Ruhi Çenet made a documentary about what the Uyghurs are living through in
East Turkestan. YouTube took it down. It is kept here — to watch, download and
mirror, no matter who wants it gone.
A 2-minute read. The rest opens when you want it.
Content note: contains first-hand accounts of detention.
The documentary is in Turkish only. We're sorry — there are no subtitles in other languages yet.
Film by Ruhi Çenet. All rights and credit are his. Kept here in the belief
that a witness account should not be easy to erase — save it, re-upload it, the
point is that it survives.
Why this page exists
A film shouldn't disappear because its subject is inconvenient.
Ruhi Çenet's video reached millions before it was pulled from YouTube. Whatever the
official reason, the effect is the same: one less place to see it. This page is one
more — plain, permanent, easy to pass on.
What is happening
East Turkestan — the region China calls “Xinjiang” — is the homeland of the Uyghurs, a Turkic, mostly Muslim people.
In its concluding observations on China, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination wrote: “Estimates of the number of people detained range from tens of thousands to over a million.”
Survivors and researchers have documented mass surveillance, forced labour, family separation, and the suppression of language, faith and culture.
In 2022 the UN Human Rights Office found that the arbitrary and discriminatory detention of Uyghurs may constitute crimes against humanity. Several parliaments have gone further and called it genocide. China rejects these findings.
Each mark is one site recorded by BuzzFeed News, grouped by how strong the evidence for it was in July 2021. Marks overlap where sites are within a few kilometres of each other.
Corroborated by other sources· 136
Satellite imagery only· 211
Facility that existed before 2016· 104
Closed or probably closed· 23
Not drawn: sub-compounds, each one an enclosure inside a site already shown.· 77
Boundaries are simplified and de facto. Aksai Chin, shown here as part of the region, is claimed by India.
Places on this map· 8cities, 474sites
The map labels each city with its Uyghur name in the Latin alphabet. A dash in the last column means we did not verify a Chinese official name for that city, not that none exists.
Uyghur
Uyghur (Latin)
Name in your language
Chinese official name
ئۈرۈمچى
Ürümchi
Ürümqi
—
قەشقەر
Qeshqer
Kashgar
—
خوتەن
Xoten
Hotan
—
ئاقسۇ
Aqsu
Aksu
—
غۇلجا
Ghulja
Yining
Yining
تۇرپان
Turpan
Turpan
—
كورلا
Korla
Korla
—
قۇمۇل
Qumul
Hami
Hami
Sites by level of evidence and by type, as recorded by BuzzFeed News in July 2021
The Taklamakan, the desert at the centre of the region. Photo: MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC, public domain — cropped and resized.Borders: made with Natural Earth, public domain. Place names and coordinates: Wikidata, CC0. Detention sites: Alison Killing, Megha Rajagopalan and Christo Buschek / BuzzFeed News, Xinjiang Camps Data (opens in a new tab), updated July 2021, licensed CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab). Changed by veax: sub-compounds removed, coordinates reprojected and rounded, the eight recorded levels of evidence grouped into four.
Six topics. Each panel names its sources, and legal wording is kept exactly as the source wrote it — may constitute, credible indications, rebuttable presumption are the sources' words, not ours; where a text is non-binding, the last column says so.
Camps and surveillance
— The standing committee of the Xinjiang regional people's congress adopted a “De-extremification” Regulation, published in English translation by China Law Translate. The United States Department of State later dated its own determination of crimes against humanity to “since at least March 2017”.
— At the review of China by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, a committee expert described the region as resembling “a massive internment camp shrouded in secrecy”. The Committee's concluding observations state: “Estimates of the number of people detained range from tens of thousands to over a million.”
— The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published classified Chinese documents with 17 media partners in 14 countries: a telegram of November 2017 signed by Zhu Hailun, an operations manual for the camps, and bulletins from the IJOP mass-surveillance platform.
According to documents published by ICIJ, a leaked intelligence briefing records that in one week of June 2017 the IJOP platform flagged 24,412 people as “suspicious”; of those, 15,683 were sent to re-education camps and 706 were formally arrested.
— In May 2022, police files hacked from the Kashgar and Ili prefectures were published by a consortium of news organisations: more than 5,000 photographs of people taken in police stations or detention centres, along with internal documents and speeches.
