China tightens anti-terror rules in volatile Xinjiang

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 on Monday, 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.