The Network for Uyghur Rights (NUR) submitted a detailed report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in August, documenting how Chinese government policies undermine China’s obligations under the Convention and will effectively prohibit the transmission of language, faith, and culture across Uyghur generations. At the most recent CRC session on September 30 ahead of China’s review, NUR briefed Committee members on the submission and suggested questions for the Chinese government.

NUR’s submission focuses on seven areas where Chinese government policy violates its obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child:

• Name selection (Art. 7): Arbitrary restrictions on names with religious connotations mean affected children can be denied a hukou (household registration), which blocks their access to school and prevents families from obtaining identity documents.

• Religious and cultural rights (Arts. 14, 30): A Uyghur child cannot enter a mosque, cannot learn religion at school, and cannot be taught at home. Children under 18 are barred from mosques, and regional policies prohibit “encouraging minors” to take part in religious activity. Government guidance treats a parent encouraging a child to pray or fast as grounds for police investigation, and parents and teachers who teach children about their faith have been imprisoned.

• State surveillance of family life (Art. 16): Under the "Becoming Family" campaign, hundreds of thousands of government cadres have lodged in Uyghur homes since 2016, monitoring families' religious and political views and dictating daily life, with refusal treated as grounds for detention. Schools in Aksu and Hotan prefectures also require students to complete annual questionnaires reporting whether family members pray, wear a hijab, or keep religious books at home.

• Boarding schools and separation from parents (Art. 9): In 2023, UN experts expressed grave concern that the expanding boarding school system in the Uyghur region separates Uyghur children from their families, warning that this would “undermine their ties to their cultural, religious and linguistic identities” and lead to forced assimilation. Authorities have kept registries of children whose parents are detained, placing them in boarding schools and “care centers” without consent or any assessment of their best interests.

• Passport confiscation and blocked family reunification (Art. 11): Since late 2016, Chinese authorities have systematically confiscated Uyghurs’ passports and refused to issue or renew them for children whose parents live abroad, in some cases forcing children already overseas to return.

• Suppression of minority-language education (Arts. 28, 29, 30): Across the Uyghur region, minority-language schools have been closed and Uyghur- and Kazakh-language teaching materials banned, while students and teachers face penalties for speaking anything other than Mandarin at school. Uyghur-language textbooks once approved by censors have since been branded “extremist,” and dozens of the editors and officials who produced them have been detained or imprisoned.

• 2026 Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress (Arts. 29, 30): The new law requires schools to teach in Mandarin, and bars parents from sharing ideas with their children deemed “not conducive to improving ethnic unity and progress,” which could be used to punish families who pass on their own language, culture, or religion. In April 2026, eight UN Special Rapporteurs warned that the law puts China’s obligations under the Convention at risk.

Many of the same policies are being imposed on Tibetan and Mongolian children, and NUR urges greater scrutiny of the boarding school system in the Uyghur region, Tibet, and Southern Mongolia alike. We stand in solidarity with all communities in China whose children are being cut off from their language, faith, and culture.

Read NUR’s full submission to the Committee on the Rights of the Child, including the evidence behind each of these findings and our suggested questions for the Chinese government.