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Eastern Turkestan – China 11 Years Prison For
Having Stundied Chinese Policy...
Brussels, 4 February 2003.
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Mr Tohti Tunyaz, an ethnic
Uighur from the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR)
while visiting XUAR, as postgraduate student at the
Tokyo University's School of Humanities (Japan)specialising in the history of Chinese government
policy towards minority groups, has been arrested on
February 6, 1998, for obtaining and copying part of a
50-year-old document, which he obtained with the help
of an official librarian. |
On November 10, 1998, Mr Tunyaz was officially charged
by the Chinese authorities with "stealing state
secrets for foreign persons" and "inciting national
disunity". The latter charge on the base of an
allegedly published book in Japan in 1998 entitled
“The Inside Story of the Silk Road”, advocating,
according to the Chinese government, ethnic separation,
which according to scholars in Tokyo has never been
written by Mr Tunyaz.
Mr Tunyaz was convicted by the Urumqi Intermediate
People's Court on March 10, 1999, and following an
appeal, was sentenced by China's Supreme Court on
February 15, 2000 to 11 years in prison with an
additional two years' deprivation of political rights.
Mr Tohti Tunyaz is currently serving his 11-year
sentence in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region Prison
No. 3 in the provincial capital of Urumqi. It is
reported that he has exhausted his appeals and will
therefore remain incarcerated until his sentence
expires on March 31, 2009.
Question of Olivier Dupuis, secretary of the
Transnational Radical Party and member of the European
Parliament, to the Commission:
“Has the Commission undertaken any initiative
concerning the case of Mr Tohti Tunyaz ? Does the
Commission intend to enforce in any way the December
2001 Declaration of the United Nations Working Group
on Arbitrary Detention granting Mr. Tunyaz status of "arbitrarily
detained" ? More generally which initiatives does the
Commission intend to take in order to create the
conditions for a political dialogue on the future
status of East-Turkestan between the Chinese
authorities and the representatives of the
East-Turkestan oppositional movements ?”
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