Rushan Abbas: We Cannot Stay Silent on China’s War on Uyghur Women

Editor’s Note: On February 16, 2026, Campaign for Uyghurs Executive Director Rushan Abbas addressed the Women’s Progress Dialogue in Berlin. Held alongside the Munich Security Conference, the event featured global leaders including Hillary Clinton, Dalia Grybauskaitė, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Tawakkol Karman, and Tzipi Livni. Speaking in the “FREEDOM” hall, Abbas highlighted the CCP’s use of gender-based violence and forced sterilization as tools of genocide, calling for global accountability. In our commitment to independent journalism, Uyghur Times is sharing the full transcript of her remarks below as we continue to serve as an independent platform for diverse voices.

Not many people around the world speak against China’s crimes nor mention what is happening to Uyghur women and it is not being covered in the main stream media often.
As part of China’s genocidal campaign against Uyghur people in co-called Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region of China, our ethnicity is outlawed, our language is banned, our religion criminalized.
Honorable Madam Secretary Clinton, 31 years after your historic powerful remarks in Beijing, China has betrayed its commitments to women’s equality and dignity.
Today, the CCP is waging a blatant war on millions of Uyghur women through an ongoing genocide, mocking the very principles of the 1995 Declaration.
The true battleground of this genocide is the bodies of Uyghur women. Beyond physical and sexual abuse, Beijing facilitates government-sponsored mass rape through forced marriages of Uyghur women to Chinese men, incentivized by state benefits. Coupled with forced sterilizations and the separation of over a million children into state-run orphanages, this is a calculated campaign to erase our future.

Chinese state media reported that 1.1 million Han Chinese cadres, mostly men, were deployed into Uyghur homes to monitor their daily lives. While most of the Uyghur men are sent to forced labor facilities or prison, Uyghur women are being sexually abused inside of their own homes.
The Uyghur birth rate growth is approaching zero in many Uyghurs populated regions. (Tweet from Chinese embassy in the US.)
My rights under democracy in a free country, cost my own sister’s freedom back in Xinjiang,
I am also here to add a name, face and a story to this genocide which China is denying and tempting to whitewash now—(I will talk about the details on my sister Gulshan’s story here).
This is what we call Transnational Repression: a foreign power reaching across the ocean to target an American citizen on U.S. soil by holding her sister hostage.
The global economy is fueled by state-sponsored Uyghur forced labor. Under the guise of ‘poverty alleviation,’ millions of Uyghurs—including doctors, students, and farmers—are shipped thousands of miles to feed global supply chains. In 2023 alone, 3.2 million forced labor transfers systematically dismantled Uyghur families.

The CCP profits from Uyghur bodies in every way imaginable. U.S. Customs once seized 13 tons of human hair from Uyghur homeland—a haunting reminder of the lives consumed by this system.

The shoes on your feet, the car you drive, and the food you eat are all tainted by the blood, sweat, and tears of my people. My sister herself may have made the shirt on your back

We cannot allow the products of genocide to be laundered through our borders. We stand at a crossroads of global trade and human dignity. We owe it to our children to build a world where freedom is not a luxury, but a guarantee.

Silence is the oxygen of tyranny.

If we fail to speak out today, the only voice left to speak is one of regret.