{"id":41871,"date":"2014-08-28T14:33:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-28T14:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=41871 "},"modified":"2014-08-28T14:33:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-28T14:33:00","slug":"41871-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=41871","title":{"rendered":"Pretrial Hearing Scheduled For Detained Uyghur Scholar Tohti"},"content":{"rendered":"
2014-08-27<\/div>
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Ilham Tohti in Beijing, August 2012.<\/div>
Photo courtesy of Ilham Tohti<\/div>
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Chinese authorities in the troubled northwestern region of Xinjiang have moved a step closer to trying detained Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti for “separatism,” with a pretrial hearing scheduled for next month, his lawyer said on Wednesday.<\/div>
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“They told me a pretrial hearing will take place on Sept. 7,” Liu Xiaoyuan, a member of Tohti’s defense team, told RFA.<\/div>
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“Originally it was scheduled for Sept. 5, but there was a clash with another case that [fellow defense lawyer] Li Fangping is working on, so it’s been moved to the morning of Sept. 7,” he said.<\/div>
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He said Tohti, who was detained in January, would likely attend the hearing in person, but that the hearing and the trial itself were likely to be behind closed doors.<\/div>
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“The charges relate to harming national security … so of course the trial won’t be open to the public,” Liu said. <\/div>
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But he added: “I don’t believe that this does involve state secrets, just that these charges come under the heading of harming national security.”<\/div>
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Video footage<\/div>
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Liu said Tohti’s defense team haven’t yet been allowed access to video footage being used as evidence for the prosecution.<\/div>
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“They told me they have it, and that they’ll let us view it if we go over there,” he said.<\/div>
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The video is believed to be of Tohti’s classes at the Nationalities University in Beijing, Liu added.<\/div>
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“The evidence is supposed to demonstrate that he spoke in favor of separatism in his classes and lectures,” Liu said.<\/div>
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“Of course this is very important evidence, because it’s objective,” he said.<\/div>
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Liu said he expects a trial to follow soon after the hearing.<\/div>
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“The trial should take place not long after the pretrial hearing,” he said.<\/div>
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Back in Beijing, Tohti’s wife Guzulnur told RFA that the video of her husband’s classes is between five and six hours in length.<\/div>
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“It’s footage of him talking in class, him and his students as well,” she said.<\/div>
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Dragged away<\/div>
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Tohti, who has spoken out for greater autonomy for the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), was dragged away from his home in Beijing by dozens of police on Jan. 15.<\/div>
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He was formally arrested on Feb. 20 by the Xinjiang capital Urumqi municipal police department on separatism charges.<\/div>
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Continue reading the original article<\/a>.<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<div>"Originally it was scheduled for Sept. 5, but there was a clash with another case that [fellow defense lawyer] Li Fangping is working on, so it's been moved to the morning of Sept. 7," he said.<\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41871\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}