Far from their home in Xinjiang, the Uyghur diaspora has put down roots across the Nordic countries. For almost three decades, they have worked to build communities and preserve their language and culture while China has tried its best to erase it.
But the Uyghur community’s ability to organise is under fierce pressure, as China’s “long arm” is growing ever longer and reaches further yet beyond the country’s own borders.
As Uyghur activists across the Nordic region struggle to attract the world’s attention amidst a world in flames, China is busy reining in Uyghurs all around the world.
“The objective is not necessarily to arrest an activist in Stockholm. Sometimes it is enough to make hundreds of people wonder what might happen to their families if they speak,” says Shukur Samsak, chairman of the Swedish Uyghur Committee.
And they’re succeeding.
This creates an “extremely difficult psychological environment,” Shukur Samsak says.
“People may hesitate before attending a demonstration. Others may be reluctant to speak publicly, appear in photographs, talk to journalists or become formally involved with an organization. There can also be mistrust inside the community because people do not always know who may be collecting information or reporting political activity.”
How the Uyghur diaspora took root in the Nordics
A 2023 report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project concluded that, of the Nordic countries, Norway and Sweden housed by far the largest number of members of the Uyghur diaspora, estimating that about 3,000 Uyghurs reside in each country.
Finland follows next, with an estimated Uyghur population of about 400, then Denmark with an estimated population of fewer than 50. Iceland is not included in the report. Because most countries only keep records of the nationality of immigrants, not ethnicity, it is often impossible to obtain an exact number.
The explanation for Sweden’s attractiveness as a destination for diasporic Uyghurs may be found in the country’s historically and notoriously relaxed immigration and asylum policies, large existing Muslim refugee communities, and its early adoption of a blanket policy that granted asylum to all Uyghur Muslim applicants by default in 2019.
It is true for both Norway and Sweden that the countries have both historically been common destinations for Uyghur refugees, possibly causing a snowball effect where more recent refugees are attracted to destinations where large Uyghur communities already exist.
“When the Uyghurs came to Norway, they built their own community very quickly,” says Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur linguist and poet. He is the founder of Uyghurhjelp, a Norway-based non-profit organisation that engages in advocacy work and support for members of the Uyghur diaspora.
In 2013, he was detained for almost nine months by the Chinese authorities in Xinjiang, the semiautonomous region of China where the majority of Uyghurs live, on charges of illegal fundraising for schools that taught the Uyghur language.
He believes that the existing Uyghur communities in Norway and Sweden are the primary reasons that the countries remain popular destinations for Uyghur refugees.
“It is really helpful,” he says. “In Sweden, they founded their organisation 20 years ago. In Norway, the first Uyghur Norwegian committee was set up in 2004.”
“So the reason there are not many Uyghurs in Denmark is, first of all, there is no one who leads this activity to build this community. And the second reason is because there are not enough people.”
The lively Uyghur communities in Norway and Sweden stand in stark contrast to Denmark, which has earned a reputation in recent years for being a frontrunner among European nations in terms of adopting legislation aimed at preventing immigration, particularly Muslim groups, although primarily from Middle Eastern and African countries.
For example, Denmark in 2021 became the first Western nation to begin revoking residence permits of certain groups of Syrian refugees against the advice of the nation’s entire human rights sector, in order to deport them to Syria.
Building communities and fighting for recognition
Abduweli Ayup fled China in 2015 shortly after being released from detention and eventually arrived in Bergen, Norway, after spending time in Türkiye, where he originally founded Uyghurhjelp, although it now operates out of Norway.
The organisation is one of a handful of Uyghur-founded organisations that operate in the region and often cooperate to promote a variety of domestic and international priorities. In Norway, Uyghurhjelp and the Norwegian Uyghur Committee, which also founded the now independent Uyghur Transitional Justice Database, are the two major groups. In Sweden, the Swedish Uyghur Committee and the Sweden Uyghur Education Association are the two most prominent groups, the latter of which is now largely inactive in the public forum.
“We always work together with Uyghurs in Sweden,” says Abduweli Ayup. “We can work together because of the language background. And also because of the geographical closeness.”
In Denmark, the Uyghur community, due to its very limited numbers, is primarily represented indirectly through umbrella organisations such as Amnesty International Denmark, the Danish Institute for Human Rights, the Tibet Support Committee, and certain individual politicians.
Currently, says Abduweli Ayup, he is collaborating with other pro-Uyghur groups in Norway to pressure the Norwegian government on a couple of major issues, such as putting pressure on the Norwegian parliament to pass a law that bans products made using forced labor alongside the European Union’s Forced Labour Regulation. If passed, it will enter into force on December 14th, 2027, and ban the sale, import, and export of goods made with forced labor.
This is particularly relevant in the context of Norway’s cooperation with China in the solar energy sector, where it has been alleged that China uses Uyghur forced labor in its production of solar cells. According to the BBC, about 45% of the world’s supply of polysilicon, a key component in the manufacturing process, is produced in the Xinjiang region.
“We have advocated for this because solar cells are linked to Uyghur forced labor,” says Abduweli Ayup.
“So yes, it’s clean. It’s clean in the environmental sense — but from the human rights perspective, it’s a different story,” he says.
The political battle over genocide recognition
In Sweden, Shukur Samsak of the Swedish Uyghur Committee says that their overarching policy goal is “the restoration of an independent East Turkistan through peaceful and democratic means,” referring to China’s northwestern region that is widely referred to as Xinjiang.
