Index relies entirely on the support of donors and readers to do its work.
Help us keep amplifying censored voices today.
“Not speaking out causes guilt; but speaking out causes fear.” – anonymous Uyghur woman
Despite being far outside China’s borders, in a region synonymous with human rights, rule of law, and democracy, many Uyghurs in Europe refrain from publicly expressing concerns for their friends and family in Xinjiang or from sharing their own. To what extent is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) working to intimidate, silence, and discredit Uyghurs in Europe? And what can be done to protect their right to free expression?
Marking the launch of our latest report, this virtual event chaired by Index on Censorship’s Flo Marks examines the scope and scale of the Chinese Communist Party’s interference in Uyghurs’ right to freedom of expression in Europe.
Meet the Speakers
Dolkun Isa
Dolkun Isa is the President of the World Uyghur Congress and Vice President of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO). He was a former student-leader of pro-democracy demonstrations at Xinjiang University in 1988 and founded the Students’ Science and Culture Union at the university in 1987 working on programs to eliminate illiteracy, promote science and lead other students in East Turkestan. He was then dismissed from university.
After enduring persecution from the Chinese government, Isa fled China in 1994 and sought asylum in Europe, and became a citizen of Germany in 2006. He has since been presenting Uyghur human rights issues to the UN Human Rights Council, European Parliament, European governments and international human rights organizations. He has worked to mobilize the Uyghur diaspora community to collectively advocate for their rights and the rights of the Uyghurs in East Turkistan.
Isobel Cockerell
Isobel Cockerell is an award-winning British journalist. Since October 2018 she has been a reporter for Coda Story, covering disinformation, the war on science and authoritarian technology. She has also written and worked as a radio reporter and video journalist covering politics, migration, LGBTQ issues, environmental affairs and culture for platforms such as WIRED, The Daily Beast, the Huffington Post, USA Today, Rappler and Eurasianet.
In 2020 she won the European press prize distinguished reporting award for a multimedia project she reported and produced for Coda in collaboration with WIRED on Uyghur women fighting a digital resistance against China’s surveillance.
She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism school.
Nus Ghani MP
Nusrat Ghani is the MP for Wealden. A former Transport Minister, she is now Vice-Chair of the 1922 Committee and an active member of the influential Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee. Here, she led an inquiry on supply chain transparency which exposed slave labour in UK value chains and the data harvesting of British consumers. For this, she was sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in March 2021, the only woman in Parliament who was, in an unprecedented move by the CCP to intimidate British MPs.
Nusrat was instrumental in leading on the Genocide Amendment to the UK’s flagship Trade Bill, aiming to stop the British Government pursuing preferential trade agreements with countries committing real time genocide. She led a campaign which resulted in Parliament unanimously declaring the markers of genocide are being met in Xinjiang. She is an active member of the Inter Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC).
Nusrat has spoken at numerous academic and public events on the nature of campaigning within Parliament to plug the policy gaps around declaring genocide, guaranteeing supply chain transparency, and pushing for closer scrutiny of British citizens’ data being harvested.
As a former member of both the Home Affairs Select Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee, she covered issues such as such as security, policing, counterterrorism strategies and antisemitism. Nusrat is also the UK representative to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. She was nominated for the 2021 NATO PA Women for Peace and Security Award and came runner up to Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
Flo Marks
Flo Marks is currently a Researcher at Index on Censorship and has been central to the research and writing of the February 2022 Uyghur Report. She has her work published in the LA Review of Books, Exposé as well as Index on Censorship. Her focus thus has been on raising attention to mass atrocity crimes, CCP influence in Europe, protecting the rights of Chinese dissidents, and empowering the voices of minorities.
She is also a politics BA student at the University of Exeter and a member of the campaign group Students for Uyghurs. Alongside other students, she exposed Exeter’s controversial links to Tsinghua (and the Uyghur Genocide ideological architect, Hu Angang), commenting to The Times on the subject. She has organised, chaired university events and developed social media posts for @studentsforuyghursexeter (Instagram). Until January 2022, she worked as a diversity and inclusion intern for MEA Consulting, giving her the professional space to drive positive change. And, in 2019 she was the UK and European winner of Zonta International’s Young Women in Public Affairs Award. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Last year Index launched a new workstream – Banned by Beijing. This project was a significant step for Index as it seeks to explore not the actions of a repressive regime against its own citizenry but rather how they are seeking to exert influence abroad which is undermining our collective right to free expression.
The need for this step came in light of increasing anecdotes and news stories about how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was seeking to leverage its soft power outside Chinese borders and the introduction of the National Security Law in Hong Kong and its impact across the world. We have therefore begun this project to document the reality.
This is not designed to be an anti-Chinese piece of work, but rather anti-authoritarian. Many of our team are Sinophiles and we are all anti-racist. But there is a difference between the people of China and the actions of their government.
