A Doctor. A Mother. A Political Prisoner by Proxy.

Dr. Gulshan Abbas is a retired Uyghur medical doctor, mother, and grandmother who has been unjustly imprisoned by the Chinese government since September 2018.

Gulshan was not a political activist. She was not a public critic of the Chinese government. Yet on September 11, 2018, Chinese authorities took her from her home in Urumqi, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. For more than two years, her family did not know where she was or what had happened to her.

Her disappearance came just days after her sister, Rushan Abbas, publicly spoke at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. about the Chinese government's mass detention and persecution of Uyghurs.

 

The timing has made Gulshan's case a powerful example of transnational repression: punishing one person for another family member's exercise of fundamental freedoms abroad.

Twenty Years for a Crime She Did Not Commit

Gulshan's family later learned that she had been secretly tried in March 2019 and sentenced to 20 years in prison on terrorism-related charges that the United States has described as unfounded.

There was no transparent judicial process. Her family was denied meaningful information about her detention, trial, and condition.

In 2022, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention formally determined that Gulshan's imprisonment is arbitrary and violates multiple provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Working Group called on the Chinese government to remedy her situation.

She remains imprisoned today.

A Family Separated

For Gulshan's family, this is not an abstract human rights issue. Gulshan has 24 U.S. family members. Her daughters, grandchildren, siblings, and extended family have spent years waiting for her to come home. More than two dozen members of Gulshan's family are American citizens.

Her daughter, Ziba Murat, and her sister, Rushan, have carried Gulshan's story to the United States administration, Congress, international institutions, and audiences around the world.

Every year of Gulshan's imprisonment is another year of birthdays missed, grandchildren growing older, and an American family forced to live with separation and uncertainty.

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