The Dui Hua Foundation reported this Thursday (21) that university professor Rahile Dawut, a member of the Uyghur minority in China, was sentenced to life in prison by the Chinese dictatorship.
The organization pointed out that it was informed about the matter by a Chinese government source. The Dui Hua Foundation is a US-based nonprofit dedicated to seeking better incarceration conditions and leniency for prisoners in China.
The Uyghurs are a mostly Muslim ethnic group who mainly inhabit Xinjiang, an autonomous territory located in northwestern China.
In recent years, the UN, human rights groups and numerous reports have reported mass incarceration of members of this ethnic group in the region (under the pretext of combating extremism), torture, sexual violence, executions, religious persecution and ethnic cleansing – which consisted of orchestrating the immigration of people from the Han ethnic group, the majority in China, and the emigration of Uighurs through incarceration, thus making it difficult to perpetuate this ethnicity, in addition to forced sterilizations and abortions and the forced transfer of children.
This process, in which more than 1 million Uyghurs were arrested, was classified by the United States as genocide.
Dawut, 57, specializes in Uyghur folklore and traditions and taught at the Faculty of Humanities at Xinjiang University. She has published several articles and books in her area of research, given lectures at Western universities such as Harvard, Cornell University and the University of British Columbia, and has been a visiting researcher at the universities of Pennsylvania, Washington, Indiana and Cambridge.
According to the Dui Hua Foundation, she was arrested in December 2017 and convicted a year later for the crime of “separatism”. She appealed the sentence, but the appeal was rejected by the Higher People’s Court of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Dui Hua was already aware that Dawut had been sentenced to a severe sentence, but has only now confirmed that it is a life sentence. The teacher was also sentenced to lifelong loss of political rights.
According to the Dui Hua Foundation, more than 300 Uyghur intellectuals have been arrested by the Chinese dictatorship since 2016.
In a statement released by the organization, the teacher’s daughter, Akeda Pulati, asked China to release her mother. “I worry about my mother every day. Thinking about my innocent mother having to spend the rest of her life in prison brings me unbearable pain. China, show mercy and release my mother who is innocent,” she said.
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