{"id":42294,"date":"2014-09-17T14:33:00","date_gmt":"2014-09-17T14:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=42294 "},"modified":"2014-09-17T14:33:00","modified_gmt":"2014-09-17T14:33:00","slug":"42294-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=42294","title":{"rendered":"China trial for Uighur academic Ilham Tohti"},"content":{"rendered":"
17 September 2014 Last updated at 08:43 ET<\/div>
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File photo: Ilham Tohti, 4 February 2013<\/div>
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Ilham Tohti is a Beijing-based academic from the Uighur minority group<\/div>
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Prominent Uighur academic Ilham Tohti has gone on trial for separatism in China’s far western region of Xinjiang.<\/div>
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Mr Tohti is an economics scholar who has criticised Beijing’s policies towards the Uighur minority.<\/div>
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He has been detained since January, after he condemned the government’s response to a suicide car attack in Tiananmen Square.<\/div>
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The United Nations, the EU and US have all called for Mr Tohti’s release. He denies the charges against him.<\/div>
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Mr Tohti, 44, is being tried at the Intermediate People’s Court in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.<\/div>
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Tight security<\/div>
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Prosecutors presented evidence alleging that Mr Tohti advocated that Xinjiang should be made independent.<\/div>
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Their evidence included testimony from his former students. Mr Tohti was teaching at Beijing’s Minzu University.<\/div>
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Mr Tohti has rejected the evidence, and his lawyers say that his students’ testimony were made under duress.<\/div>
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One of his lawyers, Li Fangping, told Reuters news agency: “Most of the students said Professor Tohti had separatist goals or intentions… We believe they weren’t trustworthy statements, that they were made under pressure.”<\/div>
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Seven of his students, said to have been working on an Uighur website which Mr Tohti managed, were arrested shortly after he was detained.<\/div>
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Guzaili Nu’er, Tohti’s wife, attended the trial with several of his brothers and appeared distraught, according to AFP news agency.<\/div>
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“He has never opposed the country or any ethnic group,” she was quoted as saying. “He has never done anything like that.”<\/div>
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Human Rights Watch, in a statement, said Mr Tohti had “consistently, courageously and unambiguously advocated peacefully for greater understanding and dialogue between various communities, and with the state”.<\/div>
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“If this is Beijing’s definition of ‘separatist’ activities, it’s hard to see tensions in Xinjiang and between the communities decreasing,” said its China director, Sophie Richardson.<\/div>
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Continue reading the original article<\/a>.<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<div>He has been detained since January, after he condemned the government's response to a suicide car attack in Tiananmen Square. The United Nations, the EU and US have all called for Mr Tohti's release. He denies the charges against him.<\/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-42294","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\/42294","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=42294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}