CIVICUS Lens interviews Uyghur activist Rushan Abbas: sister Gulshan Abbas vanished after 2018 detention, authorities admitted a secret 20-year sentence in 2020
CIVICUS Lens published an interview on October 19, 2026 with Rushan Abbas, a Uyghur American activist, founder and executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs and chair of the Executive Committee of the World Uyghur Congress. According to Abbas in the interview, on September 5, 2018, days after she spoke publicly at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC about the mass detention of Uyghurs, her sister Gulshan Abbas — a retired physician, mother of two and grandmother of four who had never been political — was taken away by Chinese authorities. [1]
Why it matters
This case is worth recording for two reasons. First, the timing and attribution: Abbas places her sister's detention days after she publicly discussed the detentions and frames it as transnational repression — punishing an exile activist through her family; this is the latest on-the-record account of the case from the person closest to it. Second, the verification layer must be stated plainly: this is a personal account in an advocacy interview, with no independent third-party investigation corroborating the "retaliation" framing; Gulshan Abbas has not been seen publicly in eight years, and apart from acknowledging the sentence, the authorities have released no case details. This record is therefore graded "under ongoing verification" and documents the interview and her account, not established facts of the case. [1]
Full report
According to Abbas in the interview, she left for the United States in 1989; in the early 1990s, after she began working with US politicians, her father — a senior academic in Ürümchi — lost his job at age 59, which she describes as retaliation for her advocacy. On September 5, 2018, she spoke at a public panel at the Hudson Institute about the mass detention of Uyghurs; days later, her sister Gulshan Abbas was taken by Chinese authorities. Her sister is a retired physician, a mother of two and a grandmother of four, who "had never been political". [1]
Abbas says that in December 2019, state media outlet CGTN denied her sister existed and accused her of "making up cases and spreading rumours overseas"; in December 2020, the authorities finally acknowledged that Gulshan had been secretly sentenced to 20 years in prison — on what Abbas calls fabricated charges. Since then: no picture or video of her sister; no one has been able to visit her; no independent report on her health or wellbeing has been received. [1]
Beyond her sister's case, Abbas says in the interview that after Gulshan's detention she quit her job to campaign full time; since then she has faced cyberattacks, defamation, fabricated court documents, harassment and intimidation; a video appeared on YouTube calling for the execution of her and her husband; she received emails asking what colour rifle she would prefer to be shot with; after her memoir was published, fake books claiming to tell her life story appeared on Amazon. All of these are her own accounts, independently unverified. [1]
Verification note: this record documents an advocacy interview published by CIVICUS Lens on October 19. The core facts (the 2018 detention and the 2020 20-year sentence) come solely from Rushan Abbas's personal account; Gulshan Abbas has not been seen by anyone in eight years, the authorities have released no case-file details beyond acknowledging the sentence, and CGTN denied the person's existence in 2019 — the case is highly contested. This record is therefore graded "under ongoing verification", and this site will continue to watch for independent investigations or official information. [1]
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