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China has justified its repressive actions in Xinjiang as a response to a series of terror attacks attributed to Uighurs. But the measures Chinese authorities have employed have attracted international condemnation. In July, the United Nations representatives of 22 mostly European countries released a letter to the UN Human Rights Council calling on China to “refrain from the
ChinaFile and the U.S.-Asia Law Institute of NYU School of Law co-hosted a discussion with historian Rian Thum and journalists Gulchehra Hoja of Radio Free Asia and James Palmer of Foreign Policy on the human rights crisis in the far-western region of Xinjiang. Panelists described the historical context for the current mass incarcerations and the scale and pervasiveness of the
In a courtroom in Zharkent, Kazakhstan, in July 2018, a former kindergarten principal named Sayragul Sauytbay calmly described what Chinese officials continue to deny: a vast new gulag of “de-extremification training centers” has been created for Turkic Muslim inhabitants of Xinjiang, the Alaska-sized region in western China. Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh, had fled Xinjiang and
The intellectual heart of China's Muslim community is under threat as scholars, writers, religious leaders and their families are under constant state surveillance.
Many Uyghurs living in Afghanistan want to leave now that the Taliban are back in control. They fear that the Chinese government could push the Taliban to deport them to China.