“Our position is that East Turkistan is an occupied homeland and that the Uyghur people possess the right to self-determination,” he says.
Another major concern of both the Swedish Uyghur Committee and Abduweli Ayup is that the Norwegian and Swedish governments continue not to recognise China’s repression of the Uyghurs as a genocide.
“Some parliaments recognise the Uyghur genocide,” Abduweli Ayup says. “Such as the British, the Dutch, and the Belgian parliaments. But in Norway, we haven’t been able to do that.”
But there’s more to the issue now than there was five or ten years ago, when China’s repression of the Uyghurs became globally known.
“The question is increasingly not whether governments have been informed, but what they are prepared to do with that information,” says Shukur Samsak.
“We advocate for stronger political and economic consequences for institutions and officials responsible for serious abuses. That includes targeted sanctions where appropriate, meaningful supply-chain enforcement against goods connected to forced Uyghur labour, and greater responsibility for European companies to demonstrate that their business activities are not benefiting from coercion in East Turkistan.”
All in all, there are two overall dimensions that characterise the advocacy work of Uyghur rights groups in Sweden, regionally in Europe, and globally, says Shukur Samsak:
“There is an immediate responsibility: to protect lives, oppose repression, combat forced labour, protect diaspora communities and demand accountability.”
“And there is a long-term objective: the restoration of the independence of East Turkistan,” he says.
Transnational repression reaches Europe’s democracies
A 2022 article by The Guardian describes Norway, where Abduweli Ayup currently lives in its capital, Oslo, “with its egalitarian laws and exemplary democracy,” as a country that “seems like the safest place on earth.”
But as the piece goes on to say, “even here, Uyghurs say they are being hunted down.”
The article refers to a term known as transnational repression, where political dissidents or human rights activists, for example, in the diaspora are targeted by a government beyond the borders of its country in order to silence and repress them.
In the most extreme cases, this can take the form of physical harm such as assaults, abductions, harassment at home or work, and even targeted assassinations. But most often it happens through digital threats, harassment, and surveillance, or by targeting family members who remain inside China. In Norway, for example, Uyghurs who attended protests against China’s internment camps in Xinjiang received dozens of automated phone calls from the Chinese embassy — a subtle way of letting them know that they’re watching.
It was revealed in 2024 that China operated more than a hundred overseas police stations across 53 countries that functioned, in part, to coerce overseas Chinese nationals to return to China in order to take legal action against them.
“This is a very thorny issue right now,” says Abduweli Ayup, adding that in the past five years or so, the fear of reprisal from China has gotten much worse among Uyghurs in Norway.
This is true in Sweden too, says Maja Åberg, senior policy adviser at Amnesty Sweden.
“Many Uyghurs are worried about their relatives in China, and there is also the issue of not feeling completely safe in Sweden, due to issues regarding transnational repression,” she says.
Fear is emptying Uyghur schools and silencing protests
As he did in Xinjiang, Abduweli Ayup has organised Sunday schools for the Uyghur diaspora in Norway and Europe, where members of the community could study Uyghur language and culture. They used to be very popular, he says, but attendance all across Europe has dropped dramatically in recent years, to the point that their very existence is severely threatened.
“We used to have 12 schools across Norway,” he says. “12 Uyghur schools in Norway. Now nothing is left. In Sweden, there are no Uyghur schools left. In Belgium, like Austria and other countries, there are no Uyghur schools left,” he says, adding that this is because the Chinese authorities have been known to keep track of who attends the schools.
Most recently, a law known as the Ethnic Unity Law took effect on July 1st, which ratified China’s policy of forced ethnic assimilation into law.
“This law threatened people a lot,” says Abduweli Ayup. “According to the law, if you participate in a protest or talk openly about anything related to human rights, you will be designated as an enemy, as a criminal. And not only Uyghurs — anyone who participates.”
In Norway, “many people have stopped coming to protests,” says Abduweli Ayup.
“We used to have them often, but now we have very few people attending. Sometimes ten, sometimes only five. We used to have hundreds of people coming to our demonstrations,” he says.
But not anymore.
And it’s not because any of them stopped caring.
But there’s another side to this issue that is often overlooked by the general public, says Shukur Samsak:
“It means that the issue should not be viewed only as a Uyghur or Chinese foreign-policy matter. When a foreign government attempts to monitor, intimidate or silence people exercising lawful political freedoms in Sweden, it becomes a question of Swedish sovereignty and of the integrity of Swedish democracy.”
When economic interests overshadow human rights
But transnational repression is just one among many major challenges that the Uyghur diaspora in the Nordics faces.
With much less attention being paid to the plight of the Uyghurs in China and the diaspora today compared to a few years ago, they have very little leverage when advocating for their rights.
“One challenge is getting media attention for the issue,” says Maja Åberg, senior policy adviser at Amnesty Sweden.
“A few years ago, there was a big interest in issues regarding human rights in China, including in Xinjiang, but it seems less now.”
This, combined with high levels of economic interdependence between the Nordics and China, means that Uyghur interest groups suffer many more political losses than they celebrate victories.
“Norway exports a lot of fish to China,” says Abduweli Ayup. “And they also sell ships to China. They have a strong economic connection. That’s why Norway is always the leading voice about, for example, the Palestine issue. Because there is no strong economic connection between Israel and Norway.”
“From this point of view, you can say that the Uyghur tragedy has already faded away from the public’s attention,” he says. “But we will keep trying.”