A Uyghur activist on Thursday obtained a 4 Freedoms award from the Roosevelt Basis for years of campaigning for the rights of Muslim Uyghurs in far-western China’s Xinjiang area.
Zumretay Arkin, director of world advocacy and chair of the Ladies’s Committee on the World Uyghur Congress, was offered the Freedom of Worship Award at a ceremony attended by members of the Dutch royal household and Prime Minister Mark Rutte.
Primarily based within the Netherlands, the Roosevelt Basis honors people and organizations dedicated to defending the 4 Freedoms — freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from need and freedom from worry — proclaimed by former U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt in a 1941 speech.
The awards ceremony was held in Middelburg, capital of the Dutch province of Zeeland. Roosevelt’s ancestors had been from a village named Oud-Vossemeer in Zeeland.
“Me, standing right here, accepting this prestigious award is a robust message to the Chinese language authorities that we are going to not be silenced,” Arkin stated throughout her acceptance speech.
“The persecution of the Uyghurs is just not merely a home challenge confined to the borders of China; it’s a matter of world concern that calls for our collective motion and solidarity,” she stated.
Arkin, 30, known as on the worldwide neighborhood to not stay silent within the face of egregious human rights abuses and to carry the Chinese language authorities accountable for its actions whereas demanding an finish to the repression of non secular freedom and genocide in East Turkistan, Uyghurs’ most well-liked identify for Xinjiang.
Arkin has drawn worldwide consideration to the suppression of non secular freedom and violations of Uyghur human rights, based a Uyghur friendship group for ladies worldwide, and labored to assist Uyghur refugees, in accordance with the 4 Freedoms Awards web site.
She has advocated for the safety and preservation of Uyghur tradition, faith and language in worldwide boards, together with on the United Nations, the web site stated.
The U.S. and different Western governments have deemed China’s extreme repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, together with mass internments in camps, torture, and compelled abortions and sterilizations of Uyghur girls, as a genocide and crimes towards humanity.
In February 2021, the parliament of the Netherlands was the primary European legislature to cross a nonbinding movement saying that the therapy of the Uyghurs in China amounted to genocide.
Edited by Malcolm Foster.