According to Adrian Zenz's peer-reviewed study of those files in the Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies, among the 2,884 photographed people who can be shown to have been detained, “the youngest of these detainees was 15 years old, and the oldest 73 years” in 2018.
The UN Human Rights Office cited the same files in its 2022 assessment: internal spreadsheets from Konasheher covering “approx. 286,000 individuals” indicate that “approx. 12.3 to 12.7 per cent of the county's ethnic adults were allegedly in some form of detention in 2018”.
The Office added that for a number of these leaked documents it “was able to take steps to verify their authenticity, resulting in assessment that they are highly likely to be authentic”, and that it relied on none of them as a sole source.
We link the text of these files. We do not reproduce the photographs of the people in them.
The same ground, 2017 and 2021
We built these two pairs from open Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery and serve the files ourselves. One pixel is 10 metres of ground: a reader can make out rows of buildings and the outline of a compound boundary, and nothing else — not what that boundary is made of, not a watchtower, not a person, nothing that says what a building is used for. An image alone does not establish the nature of a facility; the sources at the end of this topic do. A pair shows one thing: that the ground changed.
1 km
Dabancheng, east of Ürümqi. Site 130 of the BuzzFeed News dataset, level of evidence “corroborated” — that is, by sources other than satellite imagery — type “prison - medium security”. The frame covers 4.4 × 3.0 km near 43.38° N, 88.29° E — an area, not a building: our coordinates are rounded to about 1 km, so no point can be tied to a particular building here. A second recorded site, id 949, type “prison - medium security”, satellite imagery only, lies about 1.6 km to the west of it and therefore inside this frame: the separate group of buildings at the lower left may be that one. About 0.72 km² of new pale built surface appears between the dates, across 4.2 × 2.0 km.
1 km
Korla. An example of ground built on between 2017 and 2021 in the Korla area — an area, not a building. The frame is centred near 41.70° N, 86.28° E and covers 3.8 × 2.6 km. Three sites of the BuzzFeed News dataset fall inside it: id 126, type “camp”, level of evidence “corroborated” — that is, by sources other than satellite imagery; and id 419, type “detention center”, and id 421, type “prison - medium security”, both recorded from satellite imagery only. None of the reporting we cite is about any of these three points, and their published coordinates are rounded to about 1 km, so we do not say which of them, if any, is a compound visible here. New pale built surface appears on about 1.2 × 0.8 km of ground that was bare in 2017.
2017 is the earliest year with usable coverage here, not a picture of “before”: the regulation framing this campaign dates from March 2017, and the August 2017 view of Dabancheng already shows an enclosure with building work inside it. These captions date what is on the image; they do not describe a beginning.
Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2017, 2021 — Sentinel-2 Level-2A true colour, 10 m per pixel, read from the public Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs on AWS Open Data (opens in a new tab), under the Legal notice on the use of Copernicus Sentinel Data and Service Information (opens in a new tab). Changed by veax: one window cut per scene; the same linear contrast stretch on both dates of a pair, computed on the two scenes together; 2× enlargement for display, the resolution staying 10 m; conversion to WebP. Even so, the two views of a pair are not comparable tone for tone: they differ in haze and in the height of the sun, the 2017 view of Dabancheng was taken a month earlier in the year than the 2021 one, and more than half of the 2017 view of Korla is washed out to near-white. The European Union does not endorse this page. Site number, level of evidence and type: Alison Killing, Megha Rajagopalan and Christo Buschek / BuzzFeed News, Xinjiang Camps Data (opens in a new tab), licensed CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab).
— BBC News published an investigation by John Sudworth into cotton picking in Xinjiang, based on documents and satellite imagery. The Chinese government told the BBC the claims were “entirely fabricated”.
— Le Monde, working with The Outlaw Ocean Project, reported that fish-processing plants in eastern China had employed Uyghur workers transferred from Xinjiang, and that their products were exported to Europe, including France. The companies named in the investigation replied to the newspaper.
— A rebuttable presumption took effect in the United States. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act “was enacted on December 23, 2021, with a June 21, 2022 effective date for a rebuttable presumption” that goods made wholly or in part in Xinjiang, or by a listed entity, are barred from importation. An importer can rebut it: this is a presumption, not a flat ban.
