Life sentence for Uyghur scholar Rahile Dawut confirmed by US group
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An internationally recognized expert in Uyghur folklore and ethnographer who disappeared in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region nearly six years ago has been confirmed as serving a life sentence for endangering state security, a U.S.-based human rights group said Thursday.
Rahile Dawut was tried and convicted in December 2018 for the crime of “splittism” by an intermediate people’s court in Xinjiang, and appealed that sentence, the group said.
“The most recent information confirmed that her appeal was subsequently rejected by the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region High People’s Court,” the San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation said in a statement, citing a source in the Chinese government.
“Although there has been speculation that Professor Rahile Dawut was given a long sentence, this is believed to be the first time that a reliable source in the Chinese government has confirmed the sentence of life imprisonment,” it said.
Dawut, who was born in 1966, created and directed the university’s Minorities Folklore Research Center and wrote dozens of articles in international journals and a number of books, including studies on Islamic sacred sites in Central Asia, and presented her work at conferences around the world.
An anthropologist by training, she disappeared in December 2017, believed to be arrested and detained in one of the many internment camps in a mass incarceration campaign launched that year by Chinese authorities.
RFA Uyghur learned in July 2021 through interviews with employees of Xinjiang University, that the star scholar was in fact detained along with other members of the Uyghur intellectual and cultural elite, sentenced and jailed
“Professor Rahile Dawut joins the long and growing list of Uyghur intellectuals — by one count more than 300 — who have been detained, arrested, and imprisoned since 2016,” said the Dui Hua Foundation.
The non-profit group, which focuses on seeking prisoner releases and justice reforms through direct dialogue with the Chinese government, said it had put Dawut’s name on 28 lists of prisoners of concern submitted to the Chinese government, and had received four responses.
China has held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs in a network of detention camps constructed in 2017, with smaller numbers of Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, fellow Turkic-speaking people, also incarcerated in the system. Beijing first denied the existence of the camps, but later changed tack and described them as vocational training or re-education centers aimed at combating extremism in Xinjiang.
New York-based rights group Scholars at Risk gave Dawut their Courage to Think Award in 2020.
“The sentencing of Professor Rahile Dawut to life in prison is a cruel tragedy, a great loss for the Uyghur people, and for all who treasure academic freedom,” said John Kamm, executive director of the Dui Hua Foundation.
Edited by Malcolm Foster