Turkel was born in a re-education camp[1][6][12][13] in Kashgar[4] during the Cultural Revolution.[14] Turkel's grandfather had been associated with Uyghur nationalists and his mother was interned when she was six months pregnant. Turkel lived in the detention center for the first four months of his life.[12] Turkel's father was a professor and his mother was a businesswoman.[1][12] He completed his primary and middle school in his homeland. In 1991, he was admitted by Northwest A&F University in Shaanxi Province, China.[4] In 1995, Turkel received his BA and went to the United States for graduate education, never returning to China.[12][13] Turkel has a Master of Arts in international relations and a Juris Doctor from American University.[4][14]
Career
US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo meets with Commissioner Turkel and Chinese dissidents (July 2020)
After the July 2009 Ürümqi riots, he condemned alleged Chinese oppression of Uyghurs in Ürümqi, saying that "the Uyghurs literally lost anything that they had, even their native language and their own cultural heritage that they had been proudly adhering to.[25][26][27]
In April 2012, Turkel praised Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for showing support and sympathy for the Uyghur people surrounding his trip to China in a way that was seen as rare among foreign leaders.[28][29] However, in July 2020, Turkel
criticized Turkey for deporting Uyghur refugees to countries that then deported them to China.[30]
Turkel supported the June 2020 signing of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act[31][32] and a July 2020 United States Department of Commerce announcement sanctioning eleven Chinese companies involved in alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang.[33] He called for sanctions on the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) in particular.[34][35][36] In an August 2020 interview, Turkel described the camps as one of the worst global humanitarian crises and the largest incarceration of an ethnic minority since the Holocaust.[13] He also urged the U.S. Congress to pass the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would direct the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to presume that any goods produced in the Uyghur region are the product of forced labor.[37][32] On 21 December 2021, Turkel was sanctioned by the Chinese government as part of retaliatory sanctions after U.S. government imposed sanctions on Chinese officials.[38]
In September 2020, Turkel was named one of the Time 100 Most Influential People in the World.[10][11] In 2021, Fortune Magazine included him in their "The World's 50 Greatest Leaders" lists.[40] He received the inaugural Notre Dame Prize for Religious Liberty from the Notre Dame Law School Religious Liberty Initiative in June 2021.[41] He was awarded the Global Soul Award by Jewish World Watch in September 2022.[42]
Personal life
Nury Turkel is a Muslim.[12][43] In 2007, he married Turkish American interior designer Nazli Turkel. They live in the Washington, DC, area with their two children.[44]
Turkel is proficient in several languages, including Uyghur (his mother tongue), English, Turkish, and Mandarin Chinese.[45][46][47]
^Turkel, Nury (2022). No Escape: The True Story of China's Genocide of the Uyghurs. Toronto: Hanover Square Press. pp. 17, 54–55. ISBN978-1-335-46956-4.