As we have seen in the news this week in the UK, where a British Parliamentarian has reportedly accepted over £400,000 in donations from someone MI5 consider to be a Chinese asset, there seem to be few limitations on how the CCP seeks to exert influence.
It has become increasingly clear that the CCP has a clear strategy to use every resource at its disposal, beyond even its economic might, to shape a narrative about its aspirations and goals. An attempt to both promote a One China approach and to re-write its history and current actions on human rights and persecution – especially with regards to non-Han Chinese and specifically treatment of the Uighurs.
At the end of last year Index released its first report under the Banned by Beijing banner – exploring the way the Confucius Institutes across Europe are being used to drive a pro-CCP line on campus.
And as we head into February, when China hosts the Winter Olympics, Index will launch its second report – this time exploring how the CCP are seeking to systematically intimidate Uighurs living in Europe and attempting to dismiss and undermine reports of what is happening in Xinjiang province.
Every country has the right to advocate around the world, but that isn’t what the CCP are doing. They are seeking to leverage their economic might and political power to restrict the rights of people who live outside their borders. They are seeking to restrict our rights to free expression if they don’t align with the CCP preferred narrative. Which is why Index will keep analysing and will shine a light on their actions.
Nathan Law has been imprisoned, disqualified from political office and forced to seek political asylum in the UK – all for fighting for democratic rights in Hong Kong, his home city. But, in spite of it all, he remains optimistic.
“As an activist I’m not entitled to lose hope,” he tells Index on Censorship. “I still believe that maybe in a decade’s time I can set foot in Hong Kong, when it’s democratic and free.”
Law, 28, fled to London in the summer of 2020 after the passing of the National Security Law, a draconian piece of legislation that criminalises even a whisper of criticism against Beijing’s rule.
Given the chance, what would he tell Communist Party leaders in Beijing?
“I would say, ‘There is no totalitarian regime that can remain forever. All of them will collapse’, and I’d say, ‘That is your fate if you continue to do what you are doing’.”
Law’s face and name are synonymous with the struggles in Hong Kong. Alongside Joshua Wong, Alex Chow and Agnes Chow, he has helped drive the recent protest movement.
The son of a construction worker and a cleaner, he first became interested in democratic values at secondary school when the late writer and human rights defender Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. Liu was serving his fourth prison sentence in China and was unable to accept the prize in person. An image of an empty chair soon went viral, a stark reminder of how bad human rights were in China.
“I grew up in a family that did not talk about politics, did not talk about social affairs,” Law says. Although he studied in a pro-Beijing school, he was “not heavily brainwashed to believe in the Communist Party”. He adds: “I was apolitical. I was not involved.” But when Liu won the prize, the principal of his school publicly denounced the writer in morning assembly.
“It triggered my curiosity because I thought people getting the Nobel Prize are the ones who are good in their field. So how come such a person – a Chinese [person] – would be criticised in that fashion? It really triggered my curiosity and got me to look into the work that he had been doing. He opened up a gate for me to understand all these concepts.”
That gate first led Law to the Tiananmen Square vigil, held in Hong Kong every year since 1989, and then to him leading the 2014 Umbrella Movement (which later landed him in prison on charges of “unlawful assembly”).
After this, Law became the youngest legislator in Hong Kong’s history, a position from which he was quickly disqualified when he modified his oath of allegiance to China during the swearing-in ceremony in October 2016.
In the same year, he founded Demosistō, a pro-democracy political party, with Agnes Chow and Wong.
But time was up when the National Security Law was passed. Demosistō was disbanded, Law was forced out of Hong Kong and Chow and Wong were jailed, alongside scores of others connected to the democracy movement.
Today, dissent is in a straitjacket in Hong Kong. And yet not all have given up fighting. In Law’s recently published book – Freedom: How We Lose It And How We Fight Back – he writes: “Even during this most bitter of times the spirit of ordinary Hong Kong people continues to shine, even if it must do so in the shadows.”
Law lists the people who refuse to have their prison sentences lessened by agreeing to the charges against them and instead “defend themselves in order to narrate their story at the risk of heavy sentencing”. He lists those who attend court hearings to show support to the defendants, those who write letters to the imprisoned and those who advocate for any policy that might remotely challenge the government.
“The hope lies in these people. Even though we are in the darkest time and change is seemingly impossible, people are still doing things because they feel that it is the right thing to do,” he says.
Law might have an admirable sense of hope, but his is not an easy life. He had to publicly sever ties with his family when he moved to the UK and has been unable to talk to Agnes Chow and Wong, too. He misses the people and he misses the place.
“I always dream about Hong Kong,” he says. “You’re familiar with everything. You don’t have to think. Like when you step into the MTR [the subway]. It’s in your muscles, in your memory. You understand everything. You understand all the slang. The background noise with people’s hectic walk, the hectic talk of Cantonese and bus horns, those noises from the stores and from restaurants. It’s just unique.”
