A committee has been formed in Belgium to obtain the nomination of Uighur economist Ilham Tohti, jailed in China for over a decade, for next year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
The committee’s four main members presented the nomination to the Belgian parliament on Monday.
Tohti's nomination seeks to spotlight China’s harsh repression of the Muslim minority group under the guise of counterterrorism and to amplify international pressure on Beijing.
“Defending Uighur people’s rights is our moral and political duty,” said committee founder Samuel Cogolati, a Green representative who was sanctioned by Xi Jinping’s regime in March 2021.
Tohti, now 54, used to lecture at Beijing’s Minzu University. For over two decades, he advocated dialogue between Uighurs and Han Chinese, China’s majority ethnic group. Before its closure, his website, ‘Uyghur Online,’ provided information about Xinjiang, the region that is home to the Turkic-speaking minority, and advocated for regional autonomy laws in China.
Despite advocating non-violence and peaceful reconciliation, Tohti was sentenced to life imprisonment for “separatism” in 2014.
China specialist Vanessa Frangville, a lecturer at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), considers him one of the few teachers in Beijing who did not keep a low profile. His detention marked the beginning of widespread campaigns of arrests and illegal internment in Xinjiang.
“Since my father’s arrest, the Uighur situation has continuously deteriorated,” warned his daughter, Jewher Ilham, a human rights activist based in Washington who has not heard from her father since 2017.
Around 180 ministers, parliamentarians, rectors, and professors have agreed to back the nomination.
The committee, chaired by Enver Can, founder of the Ilham Tohti Initiative, is actively collecting endorsements internationally, ahead of 31 January to promote the nomination.
Parliamentarians and academics from Belgium, the Democratic Republic of Congo, France, Ireland, Paraguay, Turkey and the USA have already shown their support for the nomination.
