Uyghurs sentenced to cumulative 4.4 million years in prison: study

All told, Uyghurs imprisoned by China in the far-western region of Xinjiang have been sentenced to a cumulative 4.4 million years, a report by Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program says.

And the true tally is probably far higher, researchers said.

The figure highlights the scale and severity of the Chinese government’s crackdown on the mostly Muslim Uyghurs since 2017, when thousands of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities were herded into re-education camps and prisons.

The 25-page report, “Uyghur Race as the Enemy: China’s Legalized Authoritarian Oppression & Mass Imprisonment,” frames the massive incarceration not only as a crime against humanity and genocide, but also as a form of “dangerous lawfare” designed to erode the Uyghurs’ future prospects for dignity, prosperity and freedom. 

The study drew on information from the Xinjiang Victims Database, which has data on nearly 62,700 Uyghurs detained in Xinjiang, based on leaked Chinese police documents and other records.

Researchers also studied records from the Xinjiang High People’s Procuratorate from 2017 to 2021. It does not include numbers from years since then, after the court stopped publishing data, meaning the true number is much higher.

They found 13,114 cases that included a prison sentence, with an average term of 8.8 years, and multiplied the figure by 500,000, which they called a “conservative” figure based on the 540,000 individuals prosecuted by court from 2017 to 2021, to get 4.4 million years.

“This is happening on a scale that the world has not seen,” said Uyghur human rights lawyer and advocate Rayhan Asat, principal author of the report. “And if China is allowed to fulfill the 4.4 million years of a cumulative imprisonment it has sentenced the Uyghur people to, it will mean a total ethnic incapacitation for the Uyghur people.”

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This data is crucial for understanding the profound human rights violations and the long-term impacts on the Uyghur community.

‘Legalized human rights abuse’

The Chinese government uses “legalized authoritarianism” to extend the reach of the authoritarian state by weaponizing its legal system against people critical of state policies, the report said.

In the case of Xinjiang, Beijing has recognized the Uyghur identity as an enemy and has used laws such as Article 120 of the Criminal Law governing terrorist crimes, the Counter-Terrorism Law, and the Xinjiang Implementing Measures for the Counter-Terrorism Law “to legitimize human rights abuses,” it said.

“The involvement of laws as a means of carrying [out] human rights abuses sufficiently characterizes Uyghur incarceration as a legalized human rights abuse,” it said.

The study also noted that while the Chinese authorities make public criminal records in other parts of the country, records from almost 90% of cases in Xinjiang are not public.

Asat told Radio Free Asia that she wanted to contextualize the consequences of China’s actions for the entire Uyghur population given that the mass incarceration of Uyghurs without due process and with disproportionately harsh imprisonment is already horrific in isolation. 

She has publicly campaigned on behalf of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China, including her brother Ekpar Asat, who has been held in detention in Xinjiang since 2016. 

“With a cumulative imprisonment of 4.4 million years — a conservative estimate — it’s nearly impossible for the population to carry on their culture and community — our culture and community,” she said.

Human toll

The analysis comes before the second anniversary on Aug. 31 of a report by former U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet who visited Xinjiang in May 2022 and said China’s mass detentions of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in the region may constitute crimes against humanity.

Her successor, Volker Türk, this March urged China to carry out recommendations from his office to protect human rights in Xinjiang, Tibet and across the country, but Beijing ignored his call.

“[In] the context of mass imprisonment, it gives an idea of just how much, human capital is lost to the Uyghur community, the Uyghur population in China as a result of what is arguably a political and arbitrary, punitive, ethnically-based system of mass imprisonment,” said David J. Simon, director of the university’s Genocide Studies Program.

“The one other thing I will add about that figure is that the authors of the report have stressed to me that it is a conservative estimate — that the real number, the number of years that Uyghur political prisoners may actually be facing under these laws, could actually be substantially higher,” he told RFA.

The report makes several recommendations to address the issue. 

It says Türk, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, or OHCHR, and U.N. member states must trigger all accountability mechanisms to pressure China to free innocent detainees and to use diplomatic tools to collectively push for the release of all imprisoned Uyghurs.

It also recommends that individual states declare they are not willing to do business with China and to impose targeted sanctions like those already imposed by the United States, Britain, the European Union and Canada.

The report also recommends that the U.N.’s Human Rights Commission and the OHCHR jointly condemn Beijing’s actions and establish a Commission of Inquiry in China to investigate atrocity crimes. 

“It’s been nearly a decade after China rolled out its extensive atrocity campaigns against the Uyghurs, and the world’s attention is slowly waning due to other crises emerging,” Asat said. “But the horrors in the Uyghur region have not ceased.”

With additional reporting by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Malcolm Foster.