Law has been granted asylum in the UK – a move that angered Beijing, which declared him a criminal suspect. Even though he is thousands of miles from Hong Kong, he still has to look over his shoulder. He takes extra precautions: he never mentions where he lives and he takes detours when he leaves and returns home – measures that have come to define the life of China’s dissidents. He simply doesn’t feel safe “because of how extensive China’s reach can be”.
“We’ve got cases like Navalny; the Russian dissident forced to land in Belarus; we’ve also got a lot of cases of Uyghur activists around the world being arrested or extradited back to China. There are a lot of things that can happen to dissidents. It is not a secret that I am almost at the top of the list of national enemies that China portrays, so things like this could happen,” he says.
“On the other hand, I don’t want any of these fears to hinder my activities and my activism. So I will try to be vigilant to protect myself, but I will also try 100% to promulgate the agenda of the Hong Kong democratic movement.”
One of the ways that he wants to do this is through publishing his book. A blend of personal experience and broader context, Law wants it to appeal to as many people as possible and for these people to “act after reading it”.
“I’m an author, of course, but at the end of the day my essential identity is an activist. By definition, an activist is someone who tries to empower people to act in order to precipitate social changes. I intend to appeal to people to be more aware of their own democratic states,” he says.
As for what we can do to help Hong Kong, Law puts it simply: “Get involved. Pay more attention to Hong Kong and to China. Start to look into campaigns that could help, like boycotting the Olympics, supporting political prisoners or even reading news – just supporting the news agencies who produce these fantastic stories for Hong Kong and for China.
“After that, if you really want to be a campaigner that supports Hong Kong then get organised. Find your local grassroots organisation and be a volunteer and try to explain that to your friends and your neighbours.”
It might be the darkest chapter in Hong Kong’s story, but – to channel Law’s optimism – let’s hope it’s not the last.
Young activist Nathan Law’s election to the Legislative Council in 2016 shattered the myth that the people of Hong Kong did not desire freedom and democracy, he says in an extract from his new book
Extracted from Freedom: How We Lose it and How We Fight Back, by Nathan Law, published by Transworld in November 2021
This interview and the extract appeared in the winter issue of Index on Censorship. Click here for more information on this issue
As Human Rights Day is marked around the world, the Uyghur Tribunal in London has just announced that “beyond reasonable doubt” the Chinese government is perpetrating genocide. Evidence proving forced sterilisation, torture, imprisonment, rape, forcible transfer and displacement and other inhumane acts are overwhelming.
As stated by member of parliament Nus Ghani the judgement has offered “a rare moment of accountability for victims and survivors of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] regime’s cruelty.” The ruling is the result of time, energy and bravery over the last year and a half of individuals involved with the UT, without which this small justice for the Uyghur people would have likely never materialised.
It has not been without personal and institutional cost for those involved though. The PRC has sanctioned key barristers and legal institutions involved in the proceedings, while Uyghur witnesses have been threatened in order to silence them; yesterday a UT official, Hamid Sabi, confirmed at least one Uyghur witness refused to testify due to the CCP threatening the safety of their parents in Xinjiang.
With Chinese state propaganda continuing to work hard to discredit the ruling with accusations of it being a “fake tribunal” “delivering lies of the century”, UT officials and UK politicians have long sought to emphasise the tribunal’s independence and neutrality. During the judgement summary, Geoffrey Nice QC stressed the rigorous and impartial processes used; there was no “pre-judgement” on the PRC, assuming innocence until proven guilty for example. Ghani stated “the tribunal has worked to the highest criminal standards and has proof beyond reasonable doubt” to come to the guilty verdict of genocide, crimes against humanity and torture.
With a concrete ruling like this, many hope it will be hard for the UK government to ignore.
In a Westminster Hall debate on the eve of the UT judgement, member of parliament Chris Bryant stated: “If global Britain is to mean anything, it has to mean a passionate commitment by the United Kingdom, in every corner of the globe, to liberty, personal freedom, fair trial, the rule of law, freedom from torture […]” and to utilise sanctions against foreign officials complicit in eroding such principles. He noted that the recent leaked Xinjiang papers have been crucial but not critical in implicating the policies and actions taken by high-level Chinese government officials in the genocide, including President Xi Xinping.
This call for action now carries even more weight following the UT ruling. Ghani said this “emphatic decision must now compel the UK government to take action” with the duty to “engage all state-craft, due diligence, risk assessment, all internal and international toolkits available to ensure we are not aiding or abetting the Uyghur genocide.” This includes the government publically recognising genocide is occurring in Xinjiang, placing sanctions on the architects of the genocide and making good on promised export and import controls.
While this ruling is a very positive step, it will still need individuals and organisations to speak up for Uyghurs. Index has been shining a light on Chinese government abuses in Xinjiang for years. Please support us by subscribing to our newsletter and magazine, following us on Twitter and joining in our calls for an end to the genocide.