yuan (USD 1,538) or detention of five to 15 days.

China has already deployed large number of security forces in Xinjiang which borders Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, (POK) and Afghanistan.

PTI

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