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The BBC’s mysterious missing Xinjiang evidence

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Parliament has packed up for the holidays, with MPs and peers spending their final days in SW1 desperately dodging the omnipresent Omicron variant. But Mr S was intrigued to see an interesting intervention in the Lords on the day that recess was declared. Crossbench peer Baroness Finlay popped up to grill Foreign Office minister Lord Ahmad about China’s treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang, an unusual topic for the professor of palliative medicine to raise. 

She told Ahmad that she understood the BBC ‘has film evidence of the atrocities’ that have been addressed in the Uyghur Tribunal, but that the Corporation has been ‘reluctant to show the programmes to date, having set the evidential test so unrealistically high that it cannot be met.’ Finlay asked the minister as to whether the films could be ‘available for a private viewing to inform parliamentarians, so that people may be better informed in their own thinking and have another source of information.

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