On 30 July 2014, Uyghur human rights defender Mr Ilham Tohti was formally indicted on charges of ‘separatism’ in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Province in north-western China.
Following his arrest in January 2014, the human rights defender was denied access to lawyers for over two months and has been deprived of food while in detention.
Until his arrest earlier this year, Ilham Tohti was a professor of Economics at the Central Minorities University in Beijing. The human rights defender had regularly criticised Chinese government policy in Xinjiang province, arguing that the Uyghur population has been largely excluded from its development plans.
Ilham Tohti was originally detained after a raid on his home in Beijing on 15 January 2014 and, for the first twenty days of his detention, his legs were shackled. From 16 to 26 January 2014, the human rights defender was on hunger strike to protest the failure to provide halal foods in the detention centre. In February, he was formally arrested on charges of separatism. Following a violent attack in the city of Kunming by suspected Uyghur militants that resulted in the death of 29 people, Ilham Tohti was deprived of food in detention between 1 and 10 March 2014. He was finally permitted to meet with a lawyer on 26 June 2014. It is reported that the human rights defender has lost 16 kilogrammes in weight since his arrest.
In 2006, Ilham Tohti set up the moderate Uyghur Online website to discuss social issues involving Uyghur-Han relations, in articles published both in Chinese and Uyghur. Chinese authorities alleged this website played a role in instigating the violent unrest in Xinjiang province in 2009 which left up to 200 people dead. Consequently, the site was shut down and Ilham Tohti was questioned repeatedly by police who accused him of separatism. More recently, he ran the Uyghur Biz website, which was hosted overseas. Shortly after his arrest in January 2014, this website was shut down and has since been inaccessible.
