Nury Turkel

Early life

Turkel was born in a re-education camp in Kashgar during the Cultural Revolution. Turkel's grandfather had been associated with Uyghur nationalists and his mother was interned when she was six months pregnant. Turkel lived in the detention center for the first four months of his life. Turkel's father was a professor and his mother was a businesswoman. He completed his primary and middle school in his homeland. In 1991, he was admitted by Northwest A&F University in Shaanxi Province, China. In 1995, Turkel received his BA and went to the United States for graduate education, never returning to China. Turkel has a Master of Arts in international relations and a Juris Doctor from American University.

Career

In 2003, Turkel co-founded the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) and has served as its chairman of the board.

Between 2004 and 2006, Turkel served as president of the Uyghur American Association.

In May 2020, Nury Turkel was appointed a commissioner on the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) by then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi who said of Turkel, "I am confident that he will continue to be a powerful voice for the Uyghur people and for the cause of justice around the world."

Policy Advocacy

On 10 March 2003, Turkel made a statement to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China on the worsening human rights situation in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

In May 2009, he defended a group of 17 Uyghurs who had been held in Guantánamo Bay since 2002. He wrote that Uyghurs have faced discrimination and are not a threat to U.S. communities.

After the July 2009 Ürümqi riots, he condemned alleged Chinese oppression of Uyghurs in Ürümqi, saying that "the Uyghurs literally lost anything that they had, even their native language and their own cultural heritage that they had been proudly adhering to.

In April 2012, Turkel praised Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for showing support and sympathy for the Uyghur people surrounding his trip to China in a way that was seen as rare among foreign leaders. However, in July 2020, Turkel criticized Turkey for deporting Uyghur refugees to countries that then deported them to China.

Turkel supported the June 2020 signing of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act and a July 2020 United States Department of Commerce announcement sanctioning eleven Chinese companies involved in alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang. He called for sanctions on the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) in particular. In an August 2020 interview, Turkel described the camps as one of the worst global humanitarian crises and the largest incarceration of an ethnic minority since the Holocaust. He also urged the U.S. Congress to pass the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would direct the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to presume that any goods produced in the Uyghur region are the product of forced labor. On 21 December 2021, Turkel was sanctioned by the Chinese government as part of retaliatory sanctions after U.S. government imposed sanctions on Chinese officials.

Books

Turkel's 2022 book No Escape: The True Story of China's Genocide of the Uyghurs won the 2022 Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing.

Recognition

In September 2020, Turkel was named one of the Time 100 Most Influential People in the World. In 2021, Fortune Magazine included him in their "The World's 50 Greatest Leaders" lists. He received the inaugural Notre Dame Prize for Religious Liberty from the Notre Dame Law School Religious Liberty Initiative in June 2021. He was awarded the Global Soul Award by Jewish World Watch in September 2022.

Personal life

Nury Turkel is a Muslim. In 2007, he married Turkish American interior designer Nazli Turkel. They live in the Washington, DC, area with their two children.

Turkel is proficient in several languages, including Uyghur (his mother tongue), English, Turkish, and Mandarin Chinese.

References

References

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2. (26 May 2020). "USCIRF Welcomes Appointment by Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Nury Turkel to U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom".
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5. (22 September 2019). "Survivors of Religious Persecution at the 74th Session of the UN General Assembly".
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17. (29 June 2020). "Balance of Power: China's Treatment of Uyghurs (Podcast)".
18. (27 May 2020). "Pelosi Floor Speech in Support of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act".
19. "OPEN FORUM ON HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE RULE OF LAW IN CHINA".
20. Nury A. Turkel. (26 June 2008). "Uighur Justice".
21. "Meet the real Uyghurs". www.foreignpolicy.com.
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27. "Xinjiang in China's Foreign Relations: Part of a New Silk Road or Central Asian Zone of Conflict?".
28. Aykan Erdemir. (21 August 2020). "China Buys Turkey's Silence on Uyghur Oppression".
29. (18 June 2020). "China Warns of 'Countermeasures' After Trump OKs Bill to 'Punish' Country Over Ethnic Crackdown".
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32. (31 July 2020). "USCIRF Applauds Global Magnitsky Sanctions Against Xinjiang Entity".
33. Linda Lew. (24 August 2020). "Xinjiang's sprawling conglomerate may be biggest ever to face US sanctions".
34. Nury Turkel. (26 August 2020). "Was Your Face Mask Made Using Forced Labor in China?".
35. Turkel, Nury. "The U.S. Must Use the New Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act to Sanction Chinese Officials for Religious Persecution".
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44. Turkel, Nury. (2022). "No Escape: The True Story of China's Genocide of the Uyghurs". Hanover Square Press.
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