Case studies for the uyghur re-education

camps

Case one- Gülbahar Jalilova

A Uyghur businesswoman of Kazakh nationality, Gülbahar Jalilova recalled that before her
detention, she had an ordinary life. Yet, on 22 May 2017, she was arrested during a business
trip to China for allegedly being a ‘potential terrorist.’ From this date, she was deprived of
her liberty arbitrarily for sixteen months.
Her testimony provides harrowing insights into the deeply gendered impact of detention
and ill-treatment on women. She describes a ‘terrifying place’, where ‘conditions were
ones of horror’ – with a lack of adequate hygiene, food or water – and where women
suffered from rape and ‘constant degrading treatments’, including for speaking in Uyghur
among themselves.
" On arrival, i was stripped naked and was asked to change to a yellow
uniform. i was forced to get a urine test to check if i was pregnant: if so, i
would be taken to the hospital for forced abortion."
"i saw girls as young as fourteen years old, and women as old as eighty. it
hurt me to see these young innocent teenagers experiencing such horror.
it is extremely distressing."

In November 2020, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial

Discrimination (CERD) wrote to the Government looking at the
implementation of urgent recommendations from China’s 2018 review, a
turning point in bringing global attention to the arbitrary detention of over a
million Uyghurs and Turkic people in camps. In the letter, the Committee
expressed grave concern that:
NGOs working on human rights issues in China operate under extremely
restricted circumstances that ‘prevent [them] from documenting and
investigating violations’
‘Large numbers of Uyghurs and members of other minorities are arbitrarily
detained in extrajudicial detention facilities operating as education and
training centres and in forced labour camps’
‘Children of those detained have been placed in State-run institutions, even of
parents that have not given consent
Governmental controls over day-to-day life in Xinjiang, including ‘stops by law
enforcement at numerous checkpoints and ‘facial recognition systems to
identify and track Uyghurs’, amount to ‘violations of international legal
prohibitions against discrimination’
source- International Service For Human Rights, https://ishr.ch/latest-
updates/china-uyghur-camp-survivor-reminds-un-of-duty-to-urgently-start-
remote-reporting/

Case two- Tursunay Ziyawudun

A Uyghur survivor of the Chinese Communist Party’s concentration camp system in

Xinjiang tells Congress how she faced horrendous torture for almost a year, and how iris
scans in city cameras alerted the police wherever she went after her release.
Testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday, she recalled the
graphic horrors she and other women suffered at the hands of the CCP for over 10 months,
and how the Chinese government continued to track her every move once she was out.

"All the women had to be sterilized, or fitted with an IUD. Many young women were
crying, screaming when they were told they would be sterilized and could never have
children”
"I was tortured with an electric stick."
Rape, forced sterilizations, genital electrocution, and other barbaric crimes against
humanity occurred regularly in these camps in the Xinjiang region of China, according to
her testimony. Between March and December of 2018, “We were given injections of
unknown medications. Every day, we had to endlessly swear loyalty to the Chinese
government and reject our faith,” Ziyawudun testified through a translator. “One time an
order came. All the women had to be sterilized, or fitted with an IUD. Many young women
were crying, screaming when they were told they would be sterilized and could never have
children."
she says that when she went out on the streets finally, cameras would recognize her just
from her eyes and then police officers would come running.

“In China, initially, they started with collecting voice samples, iris scans, DNA samples to build
this giant biometric data for the Uyghurs, and that paved the way for using integrated joint
operating platforms that Human Rights Watch documented,” said Turkel, chairman of UHRP.
“The United States can and should do more to prevent Silicon Valley and the US universities
from cooperating with the CCP or CCP-funded companies selling the so-called ‘Muslim tracking’
facial recognition system being used in this high-tech genocide” — Nury Turkel, Uyghur Human
Rights Project

Turkel warned that American tech companies and universities were aiding the CCP’s techno-
totalitarian regime through their partnerships and business practices that benefit the
Communist regime.
“The United States can and should do more to prevent Silicon Valley and the US universities
from cooperating with the CCP or CCP-funded companies selling the so-called ‘Muslim tracking’
facial recognition system being used in this high-tech genocide,” Turkel testified.
Silicon Valley needs to step up to the plate. They haven’t really publicly at least, recognized the
seriousness of the issue.
“Previously, when they came to testify in Congress, most of the CEOs from the Silicon Valley
companies — high-tech companies — dodge the question about, at least, the forced labor
aspect of their business practices in China.”