A government trade minister held a one-on-one meeting with a facial recognition firm accused of enabling the Chinese government’s campaign of persecution against Uighur Muslims, the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism have established.

Graham Stuart, a minister at the Department for International Trade (DIT), met representatives from SenseTime, a Hong Kong-based surveillance technology firm, on 11 June last year to discuss the use of artificial intelligence and data in higher education.

The disclosure comes after the British government announced it would allow crucial technology from another controversial Chinese firm, Huawei, to play a limited role in the UK’s 5G infrastructure.

The meeting between Stuart and SenseTime took place on the same day US legislators were reported to have urged institutional investors to stop financing Chinese facial recognition companies, including SenseTime, on the grounds that their technologies were being used to perpetrate human rights abuses.

In October, four months after SenseTime’s meeting with Stuart, the US Department of Commerce added the firm to its “entity list”, along with 27 other companies and state bodies, preventing American firms from exporting supplies to it without government approval.

“These entities have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups in [Xinjiang],” a Department of Commerce press release stated.

Although Stuart’s meeting with SenseTime took place in June, before the Trump administration’s imposition of the export ban, international media were already reporting allegations of SenseTime’s role in China’s surveillance state.

Five days before the meeting, the Financial Times reported that SenseTime was a supplier to “officials in Xinjiang, where minorities of mostly Uighurs and other Muslims are being tracked and held in internment camps”, and that Microsoft had decided to delete a training set of 10m facial images which SenseTime had used in its research.

The previous month BuzzFeed reported, as part of an investigation into US investors financing Chinese surveillance: “Since 2017, Chinese authorities have detained more than a million Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in political re-education camps in the country’s north-west region of Xinjiang, identifying them, in part, with facial recognition software created by … SenseTime, based in Hong Kong.”

The existence of the meeting was revealed by an entry in departmental transparency data. Its purpose was only described as “to discuss technology in the areas of AI and data, higher education”.

SenseTime’s website details products including a “sign-in” system which “helps to prevent cheating during exams” and an “entertainment system” which uses facial recognition to “encourage [students] to smile more”.

It also offers a “smart campus” system using “human image visualisation, refined service management, visualised data management and the efficient management of people and vehicles ... [which] enables an all-around, visualised and controllable management of campus, and establishes a campus security system that integrates management, prevention, and control”.

A SenseTime spokesperson said: “SenseTime has no contracts in Xinjiang. We are not aware of any application of our technologies in the region. Regarding the US entity list, we are working closely with all relevant authorities to fully understand and resolve the situation.”

She said the company had a Safe Campus product to safeguard schools from threats such as unauthorised access, and recognised the wider public debate around facial recognition ethics.

Silkie Carlo, the director of the privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: “We sincerely hope Graham Stuart used his meeting with SenseTime to convey his deep concern over the alleged use of their technology in mass surveillance operations and ethnic persecution in China. However, we doubt it.

“We would urge the minister to be completely transparent about the content of this meeting and the government’s dealings with the company.”

A spokesperson for the DIT said: “The minister for investment meets with a wide range of businesses as part of his responsibility to promote UK trade and investment.

“The UK government continues to raise its concerns about the human rights situation in Xinjiang directly with the Chinese government and businesses involved.”

China is the UK’s largest trade partner outside Europe and the US, and trade between the two countries has more than doubled in the last decade, according to a British government website, hitting £70bn in the last financial year.

In August, the DIT led the “largest ever British delegation” to the Smart China Expo, a trade fair in Chongqing focusing on AI and big data technology. Stuart’s meeting with SenseTime took place during London Tech Week two months previously in June.

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