Chinese court sentences Uighur scholar to life imprisonment

On Thursday, the human rights group Dui Hua Foundation Confident Chinese authorities have sentenced internationally renowned Uyghur ethnographer Raheel Dawud to life imprisonment. The outrageous sentence follows Dawood’s six years of arbitrary detention, which was only halted by a secret trial in December 2018, in which a court found him guilty of the baseless charge of „endangering state security”.

Another Uighur scholar, economist Ilham Tohti, was sentenced to life in prison in 2014. Meanwhile, the Uighur Human Rights Project Documented As of December 2021, Chinese authorities have forcibly disappeared more than 500 Uighur intellectuals.

Chinese leadership, including recently President Xi Jinping, insist Their policies have achieved „hard-won social stability” across the Xinjiang region in northwest China. Last week, Chinese ambassadors in New York Tried To undermine a public debate Crimes against humanity Targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims on the fringes of the United Nations General Assembly, the region says it has been peaceful for years. However, there is There is no real peace For those who have been arbitrarily detained, those who have been cut off from their families, and those who endure constant high-tech surveillance. The government says it is now focusing on „normalization” across the region, but its current repressive practices suggest otherwise.

Professor Daoud’s conviction is not evidence of his wrongdoing, but of Beijing’s relentless cultural persecution of Uyghurs, hostility to free expression and aversion to fair trial rights – all serious violations of international law.

The development will spur renewed international calls for an independent investigation into crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and calls for the immediate release of academic institutions linked to Dawut, including Cambridge, Cornell and Harvard universities.

Those Uyghur voices with different opinions, no matter how peacefully those opinions are expressed, the Chinese government is still clearly unable to make their legitimate efforts to silence them – for life – quiet. The significant question is whether the rest of the world will let them get away with it.