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China Hints at Trials for 20 Seeking Asylum

Originally published by The New York Times, 13 February 2010

BEIJING — The Chinese Foreign Ministry has indicated that 20 Uighur asylum seekers who were deported from Cambodia to China in December are being or have been put on trial for what China considers criminal activities.

“China is a country ruled by law,” Ma Zhaoxu, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in a written statement to The New York Times. “The judicial authorities deal with illegal criminal issues strictly according to law.”

Mr. Ma’s statement came last week in a brief reply to a list of detailed questions The Times sent to the Foreign Ministry inquiring about the fate of the Uighurs.

Chinese officials promised to deal with the Uighurs in a transparent manner when they were returned to China in December, but the Chinese government has so far refused to release any information on the whereabouts and well-being of the Uighurs. After the Uighurs showed up in Cambodia late last year, Chinese officials said they were being investigated for possible crimes related to deadly ethnic rioting that broke out in the western region of Xinjiang in July.

The Uighurs had applied for asylum at a United Nations office in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. Since the rioting erupted in Xinjiang, a desert region that the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic group, call their homeland, the Chinese authorities have been detaining Uighurs, trying them and on occasion sentencing them to death. The regional government of Xinjiang is doubling its security budget this year compared with 2009.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/world/asia/14uighur.html