Rushan Abbas

Since the late 1980s, Abbas has been a campaigner for the human rights of Uyghur people around the world. In 1988, she began her activism by participating in the Uyghur Student Protests. One of the multiple student movements in that decade, the protests generally resisted discriminatory education policies, birth control policies, the effects of nuclear testing in the Lop Nur region, a lack of genuine autonomy and representation in government and employment opportunities.

By 1998, Radio Free Asia had launched a Uyghur Service where Abbas became the first Uyghur reporter broadcasting on Xinjiang. Her activism continued in the United States, where she participated in protests against the Olympic relay in 2008 in San Francisco.

She frequently briefs and advises on policy and legislative response, including support for the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, and greater transparency for the Sister Cities program with links to China. She works frequently with international Human Rights Organizations, civic societies and meets with international government leaders and politicians.

A few months after the September 11 attacks, the U.S. had transferred a group of 22 Uyghur terrorists to the Guantanamo Bay detention center as part of the ongoing War on Terror. Five were captured following a battle in Northern Afghanistan, and 17 were seized by police in Pakistan. According to Abbas, all 22 men had previously escaped the 1997 Ghulja Incident and fled to Pakistan and Afghanistan, then the only places in the area which offered protection and did not require a visa; after September 11, when the U.S. military raided Afghanistan, while trying to escape the war zone they were caught by some Pakistani bounty hunters who sold them for $5,000 each to the U.S. authorities as foreign fighters. Abbas states she was asked to serve as a translator to these Uyghurs in early 2002 and accepted a nine-month assignment, returning in 2003 for an additional two months.

In 2006, she returned to aid defense attorneys in their ongoing efforts to secure a declaration of innocence for the Uyghurs being held there. Following their release, Abbas assisted the US Department of Justice and State Department with the resettlement efforts in Albania, Sweden, Bermuda, Palau, Switzerland, El Salvador, and Slovenia.

Abbas introduced and led the "One Voice One Step" Uyghur Women's movement; an organized demonstration that took place on March 15, 2018, in 14 countries and 18 cities on the same day to protest China's detention of millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps. The protests were held in the United States, Germany, Belgium, Norway, Turkey, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, France, Finland, and Japan.

The demonstrations largely were held to demand that the international community take action against reports of concentration camps in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

On September 5, 2018, Rushan Abbas participated on a panel discussion titled "China's 'War on Terrorism' and the Xinjiang Emergency" hosted by the Hudson Institute. Abbas spoke about the ongoing persecution of Uyghurs in China, and described the camps being used to detain Uyghurs in China.  Six days later, one of Abbas's sisters and an aunt disappeared from their homes in northwest China, and Abbas believes both were both detained by the Chinese government as retaliation for her speech.

Abbas has been advocating for Uyghur people's rights, regularly appearing in the media, delivering public remarks in universities and forums, and creating international coalitions to draw attention to the Uyghur cause. Since her disappearance, the Chinese Government has confirmed that her sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, is being held in a prison inside China on alleged terror charges.

Beyond this confirmation, few details have been made publicly available.

In 2017, Abbas founded Campaign for Uyghurs. The non-profit is based in Washington, DC, and is used to organize internationally for the rights of Uyghur people. The primary focus of the organization are the ongoing crimes against humanity in China, which have been designated a genocide by some nations. Campaign for Uyghurs regularly engages in activism at the federal level in the United States, advocating the passage of legislation that restricts forced labor and advances human rights.

Through her work at CFU, Abbas has been recognized by Government officials at the National Prayer Breakfast, and the State of the Union, where she was the guest of Senator Marco Rubio in February 2020. Her work has drawn the ire of the Chinese Government on occasion, especially in the state-owned media apparatus, where she has been accused of being a member of a separatist group in East Turkistan.

In February 2022, two U.S. legislators, Tom Suozzi of New York and Chris Smith of New Jersey, nominated the Campaign for Uyghurs, along with the Uyghur Human Rights Project, for the Nobel Peace Prize, for their "significant contributions to building fraternity among peoples and promoting peace by defending the human rights of the Uyghur, Kazakh and other predominately Muslim ethnic minorities that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has targeted with genocide and other crimes against humanity." Rushan Abbas welcomed the nomination, saying, "Regardless of the outcome of the nomination, the fact that the Uighur issue will be discussed along with the nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize is a great victory for the Uighur movement."

Abbas has appeared before congress on multiple occasions to testify on issues of Human Rights, specifically as they relate to the status of Uyghurs living in China. She testified in 2019 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in regard to the emergence of concentration camps in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and the threat of Chinese power in the Eastern Pacific.

In 2020, she testified before the House of Representatives on international religious persecution, and the role of islamophobia in the ongoing human rights abuses in China. In 2021, she testified on the issue of forced labor as it relates to Uyghurs, and the economic coercive power being used in China.

She has been vocal in the Biden administration, writing in 2021 that she hopes "the Biden administration ensures the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, which passed with nearly unanimous bipartisan support and imposes sanctions on entities and individuals involved in these human rights abuses, will be enforced to the full extent. The Biden administration must also prioritize Section 307 of the Tariff Act — which outlaws forced labor imports — and ensure that thorough and effective enforcement is applied to every ban on products originating from the Uighur homeland."