On Human Rights Day: A Call to Restore Dignity, Faith, and Freedom for Uyghurs

CUS Press Release

For Immediate Release

December 10, 2025

Contact@Uyghurstudy.org

Uyghurstudy.org

Today, December 10, is Human Rights Day, established by the United Nations to commemorate the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It is a day meant to remind the world that human dignity and fundamental freedoms belong to all. Each year, the United Nations highlights a theme that underscores the universal rights all people should enjoy. This year’s theme, “Human Rights: Our Everyday Essentials,” reminds the world that the ability to speak freely, worship openly, learn one’s language, and live without fear are not privileges, they are the foundations of human life.

Yet for the Uyghur people in East Turkistan, these “everyday essentials” have been systematically denied. Instead of freedom and dignity, Uyghurs face a state-sponsored campaign designed to erase identity, silence faith, and dismantle community.

For Uyghurs, the “everyday” has become a landscape of surveillance, criminalization, erasure, and genocide. The most basic acts of human existence: praying in a mosque, speaking one’s mother tongue to a child, or communicating with a relative abroad, are punished as acts of “extremism.”

This year’s Human Rights Day carries profound weight for the Uyghur community. It falls during a week of remembrance and resistance: yesterday marked Uyghur Genocide Recognition Day, and this Friday, December 12, marks the 40th anniversary of the 1985 Uyghur Student Protests in Urumchi. Forty years ago, Uyghur students marched to demand equality and respect; today, we march simply for the right to exist.

As detailed in our October 2025 report, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has waged a systematic war on the spiritual “essentials” of the Uyghur people. While Beijing stages Potemkin tours for foreign diplomats to showcase a sanitized, state-controlled version of Islam, the reality on the ground is the destruction of thousands of mosques and the imprisonment of religious scholars.

Furthermore, our August 2025 report, “Exposing China’s Propaganda Campaigns in MENA,” revealed how the CCP manipulates media narratives across the Muslim world to obscure these crimes. By framing the genocide as “counter-terrorism” and “development,” China attempts to sever bonds of solidarity between Uyghurs and the Muslim world.

On this Human Rights Day, CUS also draws attention to the specific targeting of Uyghur women. The biological weaponization of women’s bodies, through forced sterilization, forced birth-prevention measures, and forced marriage, constitutes a crime against humanity that demands immediate international intervention.

Executive Director Abdulhakim Idris stated, “The UN’s theme this year reminds us that human rights are not abstract concepts; they are the ‘everyday essentials’ of life. Yet, for millions of Uyghurs, these essentials have been replaced by the walls of concentration camps and the silence of forced labor factories. On this Human Rights Day, we ask only for the restoration of what is essential: our dignity, our faith, and our future. The world cannot claim to honor human rights while funding the genocide that destroys them.”

The Center for Uyghur Studies calls upon the United Nations, democratic governments, and civil society to:

1. Challenge the narrative: Actively counter Beijing’s propaganda campaigns in the Global South and Muslim-majority nations.
   
   
2. End complicity: Enforce bans on products made with Uyghur forced labor, ensuring that global supply chains are not built on the destruction of a people.
   
   
3. Demand access: Pressure the PRC to allow unfettered access to East Turkistan for independent investigators to document the destruction of religious sites and cultural heritage.

Yesterday, December 9, 2025, twenty organizations, consisting of Uyghur groups, U.S. partners, and international partners, including the Center for Uyghur Studies, came together in Washington, D.C., to commemorate Uyghur Genocide Recognition Day at the National Press Club. The organizations also convened today at the U.S. Capitol for a conference titled “Uyghur Genocide Resistance,” reaffirming a unified commitment to truth, justice, and collective action. This gathering of Uyghur organizations, leaders, activists, and allies demonstrated the enduring resolve of a people who refuse to be silenced despite years of systematic repression.

“As victims of Communism, our unprecedented partnership of 20 organizations worldwide brings inspiration, and we are grateful for their support. It affirms that the suffering of the Uyghur people under the Chinese Communist Party is a matter of global concern,” said Dr. Rishat Abbas, President of the Uyghur Academy, during the opening of today’s conference.