It has been reported that a group of NGOs’ has urged Norway to divest from Chinese technology companies after their involvement in human rights violations in China’s Uyghur region has been brought into the light.
It is described as ‘a coalition of six Human Rights Organizations’ that address the topic of divestment of Hikvision Digital Technology and Zhejian Dahua Technology in an open letter to the Government Pension Fund of Norway.
“The Chinese technology companies Hikvision Digital Technology andZhejiang Dahua Technology, are both directly implicated in gross and continued human rights violations in the Uyghur region of China. The Fund must take immediate steps to divest from both companies,” states the letter, released by Norway News.
The letter stresses the fact that Hikvision, the world’s largest producer of surveillance cameras, and Dahua, a large provider of video surveillance products and services, have both won more than $1 billion worth of Chinese government-backed contracts in the Uyghur region since 2016, reports Big News Network.
The letter from the six human rights organizations claim that the products and services of the two companies have utilized by the Chinese regime to “monitor and surpress Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other religions and ethnic groups, including placing at least 1 million in internment camps”.
The human rights organizations states in the letter that ‘while immediate divestment will not be able to solve the crisis regarding the violation of human rights, the divestment would instead send a clear signal to the investors and companies that the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund is not interested in supporting those who participate in or enables systematic violations of human rights’.
The Organizations are the Norwegian Uyghur Committee, Norwegian Helsinki Committee, Norwegian PEN, Rafto Foundation for Human Rights, Uyghur Human Rights Project and the Eotld Uyghur Congress.
Source: Big News Network
