Brussels, 4 February 2003. Mr Tohti Tunyaz, an ethnic Uighur from the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) while visiting XUAR, as postgraduate student at the Tokyo University's School of Humanities (Japan) specialising in the history of Chinese government policy towards minority groups, has been arrested on February 6, 1998, for obtaining and copying part of a 50-year-old document, which he obtained with the help of an official librarian.

On November 10, 1998, Mr Tunyaz was officially charged by the Chinese authorities with "stealing state secrets for foreign persons" and "inciting national disunity". The latter charge on the base of an allegedly published book in Japan in 1998 entitled “The Inside Story of the Silk Road”, advocating, according to the Chinese government, ethnic separation, which according to scholars in Tokyo has never been written by Mr Tunyaz.
Mr Tunyaz was convicted by the Urumqi Intermediate People's Court on March 10, 1999, and following an appeal, was sentenced by China's Supreme Court on February 15, 2000 to 11 years in prison with an additional two years' deprivation of political rights.

Mr Tohti Tunyaz is currently serving his 11-year sentence in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region Prison No. 3 in the provincial capital of Urumqi. It is reported that he has exhausted his appeals and will therefore remain incarcerated until his sentence expires on March 31, 2009.

Question of Olivier Dupuis, secretary of the Transnational Radical Party and member of the European Parliament, to the Commission:

“Has the Commission undertaken any initiative concerning the case of Mr Tohti Tunyaz ? Does the Commission intend to enforce in any way the December 2001 Declaration of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention granting Mr. Tunyaz status of "arbitrarily detained" ? More generally which initiatives does the Commission intend to take in order to create the conditions for a political dialogue on the future status of East-Turkestan between the Chinese authorities and the representatives of the East-Turkestan oppositional movements ?”

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