Sayragul Sauytbay

Sayragul Sauytbay (; born 1977) is a Kazakh political activist and whistleblower Sweden offered her political asylum after Kazakhstan refused, and she subsequently emigrated there. ), for 2021; the prize ceremony was held 15 May 2022.

Also in 2021, she testified among other survivors, as a witness at the Uyghur Tribunal in London.

On 11 November 2023 she was elected as the Vice President of the East Turkistan Government in Exile at the 9th East Turkistan General Assembly in Washington, DC.

Life

China Sayragul was born in 1977 in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in China. She is an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national.

After finishing a medical degree at a university in China, she subsequently worked as a doctor, teacher, education director, and headmaster in several preschools. Subsequently she was reassigned from teaching in a kindergarten to a new job in a detention camp. That angered the authorities who told her that she had to convince them to return to China; her passport was confiscated and she was told by the authorities she would never be allowed to leave China, as well as that she would face internment in the camps herself for several years. She also said that revealing that information made her subject to the death penalty in China as it was considered to be state secrets. Some Kazakh activists described her as a hero for revealing the fate of the mistreated Kazakh minority in China. After the trial, she was also subject to pressure to stay silent under threats to her family's safety.

Sayragul was chosen as an International Woman of Courage on 4 March 2020 by the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo.

German-language book Die Kronzeugin, which appeared in mid 2020, was written by Alexandra Cavelius on the basis of interviews with Sayragul. An English translation of the book, in which Sayragul describes her experiences in a Xinjiang province internment camp, was published by Scribe in May 2021 under the title, The Chief Witness: Escape from China's Modern-day Concentration Camps. Since then, there are editions of the book in several other languages, including Swedish.

In 2020, Sayragul said that she was being constantly harassed by the "long arm of China", receiving "death threats from Chinese callers". The formal jury motivation for the prize can be found in English and German, at the site of the City of Nuremberg dedicated to the International Human Rights Prize.

Reaction by China Chinese authorities denied the claims by Sayragul, stating that she had fled abroad after being suspected of fraud, that she had never worked in or been detained in any "vocational education and training center", and that "her words about seeing people tortured cannot be true".