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Chinese police crossed into Kazakh territory in 2017 to arrest and abduct Askar Azabek, a naturalized Kazakh citizen, police and his family told Radio Free Asia. Azatbek, now 47, was an ethnic Kazakh of Chinese nationality living in China’s far western Xinjiang region until 2016, when he traveled to Kazakhstan and acquired Kazakh nationality shortly thereafter.  RFA had previously reported that Azatbek was arrested on Dec. 7, 2017, when he visited the Khorgos International Center for Boundary Cooperation, a special international trade zone on the Kazakhstan-China border. In 2018, he…

A Uyghur man in Ghulja County in Xinjiang, in far western China, posted a video online depicting what he said was the destruction of his family’s home to make room for a local energy company’s operations. The demolition is apparently the end of a four-year dispute over property rights in the region between local residents and China QingHua Energy Company, which operates both an electric power plant and a coal mine in the area. But it comes at a particularly difficult time for the displaced family, with nighttime lows dropping…

Calling China’s far-western Xinjiang “one of the most heavily policed regions in the world,” the Uyghur Human Rights Project published a report identifying the various police forces used to carry out what it said were “atrocity crimes” against the 11-million strong Muslim ethnic minority. “This explainer is a critical step in accurately identifying perpetrators,” said UHRP Executive Director Omer Kanat. “By identifying how Uyghurs are policed and controlled, the human rights community is better equipped to seek justice and remediation.” The report released Wednesday by the Washington-based organization, “Policing East…

Uyghur activists and U.S. lawmakers on Monday marked two years since an independent tribunal in London handed down a decision that China’s government was committing genocide against Uyghurs. The Uyghur Tribunal on Dec. 9, 2021, declared that it was “satisfied” that Beijing had pursued a “deliberate, systematic and concerted policy with the object of so-called ‘optimizing’ the population” of Uyghurs in the far-western Xinjiang province in order to reduce birth rates. It implicated Chinese President Xi Jinping in the policies, which it said were also intended to erase Uyghur culture…

More than 180 high-level officials and experts have nominated jailed Uyghur academic and blogger Ilham Tohti to receive the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, citing his role as “the true symbol of the Uyghur people’s fight for freedom” under Chinese rule in Xinjiang. The nomination includes signatures from ministers, parliamentarians, university rectors and professors from countries including Canada, Japan, Rwanda, Australia, Paraguay, Turkey and France – a “broad international coalition” which initiative leaders Vanessa Frangville of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, and Belgian MP Samuel Cogolati believe will bolster the…

Volkswagen said a self-commissioned audit turned up no evidence that its joint venture plant in Xinjiang had used Uyghur forced labor, but experts on the region cast doubt on the results, saying official documents show Uyghur detainees from re-education camps were funneled to the factory. The audit was carried out by German due diligence firm Loening Human Rights & Responsible Business GmbH came in response to a demand by investors after activists accused the German carmaker of using forced labor at its joint venture with China’s SAIC Motors in Urumqi,…

On the 75th anniversary of the U.N. convention on genocide, the international body’s human rights chief called on the global community to hold perpetrators accountable, but was slammed for failing to condemn the situation facing Uyghurs in northwestern China. “Genocide is never unleashed without warning,” Volker Turk, the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement. “It is always the culmination of preceding and identifiable patterns of systematic discrimination – based on race, ethnicity, religion or other characteristics – and of gross human rights violations, targeted as a…

About three months after ethnic Uyghur Nefise Oghuz posted videos in four languages on social media that called on the Chinese government to release her uncle Alim Abdukerim, her family finally got some answers. Nefise, 20, who lives in Turkey, took to social media in April, where she shared video of herself holding a portrait of her uncle and speaking about his case and what she called genocide of Uyghurs in western China. She spoke in Uyghur, English, Mandarin and Turkish. Police in Urumqi, capital of western China’s Xinjiang Uyghur…

Askar Azatbek didn’t realize that his friendship with a Kazakh consular officer would one day land him in prison. The ethnic Kazakh who lived in China’s far-western Xinjiang region had retired from his job at the Ili Prefecture Immigration Bureau and moved in 2016 to neighboring Kazakhstan, where he obtained Kazakh citizenship. But on Dec. 7, 2017, when he visited the Khorgos International Center for Boundary Cooperation, a special international trade zone on the Kazakhstan-China border, he was arrested by Chinese police and taken into custody. What he got was…

Arfiye Eri moved some audience members to tears when she read the poem “Yanarim Yoq” (“No Road Home”) written by prominent Uyghur scholar and influential educator Abduqadir Jalalidin, who was sentenced to life in prison by China in late 2019. The Japanese politician of Uyghur descent, who was elected to the lower house of the Japanese Parliament from the Liberal Democratic Party, recited the poem at the opening of the International Uyghur Forum: Global Parliamentarian Convention held on Oct. 30-31 at the National Diet of Japan.  [embedded content] Eri, 35, was…