Ilham Tohti built a website where Uyghurs and Han Chinese could argue about Xinjiang policy without violence. Twelve years later, he is still in prison, his family has not seen him since 2017, and even human rights researchers are no longer certain where he is being held.
Ilham Tohti was an economics professor at Minzu University in Beijing when he built a website, in the mid-2000s, meant to do something modest: give Uyghurs and Han Chinese a shared platform to discuss the social and economic problems facing Xinjiang. He called it Uyghur Online. He explicitly rejected separatism and violence in his public writing, arguing instead for the kind of dialogue and policy reform that might address Uyghur grievances within China's existing political structure. The government shut the site down in 2008. It arrested him for good in January 2014.
Police raided his Beijing home on January 15, 2014, seizing computers, phones, and property, and detained him as he prepared to board a flight to the United States with his teenage daughter. Within a week, Chinese officials had confirmed he was being held on suspicion of unspecified crimes. A formal arrest notice charging separatism followed in February. His trial, when it finally came, lasted two days, held before the Urumqi Intermediate People's Court in September 2014, with foreign journalists and diplomats barred from attending.
On September 23, 2014, the court convicted Tohti of separatism and sentenced him to life imprisonment, along with the confiscation of all his personal assets. The Xinjiang High People's Court upheld the conviction that November, despite what Amnesty International later described as procedural violations including the denial of a public hearing on appeal. His legal team, Amnesty said, went six months without access to their own client and were never shown the evidence against him.
Tohti's case became, over the following decade, one of the most closely watched examples of Beijing's treatment of Uyghur intellectuals who explicitly worked within the system rather than against it. He received the Martin Ennals Award for human rights defenders in 2016 and, in October 2019, the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, one of the body's highest honors. He could not travel to collect it. His daughter, Jewher Ilham, who had been at the airport with him the day he was arrested and had continued on to the United States alone, accepted the prize on his behalf that December. "I do not know where my father is," she said around that time. "2017 was the last time my family received word about him."
That sentence has not required updating in the years since. Tohti's family in China lost quarterly prison visitation rights in the spring of 2017 and, according to Amnesty International reporting from September 2024, has had no in-person contact with him since. His last direct contact with his daughter was a Skype call on January 14, 2014, hours before his arrest.
He argued explicitly against separatism and explicitly against violence. He has now spent longer in prison for advocating dialogue than most of the students his website was built to reach have spent in university.
Marking the tenth anniversary of Tohti's conviction in September 2024, Amnesty International's secretary general, Agnès Callamard, said it was "an outrage that the persecution of Uyghurs including Ilham Tohti continues unabated, and with impunity." Jewher Ilham responded to the same anniversary with a simpler claim: "It should be a daughter's fundamental right to see her father, and as a human being it is my right to call out injustice."
As of a Human Rights Watch report published in August 2026, marking a decade of what the organization called impunity for crimes against Uyghurs, Tohti was still named among a small group of prominent Uyghur public figures believed to remain in detention, their exact whereabouts unconfirmed even to researchers who track such cases closely. He is now in his late fifties. His conviction, life imprisonment for founding a website that argued against the very separatism he was convicted of promoting, has outlasted three American presidencies and shows no sign, twelve years on, of being reconsidered.
Uyghur Online, as Tohti conceived it, was never meant to be a protest platform. Human Rights Watch has described its founding purpose as giving "Uighurs and Hans with a platform for discussion and exchange," a modest ambition that nonetheless drew sustained official suspicion years before his final arrest. He was interrogated in March 2009 after criticizing Xinjiang policy in an interview with Radio Free Asia, and disappeared briefly that July after ethnic violence broke out in Urumqi, detained on suspicion of having posted material authorities alleged had helped incite the clashes. He was recognized for his writing well before his 2014 conviction, receiving PEN America's Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award that same year, and was named a joint recipient of the Council of Europe's Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize in 2019, the same year the European Parliament awarded him its Sakharov Prize. Each recognition arrived to an empty chair; the man being honored had already been unreachable by his own family for years.