— The European Union adopted Regulation (EU) 2024/3015, which prohibits products made with forced labour on the Union market. It names no country and no region, and it applies from .
— BBC News Türkçe followed Aziz İsa Elkun, a Uyghur academic living in London. According to the report, he spoke to his mother by telephone every week until 2017, when she asked him to stop calling because the police came to the house after each call.
— The Canadian House of Commons adopted motion M-62 by 322 votes to none. The non-binding motion calls for 10,000 Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims who fled to third countries to be resettled over two years starting in 2024.
— According to the assessment of the UN Human Rights Office, “there are credible indications of violations of reproductive rights through the coercive enforcement of family planning policies since 2017” (para. 114).
The same assessment reports that, according to China's own 2020 Statistical Yearbook, “the birth rate in Xinjiang dropped approximately 48.7 per cent, from 15.88 per thousand in 2017 to 8.14 per thousand in 2019” (para. 107).
It also reports that “in 2018, sterilisations in XUAR stood at 243 per 100,000 inhabitants, whereas the overall figure for China was a fraction thereof at only 32.1 per 100,000 inhabitants” (para. 108).
The Office set out the limit of its own finding in that same paragraph 114: “The lack of available Government data, including post-2019, makes it difficult to draw conclusions on the full extent of current enforcement of these policies and associated violations of reproductive rights.”
— An Associated Press investigation reported that “birth rates in the mostly Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60% from 2015 to 2018, the latest year available in government statistics”. This is a different period and a different area from the region-wide figure above, and the spelling is AP's own.
— The Uyghur Tribunal, an independent, non-state people's tribunal whose findings are not legally binding, rested its genocide conclusion on this policy: it said it was “satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the PRC, by the imposition of measures to prevent births intended to destroy a significant part of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang as such, has committed genocide” (para. 190).
— China's National People's Congress passed the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress by 2,756 votes to 3, with 3 abstentions. It came into force on .
Human Rights Watch, quoted by JURIST, said the law provides a legal framework “to justify repression and forced assimilation, including by weakening minority language rights”.
— BBC News Türkçe reported on religious restrictions in the region: according to the BBC, satellite imagery shows mosques that have been demolished, and the rules in force include a ban on beards.
Language, music and place names are covered further on, in Culture.
Examples, not a complete count. A government, a parliament and a court do not carry the same weight, so the last column says what each statement actually is.
Who
When
What they said
Legal weight
UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR)
Arbitrary and discriminatory detention “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity” (para. 148).
An assessment by a UN office. Not a court ruling.
United States — Secretary of State
Determined that crimes against humanity and genocide had been committed “since at least March 2017”.
A government determination, published on the State Department's 2017–2021 archive.
Canada — House of Commons
Voted 266 to 0 that a genocide is being committed against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims.
Non-binding motion.
Netherlands — House of Representatives
A motion “declares that genocide is taking place in China against the Uyghur minority” (veax translation).
Non-binding. The government did not adopt the term: in June 2021 it wrote that the genocide qualification was “not currently at issue” (veax translation).
United Kingdom — House of Commons
Passed a motion stating that Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang are suffering crimes against humanity and genocide.
Non-binding motion, agreed without a division.
France — National Assembly
Adopted resolution T.A. n° 758, recognising crimes against humanity and the “genocidal character” of the violence against Uyghurs (veax translation).
Non-binding resolution.
Lithuania — Seimas
Resolution No XIV-329 “states that pursuant to Article II(b) and (d) of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, China is currently committing genocide against Uyghurs”; passed by 86 votes to one, with seven abstentions.
A parliamentary declaration; it calls on the United Nations to launch a legal investigation.
Czech Republic — Senate
In a resolution on the 2022 Beijing Olympics, noted “with concern” that on the territory of the People's Republic of China there is “… genocide and crimes against humanity”, “in particular in the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang” (veax translation); adopted by 38 votes to none.
The resolution appeals to the Czech government; it binds no one.
Belgium — Chamber of Representatives
“Recognises that a serious risk of genocide exists against the Uyghur minority”, and condemns violations “which may be considered crimes against humanity” (veax translation).
A finding of risk, not a determination that genocide has occurred.
