US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday demanded that China end the alleged forced sterilization of Uighur women after a report of a campaign against the mostly Muslim minority.

Pompeo said in a statement, “We call on the Chinese Communist Party to immediately end these horrific practices and ask all nations to join the United States in demanding an end to these dehumanizing abuses”.

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On June 18, Beijing slammed US law that would sanction Chinese officials over the mass incarceration of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities and said it “maliciously attacks” China’s policy in the Xinjiang region.

The legislation, which passed Congress almost unanimously, requires the US administration to determine which Chinese officials are responsible for the “arbitrary detention, torture and harassment” of Uighurs and other minorities.

China’s foreign ministry said in a statement that the act “rudely interferes in China’s internal affairs”, and urged the US to “immediately correct its mistakes”.

Last month, US Congress had approved sanctions against China over the mass incarceration of Muslim Uighurs.

The House of Representatives voted with just one dissent in favour of the Uighur Human Rights Act, hours after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took a major step to press China on the autonomy of Hong Kong.

The mass detention of Uighur Muslims in the name of “attending school” where they are being taught “mild methods to fight Islamic extremism” has actually been a brainwashing camp where the citizens are being separated from their religion and families.

After an earlier version of the law passed in December, the Chinese foreign ministry accused the United States of hypocrisy in its own “counter-terrorism” efforts.

Since 2017, the authorities in Xinjiang have detained many hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in internment camps from the northwest region of the country.

Inmates undergo months or years of indoctrination and interrogation aimed at transforming them into secular and loyal supporters of the party, which is a far-reaching step since Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution of the 1966.