Tohti, a former professor at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing, was sentenced to life in prison following his conviction on a charge of “separatism” by the Urumqi Intermediate People’s Court in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) on Sept. 23, 2014
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
Video footage appearing to show authorities in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) transferring hundreds of Uyghur inmates to detention centers surfaced last week on a newly created Youtube account. But clues within the video would be key to finding out approximately when and exactly where the video was shot
Jewher Ilham, the daughter of jailed Uyghur academic Ilham Tohti, is a graduate from Indiana University who has spoken out in support of his peaceful promotion of equal rights and greater autonomy for the Turkic speaking Uyghur ethnic group in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR)
China recently organized two visits to monitor internment camps in the XUAR—one for a small group of foreign journalists, and another for diplomats from non-Western countries, including Russia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, and Thailand—during which officials dismissed claims about mistreatment and poor conditions in the facilities as “slanderous lies.”
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