Uyghur Prison Sentences Total 4.4 Million Years, Yale Report Reveals

A recent analysis from Yale University highlights the staggering impact of the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign against Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang, estimating a cumulative 4.4 million years of prison sentences, nationalreview.com published yesterday.

The report from Yale’s Macmillan Center for Genocide Studies indicates that the Chinese government has shifted from mass arbitrary detentions to a legally dubious framework for imprisoning individuals.

Researchers, led by human rights lawyer Rayhan Asat, analyzed 13,000 cases from the Xinjiang Victims Database, finding an average sentence of 8.8 years. This figure was extrapolated from 540,000 prosecutions reported by the Xinjiang High People’s Procuratorate between 2017 and 2021. The report warns that the dataset represents only a fraction of the true extent of the repression, with nearly 90% of cases lacking public records.