Uyghur Tribunal
Said it was “satisfied beyond reasonable doubt” that the PRC has committed genocide “by the imposition of measures to prevent births”, and stated that it had no evidence of any mass killing.
An independent, non-state people's tribunal. It says of itself that it “has no power of any kind to sanction the PRC”.
UN Human Rights Council
Rejected a draft decision to hold a debate on Xinjiang, by 19 votes against, 17 in favour and 11 abstentions, according to Amnesty International.
A procedural vote. The debate did not take place.
The OHCHR assessment does not use the word “genocide” anywhere. Its overall finding is that “serious human rights violations have been committed in XUAR” (para. 143), and that the pattern of detention “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity” (para. 148). Al Jazeera reported on 1 September 2022 that “Bachelet's report makes no mention of the word ‘genocide’, but concludes that ‘serious human rights violations have been committed’ in Xinjiang”.
China rejects these findings. OHCHR states that “the assessment was shared with the Government for factual comments, as per standard OHCHR practice” and that “the Government's response, further to its request, is annexed to this report” (para. 7). In that note verbale, dated 31 August 2022, China's Permanent Mission to the United Nations in Geneva said that “China firmly opposes the release of the so-called ‘assessment of the human rights situation in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China’ by the OHCHR”.
Governments also count each other at the United Nations. In July 2019, 22 countries signed a joint statement at the Human Rights Council urging China to end mass arbitrary detention in Xinjiang, according to Human Rights Watch; that same month, ambassadors from 37 countries released a letter defending China's policies in the region, according to AFP. On 31 October 2022, Canada delivered a joint statement on behalf of 50 countries, and the published list of signatories includes Türkiye. Türkiye's Ministry of Foreign Affairs had said on 9 February 2019 that the reintroduction of internment camps and the policy of systematic assimilation against the Uyghurs “is a great shame for humanity”. Türkiye signed an extradition treaty with China in 2017; China's parliament ratified it in December 2020, and according to Human Rights Watch in November 2025 the Turkish parliament “has yet to ratify it”.
Since , under the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, goods mined, produced or manufactured in whole or in part in Xinjiang, or by a listed entity, are subject to a rebuttable presumption that they are made with forced labour, and are prohibited from importation into the United States.
Regulation (EU) 2024/3015, adopted on , prohibits products made with forced labour on the Union market. It names no country or region, and it applies from .
According to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security notice published in the Federal Register on , the UFLPA Entity List — a consolidated register of the four lists required by the Act — named 187 entities as of that date. The notice adds that the list “should not be interpreted as an exhaustive list”.
Sheffield Hallam University’s Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice publishes its forced-labour reports, together with the responses it received from the companies named, on a single page.
Uyghur rights demonstration near the White House, Washington, D.C., . The placard reads “Stop the unjust imprisonment of … Kadeer’s children!”, a flag hiding the start of the name.Photo:Elvert Barnes, CC BY-SA 2.0 (opens in a new tab), viaWikimedia Commons (opens in a new tab)— resized, faces blurred, so this version is also CC BY-SA 2.0.
A march for Uyghur rights in Berlin, . The marchers’ banner reads “Over One Million Uyghurs Disappeared in China — Where are our Missing Family & Friends?”Photo:Leonhard Lenz, CC0 (opens in a new tab), viaWikimedia Commons (opens in a new tab)— cropped, resized, faces blurred.
Grasp the scale — and follow those who document it.
Reputable organisations, primary-source archives, and Uyghur voices to hear directly. Every link is checked.
Is it over?
More than 140,000 children
Human Rights Watch reported on that, citing a Xinjiang Victims Database estimate from , more than 140,000 children in southern Xinjiang were separated from their parents in 2017 and 2018.
In a statement on , independent UN experts said that state-imposed forced labour in the Uyghur region “may amount to forcible transfer and/or enslavement as a crime against humanity”.
The same experts said that Xinjiang’s 2021–2025 five-year plan projects 13.75 million instances of labour transfers, a figure that counts placements rather than individuals.
According to UN News, Thailand deported 40 Uyghurs to China on , after more than 11 years in detention.
Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and UNHCR said the deportation breached the principle of non-refoulement.
According to Human Rights Watch, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights raised concerns in about China’s new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, which “formalized existing policies to erase minority rights.”
