#Uyghur #Xinjiang #China
Nury Turkel is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and who serves as a Commissioner to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Mr. Turkel was born in a re-education camp at the height of China's Cultural Revolution and spent the several first several months of his life in detention with his mother. He came to the United States in 1995 as a student and was later granted asylum by the U.S. government. Mr. Turkel received an M.A. in International Relations and a J.D. from the American University here in Washington, D.C. In addition to his professional career, he has promoted Uyghur human rights and universal democratic norms. He is the Chairman of the Board for the Uyghur Human Rights Project, which he co-founded in 2003.
Previously he served as the President of the Uyghur American Association. Since 2011 Mr. Turkel has successfully represented a substantial number of political refugees with their asylum applications in the United States. He has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Foreign Policy and other prestigious venues. Nury has testified for Congress, including most recently in May on the atrocities against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang. Many of his recommendations have been incorporated into U.S. laws and pending bills relating to Uyghurs in China, including the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020. In May, Fortune magazine named him one of the world's 50 greatest leaders.
