Uighur wins top European rights award

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STRASBOURG, France: A Uighur scholar imprisoned in China since 2014 was jointly awarded a top European human rights prize on Monday, an accolade likely to draw the ire of Beijing.Ilham Tohti, 49, is serving a life sentence on charges of separatism for advocating the rights of Uighurs, a Muslim minority in the northwestern Xinjiang region of China. The Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize, named after the Czech ex-president, dissident and writer, was awarded by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) to Tohti and the Youth Initiative for Human Rights (YIHR), a group created in 2003 to help foster postwar reconciliation in the Balkans. Rights groups say the Uighurs have suffered a severe crackdown that has seen millions interned in re-education camps whose existence China denied until recently.

from The News International - World https://ift.tt/2o44LOE

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