Britain has no ethical option but to keep up the pressure on China over the Uighurs | y | James McMurray

Beijing's attempts to violently force Muslim minorities to assimilate have finally caught the attention of politicians

At last it appears that the British government is willing to address what is perhaps the greatest ongoing human rights atrocity on the planet: the mass incarceration and mistreatment of Uighurs and other minority Muslim people of China's northwestern Xinjiang region. On Sunday, the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, publicly recognised the gross and egregious human rights abuses" under way there, despite the denials of the Chinese ambassador, Liu Xiaoming.

The ambassador's denials were to be expected: they are invariably China's first response when challenged about the mistreatment of its own citizens. Indeed, the mass internment of large sections of the Uighur and other minority populations were denied until the evidence became incontrovertible, after which the argument moved to the treatment of the inmates. How long were they being imprisoned for? What were the conditions they were being held under? Why had they been detained?