Sayragul Sauytbay awarded the 2021 Nuremberg International Human Rights Award
Sayragul Sauytbay, a human rights activist and survivor from China’s Xinjiang, has been awarded the 2021 Nuremberg International Human Rights Award, for highlighting the human rights abuses being meted to ethnoreligious minorities in the country’s western region.
“By presenting Ms Sayragul Sauytbay with the 2021 Nuremberg International Human Rights Award, the City of Nuremberg honours a human rights activist whose fate in many aspects is exemplary for that of the ethnoreligious minorities in China,” the Germany based rights organisation said in a statement. Sauytbay’s book, “The Chief Witness” for which she gave several interviews to author Alexandra Cavelius, is a report about the ”inconceivable crimes” committed on a daily basis against Muslim minorities in China‘s “re-education camps” in Xinjiang.
The rights body said that in spite of permanent threats and intimidation attempts by the Chinese Communist Party which is trying to silence her, she bears witness: “The world needs to know what happens in those camps and what the party is really planning.”
Welcoming this decision by the rights body, the World Uyghur Congress said, “Where China has launched an unprecedented attack on women speaking out on abuses in the camps, civil society responds inappropriate manner. Yesterday, Sayragul Sauytbay, a Kazakh camp survivor, was awarded the 2021 Nuremberg International Human Rights Award.”
China has been rebuked globally for cracking down on Uyghur Muslims by sending them to mass detention camps, interfering in their religious activities and sending members of the community to undergo some form of forcible re-education or indoctrination.
Beijing, on the other hand, has vehemently denied that it is engaged in human rights abuses against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang while reports from journalists, NGOs and former detainees have surfaced, highlighting the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal crackdown on the ethnic community, according to several reports.