Authorities are believed to have held more than 1.5 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities accused of harboring “strong religious views” and “politically incorrect” in a vast network of internment camps in the XUAR since April 2017
Mass incarcerations in the XUAR, as well as other policies seen to violate the rights of Uyghurs and other Muslims, have led to increasing calls by the international community to hold Beijing accountable for its actions in the region
Authorities in the XUAR regularly detain those they accuse of being “two-faced officials”—a term applied by the government to ethnic minority cadres or other officials who pay lip service to Communist Party rule, but secretly chafe against state policies repressing members of their ethnic group
An Albanian scholar and commentator who traveled to China at Beijing’s invitation this month to disprove what he believed was biased Western media coverage of mass incarcerations of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) said his experience there confirmed the reports as true
Bilash had been under house arrest since being detained in March and flown to the Kazakh capital Nur-Sultan—formerly known as Astana—amid accusations from Chinese officials that he had “fabricated” the cases he was documenting, in an arrest that was widely seen as having been made at Beijing’s behest
Authorities are believed to have held up to 1.5 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities accused of harboring “strong religious views” and “politically incorrect” ideas in a vast network of internment camps in the XUAR since April 2017, although Beijing describes them as “boarding schools” that provide vocational training and protect the country from terrorism
China presented the two top ethnic Uyghur officials in the XUAR at a news conference in Beijing on Tuesday to deliver a surprising claim that the vast majority of Uyghurs had completed training in re-education camps and rejoined their families
Adrian Zenz, a lecturer in social research methods at the Germany-based European School of Culture and Theology, has said that some 1.1 million people are or have been detained in the camps—which would equate to 10 to 11 percent of the adult Muslim population of the XUAR
In January, China’s foreign ministry welcomed U.N. officials to visit the region, provided they “abide by Chinese law and comply with relevant procedures,” and “avoid interfering in domestic matters or undermining [China’s] sovereignty”