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
U.N. officials and human rights advocates say China continues to step up its persecution of ethnic Uighurs, confining as many as one million members of the largely Muslim ethnic group in conditions that observers describe as similar to concentration camps
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
Writing on Twitter on Saturday morning, Human Rights Watch president Kenneth Roth said that under pressure Qatar had not yet sent him back “to persecution in China.”
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
These tales of disappearance are easy to find in Uzbekistan, despite the official censorship hanging over the narrative. Farukh is also an ethnic Uighur but holds an Uzbek passport
Ebeydulla is one of many Uyghur professionals and intellectuals who have been identified as detainees in XUAR internment camps, and who defy claims by authorities that those held in the facilities are in need of “vocational training.”
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
Nearly two dozen countries at the United Nations’ Human Rights Council in Geneva have urged China to end mass arbitrary detentions, as well as widespread surveillance and restrictions, on Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR)