Uyghur retired doctor Ms. Gulshan Abbas, sentenced to 20 years, spends her 64th birthday in prison

On June 13, 2026, this outlet learned that yesterday, Ms. Gulshan Abbas, a Uyghur retired doctor sentenced to 20 years and detained for nearly eight years, spent her 64th birthday in prison. Yet nothing is known to the outside world about her situation in prison.

In September 2018, Uyghur retired doctor Ms. Gulshan Abbas was arrested because of her younger sister’s advocacy activities for Uyghurs overseas; in March 2019, she was sentenced to 20 years and has been detained for nearly eight years to date. For eight years, her family has known nothing about the place of her detention or her health. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued an opinion (No. 88/2022), determining that her deprivation of liberty was arbitrary.

Gulshan Abbas: Female, born June 12, 1962, from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a Uyghur citizen, retired doctor, political prisoner detained in China.

Before her arrest and imprisonment, she was kind-hearted, selfless, and upright by nature, and although she was not keen to participate in politics, she had a strong spirit of active dedication; since the Chinese Communist authorities imposed tighter and more severe high-pressure controls on the various ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region (especially Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and others), she was subjected to intense suppression by the Xinjiang authorities of the Chinese Communist Party after publicly criticizing the Chinese Communist authorities’ disrespect for the human rights of Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in Xinjiang, describing it as extremely poor;

In September 2018, she was taken away by Xinjiang police and has been incommunicado ever since; following more than two years of joint efforts by her family and international human rights organizations to search for her, it was finally learned on December 30, 2020, that she had long before been formally arrested by the local procuratorate on multiple charges, accused of having seriously disrupted social order through “participating in a terrorist organization” and “assisting terrorist activities,” and therefore being subject to arrest and sentencing;

In March 2019, a certain court in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region sentenced her to 20 years’ imprisonment on the charges of “the crime of terrorist organization,” “the crime of assisting terrorist activities,” and “the crime of gathering a crowd to disrupt social order,” with her sentence running until September 2038. The prison where she is currently serving her sentence is unknown.

This outlet will continue to follow Ms. Gulshan Abbas’s situation.