July 18, 2006: Cdn. refugee, Uighur arrested, China

China mum on fate of detained Canadian -- Demands for legal consular access denied more than three weeks into disappearance Geoffrey York, July 18, 2006
www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story
/LAC.20060718.CHINA18/TPStory/National

BEIJING -- More than three weeks after a Canadian citizen vanished into Chinese police custody, Chinese authorities are rejecting all of Canada's requests for information on the fate of the 37-year-old man.

The prisoner, Huseyincan Celil, was allowed into Canada as a political refugee in 2001 and became a Canadian citizen. But he was arrested in Uzbekistan on March 27 and extradited last month to China, where he could face the death penalty for alleged "separatist" activities in a Muslim province.

[....] Mr. Celil was arrested in China in the mid-1990s for his work on behalf of the Uighur people, the Muslim minority in the Xinjiang province of western China. He was sentenced to death in absentia for founding a political party to work for the Uighurs. After escaping from China, he travelled to Turkey and came to Canada as a refugee in 2001.

Allowed into Canada as a refugee for his own protection, presumably ... Then he returned to that dangerous situation. Why was he a refugee if he felt he could return?

Naturally, in expecting an election mode, the tone of the G&M article is anti-Harper, anti-Conservative ... same old, same old.