New hope in NZ woman’s fight to free brother from overseas jail in China

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Next week a New Zealand woman will sit before a committee at The Hague and try to convince them to help her brother, locked up in a Chinese prison for the past seven years. Rizwangul NurMuhammad talks to Paula Penfold about her fight, her guilt — and her hope.

Rizawangul (Riz) NurMuhammad returns to the theme of guilt at least half a dozen times during our hour-long conversation.

She’s a New Zealand citizen granted asylum in 2011. She’s Uyghur, a member of the Muslim minority in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province.

And she feels guilty because she’s watched cases internationally where imprisoned Uyghurs have been freed, and she feels she’s failed her brother Mewlan.

[...]

Mewlan was a fibre network engineer for China Telecom in Bole City. One lunch break in January 2017, he was taken by plain clothes police. “They didn’t provide an explanation for why they were arresting him. He was taken for questioning and then we expected he would be freed soon because he has done nothing wrong.”

[...]

China’s Embassy in Wellington told Stuff he was sentenced in August 2017 to nine years in prison for “separatist activities”. It did not specify what those activities were.