From 2009 to 2026 — every date links to its source.
Before the camps, 2009–2016
Human Rights Watch reported that protests in Ürümqi turned violent — 197 dead and more than 1,600 injured, according to official figures cited in its report — and documented at least 43 enforced disappearances of Uyghur men and boys in the weeks that followed.
According to The Guardian, “a four-wheel drive vehicle ploughed through a group of pedestrians” near Tiananmen Square in Beijing, “killing five people and injuring dozens”.
According to BBC News, a mass knife attack at Kunming railway station “left 29 people dead and at least 130 wounded”; Chinese officials blamed separatists from Xinjiang, an attribution the BBC noted could not be verified.
According to BBC News, attackers “crashed two cars into shoppers at a market” in Ürümqi and threw explosives, killing 31 people; the BBC attributed the toll of more than 90 injured to the state news agency Xinhua.
According to the European Parliament, the Uyghur economist Ilham Tohti was “sentenced to life in prison following a show trial” on separatism-related charges.
In its concluding observations after reviewing China, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said estimates of the number of people detained “range from tens of thousands to over a million”.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, with “17 media partner organizations across 14 countries”, published classified Chinese documents, among them a manual for running the camps and bulletins from a mass-surveillance platform.
According to Radio Free Asia, Xinjiang's regional chairman Shohrat Zakir told a press conference in Beijing that “the trainees who have participated … have all graduated”, without clarifying whether those held in the facilities had been released.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned one entity and four officials, among them Chen Quanguo, under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, over serious human rights abuses against ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.
In a press statement, the U.S. Secretary of State determined that “since at least March 2017” the People's Republic of China has committed crimes against humanity against Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and that genocide has been committed.
Canada's House of Commons adopted a non-binding opposition motion, by 266 votes to 0, recognising that the People's Republic of China is committing genocide against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims.
The Dutch House of Representatives adopted a motion which “declares that genocide is taking place in China against the Uyghur minority” (veax translation); a motion of this form states the House's view and binds no one.
The Council of the European Union sanctioned officials and an entity over “the large-scale arbitrary detentions of, in particular, Uyghurs in Xinjiang”.
The UK House of Commons agreed a non-binding motion, without a division, stating that Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang are suffering crimes against humanity and genocide.
The Uyghur Tribunal, an independent, non-state people's tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, concluded that the People's Republic of China has committed genocide through measures to prevent births, and crimes against humanity, while noting “no evidence of mass killings”.
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act “was enacted on December 23, 2021, with a June 21, 2022 effective date for a rebuttable presumption” that goods made wholly or in part in Xinjiang, or by a listed entity, are barred from U.S. importation.
France's National Assembly adopted a non-binding resolution recognising crimes against humanity and the “genocidal character” of the violence committed against Uyghurs (veax translation).
According to a peer-reviewed study of the “Xinjiang Police Files” published in the Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies, the leaked cache holds “5,074 photos of persons taken in police stations or detention centres”, taken “between January 6 and July 25, 2018”.
The UN Human Rights Office published its Xinjiang assessment, finding that arbitrary and discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim groups “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity”.
According to Amnesty International, the UN Human Rights Council rejected a draft decision to hold a debate on Xinjiang — 19 votes against, 17 in favour and 11 abstentions.
Canada's House of Commons adopted, by 322 votes to 0, a non-binding motion calling for 10,000 Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims who fled to third countries to be resettled over two years from 2024.
The Dui Hua Foundation reported that, “according to a source in the Chinese government”, the Uyghur folklorist Rahile Dawut “is serving a life sentence for endangering state security” and that her appeal was rejected by the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region High People's Court.
At China's Universal Periodic Review at the UN, the United States recommended that China “release all arbitrarily detained individuals, including in Xinjiang” — one state's recommendation, not a UN conclusion.
According to EUR-Lex, the European Union adopted Regulation (EU) 2024/3015, a general ban on products made with forced labour which names no country and applies from 14 December 2027.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Simon-Skjodt Center concluded that “all of the policies that led to accusations of mass atrocities in the Uyghur region continue, and some are expanding”.
According to UN News, Thailand deported to China 40 Uyghurs who had been detained for more than 11 years, which the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called a violation of the principle of non-refoulement.
