A Conference on Uyghur crisis and professor Ilham Tohti
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Trump Meets Survivors of Religious Persecution, Jailed Uyghur Professor Ilham Tohti’s Daughter
US President Donald Trump meets with survivors of religious persecution in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, July 17, 2019. AFP U.S. President Donald Trump met with more than two dozen survivors of religious persecution on Wednesday, including the daughter of a jailed Uyghur professor in China, a Rohingya Muslim who fled state-sponsored violence in Myanmar, and Christians from North Korea, Myanmar and Vietnam. The unscheduled meeting saw Trump host 27 representatives of groups from 16 nations the White House said have suffered violations of religious freedom, including four people from China, and came as the U.S. State Department is hosting its second annual Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom in Washington from July 16-18. “With us today are men and women of many different religious traditions, from many different countries, but what you have in common is that each of you have suffered tremendously for your faith,” he said in welcoming the survivors, noting that they had collectively endured “harassment, threats, attacks, trials, imprisonment, and torture.” “Each of you has now become a witness to the importance of advancing religious liberty all around the world … If people are not free to practice their faith, then all of the freedoms are at risk and, frankly, freedoms don’t mean very much.” Among those Trump met on Wednesday was Jewher Tohti, the daughter of jailed Uyghur professor Ilham Tohti, who regularly highlighted the religious and cultural persecution of Uyghurs in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), but was charged with promoting ethnic separatism and handed a life sentence by a Chinese court on Sept. 23, 2014 following a two-day trial. Tohti told the president about the region’s network of internment camps, where authorities are believed to have detained up to 1.5 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities accused […]