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Fez – Amnesty International announced on December 15 that Moroccan authorities decided to extradite Uyghur activist Idris Hassan to China.
Beijing accused Hasan of belonging to a terrorist group and requested Interpol to issue a red notice about him. Moroccan authorities arrested Hasan on July 19, yet Interpol’s red notice was withdrawn on August 2.
Hasan was apprehended last July after travelling from Turkey to Morocco. The Uyghur man had been living in Turkey with a “humanitarian permit” that was set to expire. His wife and children have permanent residency in the country.
The activist had been residing in Turkey since 2012 before fleeing the country because as he said, “he did not feel safe there.”
In July, Beijin requested Rabat to hand over Hasan, designating him as a “terrorist.”
Human rights groups, including Amnesty International and MENA Rights, have since pleaded with Morocco not to hand over the activist to Chinese authorities. The NGOs have cited risks of arbitrary detention and torture in China.
Hassan was put before the Casablanca Court of First Instance on July 20, which ordered placing him in custody at Tifelt prison. The Court of Cassation had been looking into the deportation request since then.
Read more: The Uyghurs: The Forgotten Muslims
Hasan is one of many Uyghurs who fled China following claims of rampant incarceration of the minority group by Chinese authorities in response to the region’s violent separatist war that claimed roughly 1,000 civilian lives between 1997 and 2014.
The Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic group from China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region who are mainly Muslims. The Uyghurs speak a language that is akin to Turkish and consider themselves to be culturally and ethnically related to Central Asian countries.
According to Western human rights organizations, the Uyghurs are currently persecuted in their own country, with reports of torture and incarceration in Chinese political prisons.
