Nyrola Elimä
An independent consultant and researcher with expertise in supply chain tracing, forced labor, and transnational repression.
The Long Road from Xinjiang
The New York Times Magazine
He fled brutal repression — only to discover, as so many Uyghur refugees have, that China’s power stretches far beyond its borders.
China Cannot Silence Me
The New Yorker
Speaking of the crimes committed against my family and other Uyghurs in Xinjiang has sparked a surprising reaction.
The Grim Reality of Being a ‘model Uighur’
The Spectator
People know about the ongoing genocide of the Uighurs, but it didn’t come out of nowhere: it followed years of smaller scale persecution.
The Faces from China’s Uyghur Detention Camps
BBC
A set of internal police protocols describes the routine use of armed officers in all areas of the camps, the positioning of machine guns and sniper rifles in the watchtowers, and the existence of a shoot-to-kill policy for those trying to escape.
Policy Reports
“We know you better than you know yourself”: China’s transnational repression of the Uyghur diaspora
The scale of transnational repression in the Uyghur diaspora is universal, and its impact severely restricts their rights to free speech and associations, and the capacity to maintain their culture. Transnational repression has expanded in Xi Jinping’s “new era,” but its tactics have gradually changed since 2017, with increased use of Uyghur informants to gather intelligence while backing off from harassing those who resist pressure.
In Broad Daylight: Uyghur Forced Labour and Global Solar Supply Chains
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has placed millions of indigenous Uyghur and Kazakh citizens from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR or Uyghur Region) into what the government calls “surplus labour” (富余劳动力) and “labour transfer” (劳动力转移) programmes. An official PRC government report published in November 2020 documents the “placement” of 2.6 million minoritised citizens in jobs in farms and factories within the Uyghur Region and across the country through these state-sponsored “surplus labour” and “labour transfer” initiatives.
Financing & genocide: Development finance and the crisis in the Uyghur Region
Significant evidence suggests that the International Finance Corporation (IFC) clients, the World Bank’s private lending arm, are active participants in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression against the Uyghurs, including through forced labor, forced displacement, cultural erasure, and environmental destruction. IFC’s failure to adequately safeguard communities and the environment affected by its financing in the Uyghur Region makes the institution complicit in the repression of Uyghur, Kazakh, and other minoritized citizens.
Built on Repression
The Uyghur Region is being used as both a source of cheap labour and cheap coal, and also as a dumping ground for the most hideous of environmental hazards. The abuse of human labour and the environment in the XUAR has significantly reduced the price of manufacturing PVC and thus of manufacturing luxury flooring worldwide.
Until Nothing is Left
Documents in great detail the egregious human rights violations of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which is a paramilitary corporate conglomerate designed to suppress and colonise the Indigenous people of the Uyghur Region.
