Chair of Defence Committee Tobias Ellwood called for an inquiry on Saturday after an investigation found that surveillance cameras from China’s Hikvision and Dahua are still in use at British Army bases.

It comes months after the UK government banned the installation of new surveillance equipment from China on sensitive government sites and more than a year after the Ministry of Defence (MoD) reportedly issued guidance to not use or install Hikvision cameras over security concerns.

According to an investigation by The Mail on Sunday (MoS), Hikvision or Dahua cameras were seen at the front door of six army bases.

The report said Hikvision cameras were seen at sites including an army training and weapons testing site at Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, and the Westminster Barracks of the 1st Battalion London Guard, while Dahua cameras were found at Hyde Park Barracks, minutes away from the Buckingham Palace.

The investigators visited a dozen other sites but couldn’t get close enough to identify the brands of the surveillance cameras.

Hikvision and Dahua, both ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), were blacklisted in 2019 by the U.S. commerce department for being implicated in enabling human rights violations and abuses against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups in China’s Xinjiang region with high-technology surveillance.

The UK’s surveillance watchdog, Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner Fraser Sampson, has repeatedly voiced concerns over the use of Hikvision and Dahua in the UK, including security risks and human rights implications.

Surprised that “the British Army is using Chinese camera systems that Beijing deploys to monitor its own population,” Ellwood said there should be a Cabinet-led inquiry while the MoD should act now to “ensure their systems aren’t relying on Chinese surveillance technology.”

Former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith also said the MoD has to “accept what has gone wrong and say we are now putting it right and getting rid of all the cameras.”

In December last year, Duncan Smith said he had made a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to every government department, asking about their possession and use of Hikvision cameras.

The Department for Work and Pensions, the Department of Health and Social Care, and the Wales Office answered his questions “completely openly, and talked of getting rid of the cameras,” but all other departments, including the MoD, the Home Office, and the Foreign Office, refused to answer the questions, citing security reasons.

Duncan Smith told MoS that he believes these departments still have cameras made by Hikvision and Dahua, the report said.

In an email to The Epoch Times, a MoD spokesperson said: “We take the security of our sites very seriously and have a range of measures in place to scrutinise the integrity of our arrangements. It is wrong to suggest our sites are compromised.”

Hikvision and Duahua, which have previously denied involvement in human rights abuses, didn’t respond to The Epoch Times’ requests for comment.

In a statement to the MoS, a Hikvision spokesperson said, “Technical analysis of our products have never indicated they are a threat to the national security of the UK.

“It is regrettable that some individuals have been willing to politicise a critical element of the country’s security architecture, thus reducing public trust in the vital work our products support.”

Under China’s National Intelligence Law, all organisations and citizens are required to “support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts.

Hikvision’s controlling shareholder is the China Electronics Technology HIK Group, a subsidiary of state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), one of China’s “big 10” state-owned military industrial groups.

According to a Sina Finance feature on Hikvision, the company was founded under the auspices of CETC’s 52nd Research Institute to make a profit after “the 911 terrorist attack made a splash in the global security and surveillance market.”

Fu Lihua, Dahua’s founder and biggest shareholder, is also the CCP secretary of the company.

According to feature reports on Fu, before founding Dahua, he was assigned after college to work at Tongda electronic equipment—a military-owned factory.

In a speech at a CCP event in 2018, Fu said the company was armed with CCP leader Xi Jinping’s “new socialism with Chinese characteristics” and vowed to “always follow the party” and contribute to the China dream with Dahua.

Conor Healy, director of government research at the security and surveillance industry research group IPVM, previously told The Epoch Times that there are “quite significant” security risks in using Hikvision and Dahua equipment, he also argued that the companies, which provide custom-designed surveillance systems to Chinese authorities, are “directly responsible” for the scale of human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

Recent research by IPVM found Hikvision has activated alarms to aid the Chinese regime in tracking protesters and adherents of Falun Gong—a spiritual practice based on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.

A separate IPVM study said Dahua surveillance cameras can identify Uyghurs from within a crowd, and issue “Uyghur Warnings” to the CCP police.