Cambridge University has failed to condemn the Chinese government’s arrest of a visiting lecturer, despite calls from academics to do so.

Members of the East Asian Faculty called for the department to make a statement on the arrest of Professor Rahile Dawut in China last year, after she was issued a life sentence for “endangering state security”.

When the issue was raised in a meeting last October, some members of the Faculty claimed that issuing such a statement “might affect future visa applications for YA [year abroad] students or academic visits”.

The issue was then passed onto the University, with the Faculty stating that they “would be happy to help draft the statement if needed”. No statement has been issued from the University or Faculty since.

Rahile Dawut is a Uyghur scholar who was arrested in 2017 on charges of “a deliberate attempt to split the Chinese nation”. She had previously given lectures at Cambridge University as a visiting scholar.

Dawut is believed to be among more than 300 Uyghur intellectuals who are known to have been detained, arrested, and imprisoned since 2016. An estimated 1.5 million Uyghur people have been detained in the Xinjiang province.

There are about 12 million Uyghurs, mostly Muslim, living in Xinjiang, which is officially known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Human rights groups believe China has detained more than one million Uyghurs against their will over the past few years in a large network of what the state calls “re-education camps,” and sentenced hundreds of thousands to prison terms.

The University has refused to reveal this information through Freedom of Information requests on two prior occasions. The minutes of the meeting were only disclosed in June following an appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which found the request had been wrongly rejected.

Calls to issue a statement came after multiple Universities issued condemnations of Dawut’s arrest. This included the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, who gave her an honorary fellowship following her imprisonment.

Dawut’s arrest was also condemned by the US government who labelled it as being part of a “broader effort by the PRC to eradicate Uyghur identity and culture and undermine academic freedom”.

This comes after Cambridge students launched a Uyghur Rights Campaign in Lent Term, accusing the University of “silence” over China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims. This was followed by a separate article criticising conduct of Jesus College’s China Forum and its “treatment of the topic of China’s Uyghur minority”.

The China Forum previously hosted Professor Hu Angang, a Chinese professor from Tsinghua University, who the letter alleged had “influenced” the ethnic policy of the Chinese Communist Party.

The University has also been criticised over their financial ties to the Chinese government after it was alleged they held “secret meetings” with the daughter of the former Chinese Prime Minister over a £3.7 million donation to the University. This donation was supposedly tied to the Chong Hua Professorship.

The University of Cambridge was contacted for comment.