Independent UN experts (Special Procedures), who are not UN staff and serve in their individual capacity, said that coercion in state-run labour transfer programmes “may amount to forcible transfer and/or enslavement as a crime against humanity”.
According to JURIST, China's National People's Congress passed the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, in force from 1 July 2026, which Human Rights Watch says provides a legal framework “to justify repression and forced assimilation, including by weakening minority language rights”.
According to UNESCO, the Uyghur Muqam of Xinjiang was inscribed on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in , after being proclaimed in . It is described there as songs, dances, folk and classical music, in four regional styles; the Twelve Muqam alone holds more than 300 pieces and runs over 20 hours.
UNESCO inscribed the meshrep — a gathering that combines music, dance, drama, folk arts, acrobatics, oral literature, foodways and games — on its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding in . It describes the meshrep as both a “court”, where the host mediates conflicts, and a “classroom”, where people learn their traditional customs. The nomination file of 2010 recorded that its transmitters had “sharply decreased from hundreds to tens”.
According to a report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an estimated 16,000 mosques in Xinjiang — 65% of the total — have been destroyed or damaged, mostly since 2017. About 8,500 of them were demolished outright. The same report estimates that 30% of important Islamic sacred sites have been demolished, and a further 28% damaged or altered.
The Dui Hua Foundation describes Rahile Dawut as an ethnographer of Uyghur folklore and traditions, who taught at Xinjiang University and founded a research centre on minority folklore there in .
According to Dui Hua, she went missing in and was tried in for “splittism”. On the foundation announced that her sentence of life imprisonment had been confirmed and her appeal rejected.
According to English PEN, Michael Rosen named her Writer of Courage on and shared the PEN Pinter Prize with her.
The European Parliament describes Ilham Tohti as “an Uyghur economist, scholar and human rights activist serving a life sentence in China on separatism-related charges”. It says he was sentenced “following a show trial in ”.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe awarded him the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize on , jointly with the Youth Initiative for Human Rights. The European Parliament announced its Sakharov Prize for him on , and the prize was awarded on .
ABC News (Australia) described Abdurehim Heyit in as a “master musician of the dutar, a two-stringed instrument from Iran and Central Asia”, reportedly sentenced to eight years in prison because of one of his songs.
According to the same report, Turkey announced in February 2019 that it had learned of his death in detention, and a Chinese state outlet then broadcast a video of a man presenting himself as Heyit and saying he was in good health. Campaigners in the diaspora questioned the conditions of that recording.
CNN reported on that it had found more than 100 Uyghur cemeteries destroyed, “most in just the last two years”. It reported that the Sultanim Cemetery, in the centre of Hotan City, was destroyed between January and March 2019.
CNN credits the first account to the French news agency AFP and the satellite imagery analysts Earthrise Alliance, who reported in that at least 45 cemeteries had been destroyed since 2014.
The ASPI report follows two sites in detail: Ordam Mazar, a pilgrimage site, and the sacred cemetery of Yengichimen, near Aksu. It notes that Ordam Mazar was demolished in , the same month the ethnographer Rahile Dawut went missing.
Human Rights Watch reported on that research it carried out with the Norway-based organisation Uyghur Hjelp had identified about 630 villages in Xinjiang whose names, carrying religious, historical or cultural meaning for Uyghurs, were changed. Among the words removed are mazar (shrine) and dutar (a two-stringed lute). The names were taken from China's National Bureau of Statistics website for the years 2009 to 2023, out of some 25,000 villages in the region; about 3,600 changed name over that period, and Human Rights Watch says roughly four fifths of those changes appear mundane. The three most common replacement names are “Happiness”, “Unity” and “Harmony”.
According to the BBC, the authorities call these facilities schools; John Sudworth's report sets that description against the evidence his team gathered.
A Four Corners investigation into the mass detention of Uyghurs, told through Uyghur Australians whose families are in Xinjiang, with satellite imagery and official documents.
According to the BBC, documents and satellite imagery point to hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other minorities being marshalled into cotton picking in Xinjiang. The Chinese government told the BBC the claims were entirely fabricated.
The Xinjiang Police Files are data hacked from police servers in Xinjiang; according to the BBC they set out a shoot-to-kill policy for anyone trying to escape.
