Uyghur Human Rights Project was founded in 2004 by the
Uyghur American Association, and have eight full-time staff. meets with
Nury Turkel and Chinese dissidents in July 2020 Omer Kanat has been the organization's Executive Director since 2018. He previously served as the
World Uyghur Congress (WUC) Vice President from 2006 to 2017, and has also been a WUC Executive Committee Chairman since 2017. Co-founder
Nury Turkel also serves as board chair, and was appointed by the U.S. House of Representatives Speaker
Nancy Pelosi as a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (2019–2022). The group also joined with fifty other organizations and experts in September 2020 to call on the
UN Human Rights Council to appoint a Commission of Inquiry to investigate atrocity crimes against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim peoples. In January 2022, the group wrote to Senate Majority Leader
Chuck Schumer in support of the
Open App Markets Act, arguing that the bill's
sideloading protections will help Chinese citizens bypass censorship. UHRP maintains a bill tracker on Uyghur-related matters before the
U.S. Congress, maintains a list of U.S.
sanctions on companies suspected of violating human Uyghur rights in China, hosts events on China's actions in Xinjiang, and tracks international responses to Uyghur human rights issues in China. UHRP has documented the Chinese Communist Party's use of transnational repression against Uyghurs and the CCP's evolving strategy to harass, intimidate, and silence Uyghurs abroad. The organization has also expressed concern that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is not fully implementing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, calling on the organization to make full use of its “entity list” to designate companies that are in violation of the act. ==Reports==