Uyghur student arrested in Egypt still missing two years on

Amnesty International launched a petition to find an Uyghur student deported from Egypt two years ago, who has since disappeared.

Following an order in May 2017 for Uyghur students to return to the Xinjiang province of China, Egyptian authorities raided student accommodation.

Although Yiliyasijiang Reheman and his pregnant wife attempted to flee, Reheman became one of 200 students that were arrested in 2017, 16 of whom were deported to China.

Fears grew for the deported students, who were likely sent to the internment camps where staff are ordered to “promote repentance and confession,” according to leaked documents.

During one week in 2017, 15,000 people from southern Xinjiang were sent to the camps, where detainees have reported being gang raped, tortured, used as medical experiments and forced to eat pork.

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Since 2017, up to one million people have been sent to China’s internment camps.

In December 2017, news broke that two of the students who had been living in Egypt died in police custody, after voluntarily returning to China.

The Chinese government is pressuring countries seeking closer ties with Beijing to arrest and surrender Uyghurs – including Morocco, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan.

China’s treatment of Uyghurs in the northwest region of Xinjiang is coming under increasing scrutiny.

At the end of October, 23 countries backed a British statement condemning human rights abuses in the camps, yet Egypt praised China for its “remarkable achievements in the field of human rights.”

The US House of Representatives just passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, calling on the US president, Donald Trump, to condemn the abuses against Muslims, to call for the closure of the camps and to place sanctions on Chinese officials involved in the abuses.

China has accused the bill of slandering “China’s efforts in deradicalisation and counter-terrorism.”

Amnesty are calling on the Chinese government to close the internment camps, and disclose the whereabouts of the detainees.