Sayragul Sauytbay
The Muslim Kazakh woman, born in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, was awarded the International Nuremberg Human Rights Prize in 2021 for her admirable courage in reporting on the crimes committed against Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang region.
The award ceremony itself took place on May 15, 2022 due to the pandemic.
Click here for the official jury statement:
The press conference to announce the 2021 prizewinner
The press conference for the announcement of the International Nuremberg Human Rights Prize Winner 2021 with interviews of the jury members was streamed live on March 1, 2021.
Sayragul Sauytbay
Sayragul Sauytbay was born in 1976 as a Muslim Kazakh in the autonomous prefecture of Ili Kazakh in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, which is home to many Turkic peoples such as Uyghurs. After studying medicine, Sauytbay worked as a doctor in a hospital and later ran several preschools as a civil servant. She is married and has two children. Over the years, she has witnessed first-hand how the Chinese government is increasingly targeting the Muslim minorities in the region under the guise of fighting terrorism.
As the situation in her home country continues to worsen for the Muslim family, Sayragul Sauytbay's husband and two children leave China for Kazakhstan in July 2016 under false pretenses. However, Sauytbay herself does not receive an exit visa and has to stay behind. When her family did not return home, Sauytbay was pressured by the authorities to bring them back. Despite being interrogated several times, she refused. Initially, she is still able to keep in touch with her family, but in November 2016, the Chinese government cut off all common means of communication in the region and banned contact with people abroad.
In November 2017, Sauytbay was finally arrested and forced to work as an instructor for the Chinese government in a re-education camp. She was supposed to use her excellent language skills to teach the prisoners Chinese. However, it is not just about the language, but also above all about the indoctrination of propaganda: Party songs, Chinese customs, who the enemies of the Chinese state are. During this time, Sauytbay has to witness how the detainees are held captive, humiliated and tortured under the most adverse conditions. She herself was not spared. She reports on arbitrary detainees of all ages and statuses. The crimes against prisoners range from brainwashing, torture and rape to forced medication.
According to Amnesty International, hundreds of thousands of members of ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China have been forcibly detained and tortured in such camps in recent years.
In March 2018, Sayragul Sauytbay is unexpectedly relieved of her duties in the camp and is told to return to her old position as director of a preschool for a few days to settle her succession. Sauytbay immediately realizes that she is still under surveillance. She receives threats and is soon to return to the camp as a prisoner herself. At great risk, she flees illegally to Kazakhstan and is able to reunite with her family. But shortly after her arrival, she is arrested by the Kazakh secret service, abducted, interrogated and finally taken to a prison. She is threatened with extradition to China. During the court proceedings against her, Sayragul Sauytbay now reports in public for the first time what she herself saw in the camps. It is only thanks to strong civil society pressure, numerous campaigns by various human rights organizations worldwide and diplomatic representatives that her deportation can be prevented. However, she and her family continue to be threatened and persecuted by the Chinese government in Kazakhstan. So that the family does not have to live in fear, they decided to move away from Kazakhstan.