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Rushan Abbas, an Uyghur human rights activist and founder and executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs and chair of the Executive Committee of the World Uyghur Congress, explains how the danger of China's repression followed her into exile.

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"[The repression] hit my family directly. In the early 1990s, as soon as I started working with US politicians, my father, a high-level academic in Ürümchi, lost his job at 59 in retaliation for my advocacy. In 2018, just days after I spoke publicly at the Hudson Institute, a Washington DC think tank, about the mass detentions, Chinese authorities abducted my sister Gulshan Abbas. She’s a retired physician, a mother of two and a grandmother of four, and she had never been political."

In December 2019, Chinese state media outlet CGTN denied my sister existed and accused me of making up cases and spreading rumours overseas. In December 2020, the authorities finally acknowledged Gulshan had been secretly sentenced to 20 years in prison, obviously on fabricated charges. Her case is one of the clearest examples of how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses kin punishment and transnational repression to silence Uyghurs. My sister turned 64 this June. She’s still in a Chinese prison because I exercised my freedom of speech. We have no picture or video of her. No one has been able to visit her and we have received no independent report on her health or wellbeing.

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Transnational repression has followed me ever since, in the form of cyberattacks, defamation, fabricated court documents, harassment and intimidation. A video appeared on YouTube calling for my execution and that of my husband, Abdulhakim Idris. I have received emails asking what colour rifle I would prefer to be shot with. After I published my memoir, fake books claiming to tell my life story appeared on Amazon. My organisation, Campaign for Uyghurs, has experienced persistent cyberattacks. My case is not unique. Uyghurs in the diaspora and those who speak out continue to suffer transnational repression.

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Governments should use existing sanctions tools, including the Global Magnitsky Act, which allows sanctions on individual human rights abusers, to hold officials responsible for the genocide accountable.

Governments should also refuse to extradite Uyghurs to China. No one should be sent back to a country where they may face genocide.

Governments and international institutions must keep individual cases and the broader human rights crisis on the agenda. They should keep existing official genocide determinations in place and secure the release of political prisoners such as my sister. Human rights should never be treated as secondary to broader relations with Beijing.

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The CCP imposes forced labour, mass arbitrary detention and imprisonment, mass surveillance and restrictions on cultural and religious life. In 2025, there were 3.36 million forced labour transfers and over a million children were placed in state-run boarding schools, where they are raised cut off from their cultural heritage. The Uyghur language is banned in schools. Uyghur books and religious texts have been burned. Uyghur women are subjected to forced abortion, sterilisation and marriage to men from the dominant Han ethnic group.

China’s government claims these policies bring stability, but stability for who? This is a system where the government exercises unchecked power to detain, punish, silence and watch people for their beliefs, their identity and their demands for human dignity.

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