UHRP Observes International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief
August 22, 2025 | 1:00 p.m. EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact: Omer Kanat +1 (202) 790-1795, Peter Irwin +1 (646) 906-7722
The Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) marks International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief, calling on government and civil society worldwide to condemn China’s faith-based persecution of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples.
“The Chinese Communist Party deserves global condemnation for its brutal persecution of religious believers,” said Omer Kanat, UHRP Executive Director. “For nine years in East Turkistan, China has committed ongoing atrocity crimes—locking up millions simply for practicing ordinary acts of faith, such as praying, or for being Uyghur and Muslim. To remain silent in the face of this would be deafening.”
The Uyghur Human Rights Project has documented state violence targeting religious Uyghurs in a series of reports. In 2021, UHRP published Islam Dispossessed: China’s Persecution of Uyghur Imams and Religious Figures, which revealed how in a seven-year period the Chinese government had detained or imprisoned at least 1,046 imams and community leaders. Author of the report, UHRP’s Associate Director for Research & Advocacy, Peter Irwin revealed that those detained or imprisoned were targeted for ordinary practices such as prayer, teaching, or officiating ceremonies.
Furthermore, many imams and community leaders received harsh sentences, with 96 percent of documented cases handed five years or more, with some exceeding 20 years or resulting in life imprisonment, often on vague charges. The report concludes that targeted persecution of Uyghur religious figures aims to dismantle religious leadership and prevent the intergenerational transmission of Islamic knowledge.
In 2024, in a UHRP report, Dr. Rachel Harris and Abduweli Ayup spotlighted that Uyghur women, not only men, have been heavily targeted with criminal prosecutions and long prison sentences for ordinary religious practices such as prayer, wearing the hijab, or teaching children.
The report detailed how elderly women and female religious leaders have been imprisoned, sometimes retroactively, for activities that occurred decades earlier, accelerating the erosion of Uyghur religious and community life. These violations of women’s freedom of religion and belief occur alongside other abuses, including gender-based violence, forced sterilization, abortion, and marriage.
UHRP has documented this pattern of violence against religious Uyghurs since the publication of a 2013 report by UHRP researchers Henryk Szadziewski and Greg Fay. The report, titled Sacred Right Defiled, highlights policies criminalizing faith across the Uyghur region that has led to the systemic persecution of individuals exercising their right to religious freedom.
Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the right to freedom of religion or belief. On International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief, UHRP calls on governments and civil society to condemn the Chinese state’s persecution of religious communities in East Turkistan and throughout China.