China detention camp frees rights activist but lawyer fears coercion used

HONG KONG — An activist who drew attention to the plight of Muslims held in Chinese indoctrination camps has been freed after months of detention in Kazakhstan, but his lawyer refused to sign his plea deal, saying she believed he had been threatened into accepting it.

The activist, Serikzhan Bilash, walked out of a courtroom late Friday in Almaty, Kazakhstan, surrounded by dozens of cheering supporters. He did not respond to messages seeking comment Saturday.

But news agency Agence France-Presse quoted him as saying that under the terms of his plea agreement, he would have to stop his activism.

“It was that or seven years in jail,” he was quoted as saying. “I had no choice.”

Bilash, a naturalized Kazakh citizen who was born in China, had been a prominent advocate for people being held in a vast network of camps in the Xinjiang region in northwestern China. Chinese authorities initially denied that the camps existed, but they now describe them as job and legal-skills training programs meant to steer people away from extremism.

Scholars estimate that as many as 1 million Uighurs, Kazakhs and members of other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups are being held in the camps, where former detainees have said that they were subjected to indoctrination programs meant to replace Islamic piety with devotion to the Chinese Communist Party.

The Chinese government recently said that it had released many of the detainees, but New York Times reporters who recently visited the region found it blanketed with secrecy, and the camps were continuing to operate.

Bilash and the group he leads, Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights, compiled testimony of former camp inmates and the family members of people still being held in order to put pressure on Chinese authorities to release them.

In March, police in Kazakhstan detained Bilash and took him to the capital, Nur-Sultan, where he was placed under house arrest. He pleaded guilty Friday to a charge of inciting ethnic discord.

His lawyer, Aiman Umarova, said Saturday that she had refused to sign Bilash’s plea deal and that it had been arranged without her knowledge. Umarova said she believed Bilash had been threatened into accepting it.