Global Courant
WASHINGTON – The United States on Friday condemned a life sentence handed down in China against prominent Uyghur academic Rahile Dawut.
This week, a US-based rights group said Dawut, 57, had lost her appeal against her original December 2018 conviction on charges of “endangering state security.”
Rights advocates have accused China of a mass internment campaign against Uyghurs, along with abuses such as forced sterilization and cultural repression, which some government agencies, including the U.S. State Department, are calling “genocide.”
China denies such accusations.
“We condemn the reported life sentence handed down by the government of the People’s Republic of China following a secret legal proceeding by Professor Rahile Dawut,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement.
Before her detention, Dawut was a professor at the Xinjiang University College of Humanities, as well as a leading cultural anthropologist and ethnographer of Uyghur folklore.
She had been held since December 2017 in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where Beijing has been accused of rights abuses against the mainly Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority, which it denies.
Dawut is just one of more than 300 Uyghur intellectuals who have been detained, arrested or imprisoned by Chinese authorities since 2016, according to the US-based Dui Hua Foundation, which reported the conviction.
She worked with many leading Western institutions, such as Harvard and Cambridge universities, which have called for her release.
Some Xinjiang experts said the mass internment of Uyghurs peaked in 2018, but abuses have continued and forced labor has become increasingly prominent. REUTERS