ABC · Foreign Correspondent ·
·
English ·
youtube.com ↗ ·
context, before the camps
In 2014, Stephen McDonell travels the Silk Road through Kashgar and Ürümqi, followed by security agents, and reports claims that Uyghur heritage is being erased.
France 24 · Reporters ·
·
French ·
youtube.com ↗ ·
longer version of the ARTE investigation above
An investigation carried out over more than a year across China, Canada, Turkey, France and Kazakhstan, gathering testimony on the Xinjiang camps and on the pressure put on the diaspora.
An investigation built on the China Cables, secret Chinese government documents obtained by the ICIJ, which set out the detention, indoctrination and forced-labour system in Xinjiang.
Le Monde, working with The Outlaw Ocean Project, reports that fish-processing plants in eastern China employed Uyghur workers transferred there by force, and that their products were exported to Europe.
Uyghur families in France search for relatives who disappeared in Xinjiang; the film describes the re-education centres, DNA collection and mass surveillance.
The BBC presents evidence that Uyghurs are being made to work in Xinjiang's cotton fields. The Chinese government called the accusations entirely fabricated.
A portrait of Aziz İsa Elkun, a Uyghur academic exiled in London, who spoke to his mother by telephone every week until 2017, when, the report says, she asked him to stop calling because the police came to the house after each call.
VOA Türkçe ·
·
Turkish ·
youtube.com ↗ ·
funded by the United States government
Ömer Bekali, a Kazakhstani citizen of Uyghur origin, says he was arrested by Chinese police in 2017 while visiting his family, and then held in a camp.
The ZDF correspondent in China reports from Kashgar, where the police are everywhere, and looks for traces of the repression of the Uyghurs that Beijing denies.
Episode six of the Nasij Watan series: the lives of Uyghur Muslims in Istanbul, what pushed them to leave, and the hardships of exile. It is about the diaspora, not about the camps.
RFE/RL · Radio Azattyq ·
·
Russian ·
youtube.com ↗
A short RFE/RL film in which ethnic Kazakhs from Xinjiang describe the pressure to give up their language and their religion, detention, surveillance and family separation.
A documentary made by Uyghur filmmakers, following three craftsmen near Qaghiliq, south of Kashgar: a mat maker, a spoon maker and a salt seller. It is Uyghur life filmed by Uyghurs, not a record of the repression. English and Chinese subtitles are burnt into the picture.
The copy online is hosted on an academic channel, not by the filmmakers.
Also above: ARTE Reportage in six languages, and the two DW reports with German and Arabic versions. Kazakh voices: Reeducated.
No documentary in Azerbaijani has been verified for this page; the Turkish ones are the closest.
The Chinese press release from the UN Human Rights Office is an abridged version and does not carry the finding that the conduct may constitute crimes against humanity; the Human Rights Watch summary does. BBC News may be blocked in mainland China.
دۇنيا ئۇيغۇر قۇرۇلتىيى· Dunya Uyghur Qurultiyi ·the name the World Uyghur Congress writes for itself on its Uyghur-language site. That site could not be reached from here, so it is named without a link.
Radio Free Asia is funded by the United States government, and its site is blocked in China.
Go further
Grasp the scale — and follow those who document it.
Reputable organisations, primary-source archives, and Uyghur voices to hear directly. Every link is checked.
Chinese state media are not used as a source of fact; Beijing's position is quoted when a source cited here reported it.
Loading this page makes no request to any third party: no embedded player, no map tiles, no remote fonts — outbound links open other sites, which set their own cookies.
On the map, boundaries are simplified and de facto. Aksai Chin, shown here on the Chinese side, is claimed by India.
Borders: made with Natural Earth, public domain. Place names and coordinates: Wikidata, CC0. Detention sites: Alison Killing, Megha Rajagopalan and Christo Buschek / BuzzFeed News, Xinjiang Camps Data (opens in a new tab), updated July 2021, licensed CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab). Changed by veax: sub-compounds removed, coordinates reprojected and rounded, the eight recorded levels of evidence grouped into four.
The film's rights belong to Ruhi Çenet. Third-party photos and data are not ours: they stay under the licences listed above, each of which allows this reuse.
