A Conference on Uyghur crisis and professor Ilham Tohti
Post Tagged with: "Amnesty International"
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Hundreds of academics urge China’s President to free Professor Ilham Tohti
Posted on January 18, 2016, in News Uyghur Related News Amnesty International, 18 January 2016 Amnesty International– Four hundred academics from across the world have called on China’s President Xi Jinping to immediately release Uighur Professor Ilham Tohti, on the second anniversary of the day he was taken into custody by authorities. In an open letter to President Xi, scholars from globally recognized academic institutions – including Harvard University, The University of Hong Kong, and the University of Oxford, among many others – write that the immediate and unconditional release of Professor Ilham Tohti would be “an important way of demonstrating China’s commitment to academic freedom”. Ilham Tohti is a prisoner of conscience, who is being cruelly punished for peacefully challenging the Chinese government’s policies towards ethnic minorities. Ilham Tohti is serving a life sentence solely for expressing ideas that fell well within the boundaries of freedom of expression as an academic and writer. He was taken away from his home in Beijing on 15 January 2014 and found guilty of “separatism” on 23 September 2014, after a politicized trial that was marred by numerous procedural irregularities. “Ilham Tohti is a prisoner of conscience, who is being cruelly punished for peacefully challenging the Chinese government’s policies towards ethnic minorities,” said Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia Director at Amnesty International. “That so many academics from across the world have united to call for Ilham Tohti’s immediate release underlines the gross sense of injustice people feel at his continued imprisonment. President Xi Jinping should heed the scholars’ calls.” Perry Link, a professor at the University of California at Riverside and a renowned expert on human rights and politics in China, said: “While much of the world is worrying about ‘radical Islamic terrorists,’ the Chinese government has given a lifetime sentence to an un-radical Muslim non-terrorist. Why […]
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Five facts about Ilham Tohti, award-winning activist jailed in China
20 October 2016, 16:39 UTC Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti celebrates his birthday on 25 October, shortly after he was awarded the prestigious Martin Ennals Award for human rights. But who is he and why is he in prison in China? Ilham Tohti is a respected economist who has highlighted abuses against China’s Uighur minority. A renowned Uighur intellectual in China, Ilham Tohti was an economics professor at Central University for Nationalities in the capital, Beijing. He has worked for two decades to build understanding between Uighurs and Han Chinese. Rejecting separatism and violence, he tried to reconcile differences between these ethnic groups. Uighurs, a mainly Muslim Turkic ethnic group, have faced widespread discrimination in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in northwest China. Ilham Tohti has been put under surveillance and arrested many times for drawing attention to the plight of Uighurs in China. Through his writing and lectures, Ilham highlighted government policies that limit the use of the Uighur language, severely restrict Uighurs’ ability to practice their own religion, block their chances of getting a job, and encourage Han migration into the region, all fuelling discontent and ethnic tensions. Ilham was the founder and director of the bilingual website “Uighur Online”, which reported on human rights violations suffered not only by Uighurs but also by ethnic Han Chinese. The website had been shut down by the authorities several times: first before the Beijing Olympics in 2008, again in March and April 2009, and now since 2014. When ethnic violence erupted in the XUAR in 2009, Ilham was detained for several weeks after he posted information on the internet about Uighurs who had been detained, killed and had “disappeared” during and after the protests. In the following years, he was placed under house arrest for various periods.The path I have pursued […]