Rights group urges US company Thermo Fisher Scientific to stop supplying China’s regime with DNA surveillance tech ( www.hrw.org )

The U.S. biomedical company Thermo Fisher Scientific announced on Jan. 5 that it will no longer sell human DNA identification technology to the Chinese police in the Tibet Autonomous Region. In 2019, it had made a similar decision to halt the sale of these products in Xinjiang, the northwestern region where the Chinese government’s persecution of ethnic Uyghurs amounts to a crime against humanity.

Helping to protect the rights of Tibetans and Uyghurs in China is essential, and Thermo Fisher’s decisions are important and welcome. But they fall short of what is needed, given the gravity of abuses. And within China, the problem of mass DNA surveillance goes beyond these two regions.