China has dramatically increased its prosecution of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang through the formal court system, handing out long prison terms for dubious charges such as "picking quarrels" and giving gifts to overseas relatives, Human Rights Watch said yesterday. These criminal convictions are in addition to the detention of an estimated one million Uighurs and other mainly Muslim minorities in "political education" camps in Xinjiang, it added. More than 250,000 people in the northwestern region have been formally sentenced and imprisoned since 2016, HRW said. The US State Department has said China's actions in Xinjiang amount to genocide, while Canadian lawmakers on Tuesday passed a similar declaration.