Nurungul Tohti (born 1980) is a Uyghur activist in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

. She is considered by ''

TIME Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

'' magazine to be part of a "rapidly growing group of activists fighting for their families and communities."

Biography

Tohti comes from the

Uchturpan county Uqturpan County, United States National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency or Uchturpan County ( transliterated from ; ), also Wushi County (), is a county in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region under the administration of Aksu Prefecture and shar ...

in Aksu. She was working as a fruit seller in

Dalian Dalian () is a major sub-provincial port city in Liaoning province, People's Republic of China, and is Liaoning's second largest city (after the provincial capital Shenyang) and the third-most populous city of Northeast China. Located on the ...

. When her son was

kidnapped Kidnapped may refer to: * subject to the crime of kidnapping Literature * ''Kidnapped'' (novel), an 1886 novel by Robert Louis Stevenson * ''Kidnapped'' (comics), a 2007 graphic novel adaptation of R. L. Stevenson's novel by Alan Grant and Ca ...

in 2009, she rescued him on her own by "confronting the abductors herself." After she recovered her son, she went to officials in the local government to ask for help in prosecuting her son's kidnappers. She was denied redress and appealed to authorities. She appealed to the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...

, and was arrested on June 4, 2012, and held for eight months. As an activist who is working for justice in her son's case, she has been jailed three times. Tohti believes that as a minority in China, she is being discriminated against and has appealed her case to

Beijing } Beijing ( ; ; ), alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the capital of the People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's most populous national capital city, with over 21 ...

in June 2015.

Works

References

Living people 1980 births Chinese women's rights activists People from Aksu Prefecture Prisoners and detainees of China {{China-activist-stub