Yaxue Cao, January 15, 2024 1. People often assume that I know Ilham Tohti in person. I don’t. When Ilham was arrested on January 15, 2014 from his home in Beijing, I, a relative newcomer to human rights living overseas, barely knew his name. I began to read about him. The first thing I read was his autobiographical essay My Ideals and the Career Path I Have Chosen. “I was born in 1969 into a Uighur family in Atush City, Kizilsu Kirghiz Autonomous Prefecture, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” he thus began. His father, a young communist cadre, died when he was two in factional fighting during the Cultural Revolution. It was the first event in Ilham’s childhood, and the point from which I drew the […]

André Gattonlin, Marie Holzman, and Noël Mamère, July 18, 2016 This is a translation of Donnons le prix Sakharov à un intellectuel ouïghour published in the French newspaper Libération on July 14, 2016. – The Editors   The Sakharov Prize is awarded every year in October, to honor individuals or organizations who have dedicated their lives to defending human rights and fundamental freedoms. The award, which was created in 1985 by the French MP Jean-François Deniau, may well be awarded this year to an Uighur intellectual who was sentenced in 2014 to life in prison. It turns out that this professor from Minzu University (University for Nationalities) in Beijing had been discovered in 2008 by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was invited to spend […]

Translated From a Report Posted by RFA on October 16, 2015   Noted French Sinologist Prof. Marie Holzman, someone who knows Ilham Tohti, is calling on the European Parliament to award the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to Ilham, a well-known Uyghur intellectual who has been sentenced to life in prison, and to speak out more forcefully on his behalf. When Prof. Holzman, a noted French Sinologist, went to China as a student in the 1970s, she met several youths who at the time were opposing the Chinese dictatorship and struggling for democracy. Later on, the representative figure for this group of youths, Wei Jingsheng (魏京生), received a sentence of 15 years imprisonment. This spurred Prof. Holzman to become one of the Sinologists in the […]