Protests in Iran

Hundreds of protesters marched in northwestern Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini after her brutal death in September 2022.  Her death sparked outrage among both men and women who gathered at her gravesite to pay their respects and demand justice.  Human rights experts have condemned the arbitrary arrests of peaceful protesters.  The protests also highlighted the plight of other women who have been arrested or disappeared under suspicious circumstances while peacefully protesting against the regime’s oppressive policies.  With no clear answer or solution yet, activists continue to demand justice for Mahsa Amini and an end to the unjust killings that have been carried out by authorities with impunity.    

The incident has drawn attention to Iran’s morality police and their overreach with regards to enforcing the country’s dress code.  Many are also accusing the clerical leadership of failing to protect young Iranians from these harsh punishments.  Riots and protests have broken out across the nation as a result, with many calling for a revolution in how women are treated in Iran.  In response, hundreds of people have been arrested by morality police for protesting against Mahsa’s death and demanding an end to oppressive regulations on dress codes.

Videos posted online showed that her death sparked outrage and triggered widespread protests.  Since then, there have been several other demonstrations against the Iranian government’s policies regarding Kurdish rights and human rights in general.  Despite the brutal government crackdowns on these protests, they continue to spread across Iran with growing intensity.  This has prompted Iranian state television to report on the protests for the first time ever.  Furthermore, rights groups such as Amnesty International are calling for an end to violence against protesters and for their demands for justice and freedom to be heard by the Iranian government.  The recent protests in Iran demonstrate that Iranians are not willing to stay silent anymore and will not accept any form of oppression from their government or anyone else. 

Protests in Iran have been ongoing for several months and are a result of a vicious cycle that has been continuing since the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979.  Over the chaotic months of 2018, Iran entered what many have called its largest sustained challenges to the regime since the revolution.  Protests over economic conditions, widespread corruption and other grievances have been met with forceful crackdowns from Revolutionary Courts and morality police.  The recent anti-government protests, which began in December 2017, were sparked by economic grievances and quickly swelled into one of the largest popular challenges to Iran’s clerical establishment since its 1979 Islamic Revolution.  Unrest has spread across more than 80 cities as thousands took to streets to voice their anger against government policies and practices such as austerity measures, unemployment levels and labor rights issues.  In response to these demonstrations, authorities arrested hundreds while employing tactics such as cutting off access to social media networks in an attempt to stifle further dissent.

The clerical leadership feels threatened by the level of public outrage and unrest towards them, leading to a brutal crackdown on protesters with death penalties and other forms of brute force.  Despite this, people have not been silenced, as demonstrations continue in major cities such as Tehran and other places across Iran.  According to the government of Iran, the morality police have been disbanded, but the source feeding this  information to the outside world is highly unreliable.  People are calling for an end to the oppressive regime by toppling their leaders, with more peaceful protests being organized in response to years of economic hardship and political injustice.

The Abuse Towards Uyghurs

Xinjiang, located in China’s northwestern region, is a site of intense rights abuses against Uyghurs, an ethnic Muslim minority. These abuses include mass detentions, surveillance, forced labor, and involuntary sterilizations. This is in addition to the discrimination and abuse they endure in other parts of the country. In 2009, riots broke out in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, in response to China’s treatment of Uyghurs and influx of Han Chinese. The Chinese government has been actively promoting Chinese cultural unity in the area since the 1950s, and this has included mass migration of Han Chinese to Xinjiang and policies that punish Uyghur identity. 

Since 2017, the Chinese government has imposed draconian restrictions on the Muslim minority group of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region. This has resulted in the detainment of potentially millions of people in internment camps, and thousands more have been subjected to mass surveillance outside of the camps. Testimonies from more than 50 people who have been detained in these camps have been collected by Amnesty International, and all have reported being tortured or mistreated in some way. 

NPR’s “All Things Considered” interviewed Jonathan Loeb, senior crisis advisor at Amnesty International, about the report he authored on the detention camps in Western China. The report details the torture and human rights violations that take place in the facilities, which the Chinese government calls “re-education camps.” The report also dives into the lengths the Chinese government has gone to cover up the persecution of Muslim minorities, which Adrian Zenz, an anthropologist specializing in he Xinjiang internment camps and Uyghur genocide, called “probably the largest incarceration of an ethnoreligious minority since the Holocaust.” The report’s findings meet the United Nations’ definition of genocide.   

In 2014, Chinese officials began using dedicated camps in Xinjiang to re-educate the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims who supposedly hold extremist and separatist ideas, as part of China’s efforts to eliminate threats to its territorial integrity, government, and population. According to Zenz, this has led to the largest-scale arbitrary detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II, with up to one million people being imprisoned in political education camps. 

The Chinese government has been accused of interning millions of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in camps in Xinjiang province since 2017. Satellite imaging obtained by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has revealed the existence of dozens of such camps, while international researchers and leaked Chinese government documents have revealed information about a wider government campaign against Muslim minorities in the region. Human rights groups and accounts from survivors who have fled abroad have also spoken out about the reported abuse and forced labor taking place in these camps. 

In Xinjiang Province, China has been engaging in mass detention of Muslims in internment camps during the past four years; with millions of people affected by the situation. International journalists and researchers have documented the situation, but have not been allowed independent access to the camps. The Chinese government has been heavily surveilling visitors to the region. The US and other foreign governments have described China’s actions as genocide, while the UN human rights office has said it could constitute crimes against humanity. 

The United Nations Security Council has called on the Chinese government to put an end to the mass detention of Uyghurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region. The UN has asked for unrestricted access to Xinjiang for the High Commissioner for Human Rights and for an independent UN investigation to take place. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, China has built nearly 400 internment camps in the region, with dozens more being constructed in the last two years. Activists have said that at least one million Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities have been detained in a network of detention camps and prisons in Xinjiang. China has defended the camps, calling them vocational skills training centers needed to tackle “extremism.”   

Despite the Chinese government’s attempts to mask the camps as “vocational skills education and training centers,” evidence from the Xinjiang police files and other sources reveals the true nature of the situation. Millions of Uyghurs continue to suffer in the western region of the autonomous region.  

Since 2017, the Chinese government in the western region of Xinjiang has been subjecting ethnic minorities like the Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz to “collective repression” by detaining them in camps meant to rid them of “terrorist or extremist leanings.” In 2022, the five-year program to eradicate “extremist forces” in Xinjiang officially ended, and the Chinese government invited religious leaders from Indonesia to the province and camps in response, resulting in a reduction of criticism. However, in June 2020, fifty UN human rights experts released a scathing evaluation of the Chinese government’s human rights record, emphasizing the human rights violations being committed in Xinjiang and Tibet.  

The China Cables investigation, released by ICIJ and 17 other media partners in 2019, was based on classified documents from the Chinese government that revealed the operations manual for Xinjiang detention camps and the mass surveillance system in the region. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were no reports of cases of the coronavirus in Xinjiang prisons or internment camps. The Chinese government must take immediate action to end human rights violations against Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang and elsewhere, such as arbitrary detention and imprisonment, torture, restrictions on freedom of religion, privacy, and movement, sexual violence, enforced sterilization, and forced labor.