Former World Uyghur Congress vice president named Bloc Québécois candidate in Montreal, Switzerland raised the ethnic-unity law with Beijing, ex-regional financial official gets suspended death sentence

October 27, 2026 Közet Staff

Közet’s daily roundup of news on Uyghurs, their homeland, and the world around them. Tuesday, October 27, 2026.

TOP LINE

Zumretay Arkin, a vice president of the World Uyghur Congress, an advocacy group, until this month, will be the Bloc Québécois candidate in the coming federal by-election in Montreal’s Laurier–Sainte-Marie riding, party leader Yves-François Blanchet announced at a news conference on Sunday, La Presse Canadienne reported. Arkin, who came to Quebec at 10 and grew up in Montreal, has argued for Uyghur self-determination at the United Nations; she said the fight taught her “how precious it is that a people can decide its own future”. The seat was vacated by former Liberal minister Steven Guilbeault, whose resignation reached the chief electoral officer on August 31; no by-election date has been set. The World Uyghur Congress said on Monday that Arkin joined its Munich office in 2019, led its women’s committee from 2021 and “served as its Vice President from October 2024 to October 2026”; its president, Turgunjan Alawdun, called her candidacy “a powerful message that Uyghurs will not be silenced.” (La Presse Canadienne, via Les Affaires; World Uyghur Congress, an advocacy group)

HOMELAND

Former regional finance chief sentenced to death with reprieve for 436 million yuan in bribes. The Chengdu Intermediate People’s Court on Tuesday sentenced Wang Huimin to death with a two-year reprieve, to be converted on expiry to life imprisonment without commutation or parole, for taking bribes worth more than 436 million yuan between 1998 and 2025, People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s newspaper, reported. The court listed his posts as president and party secretary of China Construction Bank’s regional branch, assistant to the chairman of the regional government, director of the regional government’s financial work office, party secretary of the regional rural credit cooperatives union, and head of the party disciplinary group at the China Securities Regulatory Commission. He was tried in public on July 17; the court credited him with confessing and disclosing facts investigators had not yet found. The report gives no breakdown of how much of the money was taken in his regional posts, and names none of the businesses that paid. (People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s newspaper, via Guangming Net)

DIASPORA

Silicon Valley’s Uyghur restaurant becomes a Chinese one. Mrs Khan Uyghur Cuisine, opened in downtown Menlo Park, California, in 2022 by sisters Kalbinur and Almira Tursungjan, closed in September, and Kalbinur Tursungjan reopened it on October 14 as Dragon General, serving Dongbei, Beijing, Shanghai, Hunan and Sichuan dishes with Minjun Li brought in as chef and co-owner, The Almanac, a Menlo Park weekly, reported on October 23. She told the paper she could not find a chef able to cook Uyghur food and that her sister had already left the business, finding the work “stressful and tiring”; Li said a beer-and-wine license also figured in the change. When the restaurant opened, the sisters told the same paper their parents, restaurateurs in the Uyghur region, had had their passports taken. Li said he may restore some Uyghur dishes later. (The Almanac)

INTERNATIONAL

Switzerland raised the ethnic-unity law and Uyghurs with Beijing a week ago. Switzerland’s Federal Department of Foreign Affairs raised the situation of Uyghurs and Tibetans, developments in Hong Kong, and China’s new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress — and “its potential effect on the linguistic, cultural and religious rights of minorities” — at the 19th round of the two countries’ human rights dialogue in Bern on October 20, the department said in a statement that day; individual cases were also discussed. The Swiss delegation was led by Dagmar Schmidt Tartagli, deputy head of the FDFA’s peace and human rights division, and the Chinese by Yuan Yuan, a deputy director-general at the foreign ministry; the delegations spent October 19 in the canton of Fribourg looking at bilingual education. The statement does not describe China’s response. The dialogue, held since 1991, took place five days before the regional legislature in Urumqi called for regional regulations implementing the same law. (Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs)

MEDIA WATCH

Eight years after a 14-year-old’s detention, a report of her death and no word from the state. UygurHaber, a Turkish-language Uyghur news site, reported on Monday that Rahile Omer, detained at 14, has died in custody, citing no source for the death. Her detention is a matter of record: the Xinjiang Police Files, leaked in 2022, show she was taken on September 28, 2017, and photographed in March 2018 at what the authorities called a “vocational skills education and training center” in Konasheher (Shufu). Nothing public from the authorities records her after that. She would now be about 23. In 2019, when reports of the musician Abdurehim Heyit’s death spread, the state answered with a video of a detained man against a bare wall and used it for weeks to discredit reporting on the region; it never said why he was held. The same authorities are the only ones who can account for Rahile Omer. (UygurHaber; Xinjiang Police Files)

Feng’s account of Uyghur fighters in Syria reaches op-ed pages and radio. Emily Feng, NPR’s White House correspondent and formerly its China correspondent, author of Our Hearts Burned for Home: Uyghur Militants in Syria’s Civil War, wrote in The Washington Post on Monday that “hundreds of Uyghur fighters” were among the rebels who entered Damascus in December 2024 and that thousands of Uyghurs are now settling in Syria; WBUR’s Here & Now broadcast an interview with her the same day. (The Washington Post; WBUR)

ON THE RADAR

Laurier–Sainte-Marie: The by-election writ. Elections Canada had issued none by Tuesday morning.
Tonight, Delaware, Ohio: Researcher Muetter Tohti is listed to speak on China’s repression of the Uyghur diaspora at Ohio Wesleyan University at 6:30 p.m. Eastern.
October 28, New York: Emily Feng discusses Our Hearts Burned for Home: Uyghur Militants in Syria’s Civil War, reported with Abduweli Ayup, at Columbia Journalism School (1 p.m.) and Asia Society (6:30 p.m.), per the publisher’s calendar.
Carried from Monday: Names from the regional legislature’s October 25 appointment vote; a successor to Wang Gang at the political and legal affairs commission; a draft of the regional ethnic-unity regulations; Thailand’s National Security Council decision on the two pardoned Uyghur men; the Central Committee’s fifth plenum dates.

Radar is compiled by Közet’s editors from Közet’s own reporting, public documents and other outlets’ work, attributed in each item. Where Közet has read the underlying record, the item says so; where it could not verify a claim, the item says that too. Statements by governments and companies are reported as statements, not facts. Uyghur place names appear first, with the official Chinese name in parentheses. Published weekdays at 10:00 a.m. Eastern. Editorial standards and corrections: kozet.org/editorial-standards.