Here's a summary of recent Uyghur-related news from around the world:
Taiwanese NGOs express support for Uyghur independence
On November 12, the anniversary of the establishment of two short-lived independent Uyghur states inside Xinjiang in the early 20th century, several nongovernmental organizations in Taiwan said that Uyghurs have been deprived of basic human rights ever since they lost their sovereignty during the 1949 invasion of the East Turkistan Republic by the Chinese People's Liberation Army.
Human Rights Watch urges G20 leaders to challenge Xi on Xinjiang abuses
Human Rights Watch called on world leaders during the G-20 summit in Indonesia to ask for an international investigation and accountability for widespread and systematic human rights violations committed by the Chinese government.
China's yarn export shrank because of US ban on Xinjiang cotton
China's yarn exports declined nearly 25% from May to September. A U.S. law went into effect in June that bans products from Xinjiang, affecting yarn exports from the region, Fibre2Fashion reported.
China imprisons mother, sister-in-law of Uyghur Dutch airman
China sentenced the mother and sister-in-law of a Uyghur Dutch citizen and member of the Dutch air force to 15 years in prison on terrorism charges after a visit and communication with him, Radio Free Asia reported.
Report: China forces Uyghur women to marry Chinese men in Xinjiang
The Chinese government is systematically imposing forced interethnic marriages on Uyghur women, according to a report by the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project.
News in brief
Chinese state-backed threat actors continue to conduct online surveillance of Uyghurs through spyware that mimics Android apps, a new investigative report by the San Francisco-based cybersecurity company Lookout said. Last Thursday, Lookout released an investigative report, "Lookout Discovers Long-term Surveillance Activities Targeting Uyghurs," claiming that some new Uyghur-language Android apps were linked to two malicious programs called BadBazaar and Moonshine. The report said that the campaign was linked to a type of spyware, likely created by Chinese-speaking developers, that is being used to spy on Uyghur-speaking communities inside and outside China.
Quote of note
"The threat actors seem to be more strategic with how they're protecting their infrastructure and even hiding the malicious functionality within the applications: the surveillance capabilities aren't built into the app — they're downloaded to the application once the user installs it or decrypted and unpacked from a separate file within the application. This can make it more difficult for antivirus products to detect the threat on a user's device."
— Kristina Balaam, staff security intelligence engineer at Lookout, to VOA
