Beijing: China's far-northwestern region of Xinjiang has revised legislation to provide a legal basis for internment camps where up to 1 million Muslims are being held amid mounting international criticism.

New clauses adopted by the regional government officially permit the use of "education and training centers" to reform "people influenced by extremism."

An angry crowd belonging to the Chinese Uyghur Muslim minority try to grab hold of a police officer during protests in Urumqi, China, in 2009. Credit:EPA

Chinese authorities deny that the internment camps exist but say petty criminals are sent to vocational "training centres." Former detainees in the centres say they were forced to denounce Islam and profess loyalty to the Communist Party in what they describe as political indoctrination camps.

"It's a retrospective justification for the mass detainment of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang," said James Leibold, a scholar of Chinese ethnic policies at Melbourne's La Trobe University. "It's a new form of re-education that's unprecedented and doesn't really have a legal basis, and I see them scrambling to try to create a legal basis for this policy."