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The U.S. Department of State condemned Beijing in a statement Friday for secretly imposing a life sentence on a Uyghur folklore expert and ethnographer who disappeared in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region nearly six years ago.  Rahile Dawut was tried and convicted in December 2018 for the crime of  “splittism,”  a U.S.-based rights group reported last week, citing a source within the Chinese government. The State Department statement said Dawut and other Uyghur intellectuals were unfairly imprisoned for their work to protect and preserve Uyghur culture and traditions.  “Professor Dawut’s life…

Experts from the United Nations have expressed “grave concern” over allegations that Chinese officials in Xinjiang have expanded a government-run boarding school system that forcibly separates Uyghur and other minority Muslim children from their families and communities. The experts were also concerned that the boarding schools teach almost exclusively in China’s official language of Mandarin “with little or no use of Uyghur as medium of instruction,” according to a statement released by the U.N.’s human rights office on Tuesday. “The separation of mainly Uyghur and other minority children from their…

Rahile Dawut, an internationally recognized expert in Uyghur folklore who disappeared in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region nearly six years ago was recently confirmed to be serving a life sentence for “endangering state security,” according to the U.S.-based human rights group Dui Hua. Prior to her disappearance in December 2017, Dawut had founded and directed a folklore research institute at Xinjiang University, and wrote dozens of journal articles and books, including studies on Islamic sacred sites in Central Asia, and presented her work at conferences around the world. Rahile Dawut was…

A young Uyghur businessman who was reportedly arrested in 2016 on vague separatist charges has been serving a 15-year prison sentence since 2017 for illegal religious activities, a police officer in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province confirmed to Radio Free Asia. Abduqahar Ebeydulla’s case was mentioned in a Agence France-Presse article that reported on police records obtained by researcher and Xinjiang region expert Adrian Zenz.  The records indicated that up to half of adult men in four Uyghur-majority villages in Yarkant County in Xinjiang were rounded up in 2017, when the…

The United States on Tuesday blacklisted three more companies located in China’s Xinjiang region due to their use of forced Uyghur labor, banning American companies from importing their goods. A total of 27 companies are now explicitly blacklisted under the 2021 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which also includes a general ban on the import of any goods made even in part by the forced labor of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority subjected to internment in China. Goods made by Xinjiang Zhongtai Group, Xinjiang Tianshan Wool Textile and Xinjiang Tianmian Foundation…

Updated on Sept. 21, 2023, at 4:45 p.m. EDT An internationally recognized expert in Uyghur folklore and ethnographer who disappeared in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region nearly six years ago has been confirmed as serving a life sentence for endangering state security, a U.S.-based human rights group said Thursday. Rahile Dawut was tried and convicted in December 2018 for the crime of  “splittism”  by an intermediate people’s court in Xinjiang, and unsuccessfully appealed that sentence, the group said. “The most recent information confirmed that her appeal was subsequently rejected by the…

The Chinese government is increasingly moving Uyghurs from internment camps to the regular penal system while claiming it is closing the camps, experts and foreign diplomats told a forum on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Tuesday. Chinese diplomats over the weekend tried to hamstring the event by sending out a letter to foreign missions to the United Nations warning them against attending. The panel of diplomats and human rights experts slammed Beijing’s attempted interference. “Thank you also for being here, notwithstanding the PRC’s continued…

China has warned fellow United Nations member states not to attend a panel on human rights abuses in Xinjiang sponsored by a think tank and two rights groups on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, the National Review reported. The event organized by the Atlantic Council, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International aims to put more pressure on China to stop its repression and violence against mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in the restive, far-western region of China. China’s permanent mission to the U.N. expressed…

Authorities in northwest China’s Xinjiang region have completely walled off a village of 13,500 people in a bid to control their movement, subjecting them to 24-hour surveillance and restricting their access to a single gate each for residents and vehicles, according to security personnel. The enclosure of Chuluqai village in Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture’s Ghulja (in Chinese, Yining) county – roughly 650 kilometers (400 miles) west of Urumqi, the regional capital – is the latest attempt by authorities since the 2000s to surveil Uyghurs under the pretext of maintaining peace…

For years, the young Uyghur entrepreneur was held up in Chinese media as a role model for other Uyghur youth – a clean-shaven, smartly-dressed young man who returned to China to start his educational consulting business after getting an MBA in the United States. “Rather than staying abroad, he decided the best place to launch his career was in Beijing,” read a June 2014 article about Abdulhabir Muhammad in the state-run Global Times that included a photo of him in a dark suit and tie, smiling and sitting confidently behind…