NEWS

Eid Celebrations and Chinese Propaganda Campaign in East Turkistan   

The World Uyghur Congress team wished all Uyghurs and Muslims around the world a happy Eid, despite the fact that Uyghur families are separated and Uyghurs in East Turkistan are not free to celebrate religious festivities. On July 21,  RFA reported that the Chinese administration in East Turkistan had organized a campaign to co-opt Eid with staged displays of happy and dancing ethnic groups to counter accusations of widespread rights abuses and religious repression of Uyghurs in East Turkistan.

EU Legislation to Clean Up Supply Chains and Corporate Governance Has Been Delayed After Industry Lobbying                                                                                                                                        

The proposed EU law on Sustainable Corporate Governance for companies has been delayed until Autumn 2021. The European Commission was forced by industrial lobbying to delay a landmark proposal on holding  companies accountable for human rights and environmental abuses in their supply chains. The European Commission was due to launch its proposal on new due diligence rules for companies in June, covering EU companies’ ties to practices, such as Uyghur forced labour in global supply chains. 

Inside China’s Largest Detention Center                             

AP journalists were given access  to a large detention center in East Turkistan by the central authorities, with the intention to counter western critics. AP journalists discovered that China holds, and plans to hold, vast numbers of innocent people for years to come in detention.  Despite the fact that AP journalists were unable to speak directly to any former or current Uyghur or Turkic detainees, many relatives of those imprisoned say they were sentenced on spurious charges, and experts caution that the opacity of the Chinese legal system is obvious.

BuzzFeed News Reveal the Full Capacity of China’s Previously Secret Network of Prisons and Detention Camps in East Turkistan        

On July 21, BuzzFeed reported on the large-scale network of  prisons and detention camps in East Turkistan: “enough space to detain more than 1 million” at the same time. The report reveals the full capacity of China’s previously secret network of prisons and detention camps in East Turkistan. Even this extraordinary capacity is very likely an underestimate, as it does not take into account the suffocating overcrowding that many former detainees have previously described. The Chinese government erted covschools, hospitals, and apartment buildings into makeshift camps. This twin process, according to BuzzFeed, allowed authorities to immediately detain hundreds of thousands of Muslims until its vast new detention infrastructure was completed.

Kodak Delets Posts by Photographer Patrick Wack, Author of DUST Visual Narrative of East Turkestan      

The American photo company Kodak is facing  public backlash after deleting an Instagram post featuring photos from a French documentary photographer, Patrick Wack. Wack described the region as an “abrupt descent into an Orwellian dystopia”.Kodak apologized this week for sharing the photographer’s work and reiterated its platform isn’t meant to be political. Patric Wack, who lived in China for more than a decade, promoted his new photo book “DUST” that features a series of photos – all shot on Kodak film – from East Turkistan between 2016-2019.

Tursunjan Nurmamat, a Uyghur Scientist Has Been Confirmed Detained                    

On July 20, RFA reported that Tursunjan Nurmamat, a Uyghur research scientist at the Chinese university of Shanghai has been confirmed detained for three months under  police custody in Tongji. The reason Tursunjan Nurmamat is detained is unclear. He did his postdoctoral research in Texas and California, and is one of many intellectuals from East Turkistan to vanish from public life into the internment camps or prison system.

PARTICIPATE

On July 29, WUC in collaboration with partner organisations is holding a protest against Confucius-Institute and state funding of Chinese propaganda. The protest is taking place in Ingolstadt, from 2 pm to 4 pm, at Theaterplatz. 

Keep signing and sharing our changeorg_deutschland petition to ask German Parliament to recognize the Uyghur genocide.