European Travel Companies Offer East Turkistan “Genocide Tours”: 18 Companies Named in New UHRP Briefing

New research from the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) highlights the ongoing problem of organized travel to the Uyghur region amid crimes against humanity and genocide. The briefing, Genocide Tours: European Travel Companies in East Turkistan, is the second in a series on tourism complicity in East Turkistan, also known as “Xinjiang.”

UHRP found at least 18 European travel companies, based in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, currently offering tours to the region.

Sites in Kashgar, Turpan, Ürümchi, and other destinations on tour itineraries are connected to crimes against humanity and genocide through repression of religious belief and expression, destruction of tangible and intangible cultural heritage of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples, as well as large-scale racial profiling, surveillance, internment, imprisonment, torture, sexual assault, and deaths in custody.

Some tours offer intrusive and problematic “experiences” for visitors, such as visits to Uyghur homes, which families are in no position to refuse, given the environment of securitization and extra-legal punishment regimes. French travel company Hasamélis, as part of its La Route de la Soie Chinoise tour, offers dinner in Turpan with a Uyghur family in their home. Other companies offering home visits include EMS Voyage, Shiraz Travel Tours, and Viatgi.

UHRP calls on international travel companies in Europe to cease profiteering from genocide.

In addition to the 18 European travel companies, an August 2023 UHRP briefing documented seven travel companies based in Australia, North America, and the UK, which also advertised tours to the region. In an October 3, 2023 statement, UHRP noted that only two of the seven companies had dropped tours to East Turkistan as a result of the briefing.

UHRP has also alerted the international community to the importance China attaches to tourism in East Turkistan as a means to whitewash crimes against humanity. Minister for Culture and Tourism Hu Heping is also a Deputy Director of the Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department. Hu Heping has visited East Turkistan on at least three occasions, including a May 2021 trip to inspect “cultural tourism” in the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, an entity sanctioned by the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union for its grave and systematic human rights violations.

UHRP urges European travel companies, national associations, and the ECTAA to include the Framework Convention on Tourism Ethics, approved by the UN General Assembly in 2019, as further benchmarks for business standards.