The Chinese government has sentenced and detained nearly 30,000 Uyghurs on so-called “terrorism-related” charges, say overseas Uyghur activists quoting a leaked Chinese police database that gives personal details in respect of each interne.

This is said to be the largest known list of Uighurs detained to date, reflecting the scale of the Chinese government’s incarceration of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in “re-education camps” and prisons

The Konaxahar County in the southwestern Kashgar region has acquired the dubious distinction of the highest known incarceration rate in the world. Nearly one in 25 people have been jailed here for terrorism-related crimes, adds the Taiwan based Liberty Times Net (LTN) in a report.

The prison in Shufu County accounts for another 10,000 plus Uyghurs in jail.

“Even by the most conservative estimates, the incarceration rate in Shufu County is more than ten times higher than in the United States, and more than thirty times the overall incarceration rate in China in 2013 that is available to outsiders”, the LTN report observes.

The jail term of those detained in Shufu, a predominantly agrarian region, ranges from two years to 25 years, with an average of nine years, and most of them were arrested in 2017.

VOA and The Associated Press (AP) obtained the leaked list from Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur activist living in exile in Norway, but it is said that the material was originally written by independent Xinjiang scholar Gene Bunin.

Darren Byler, a scholar who has studied Xinjiang’s mass incarceration system, points out that most of the arrests and convictions were arbitrary and extra-judicial. Most of the arrested persons were picked up because they had relatives overseas or downloaded certain mobile phone applications. program or data.

Said another expert, “local police in Xinjiang have a quota for arrests”. This was reason that in some cases, even entire villages of men have been arrested and entire families driven out of their homes.

International human rights organizations, the United States and other countries have accused China of abusing Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities.  (SAT)