‘Huge blunder’: Germany deported Uyghur woman to China in bureaucratic bungle -

Germany deported a Uyghur woman back to China rather than to Turkey after a bureaucratic mix-up, government sources said Monday, with critics slamming a “huge blunder” that endangered her life.

The woman, Reziwanguli Baikeli, was only in Beijing for a short time after her deportation last week, and managed to quickly leave again for Turkey, news magazine Der Spiegel reported.

But the fact she was sent to China — despite an immigration order to deport her to Turkey, where she had lived previously, and official guidance to protect Uyghurs — sparked condemnation.

“It’s a blatant human rights violation and greatly endangered the lady,” Adrian Zenz, an expert on China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, home to the mostly Muslim Uyghurs, told AFP.

“It’s just out of luck she survived this and made it back out of China,” he said, adding it was a “huge blunder”.

Baikeli had left Xinjiang in 2017 with her daughter, according to Der Spiegel, which first reported the case, at a time when allegations were emerging that China was detaining Muslims, mostly Uyghurs, in a network of facilities and committing rights abuses.

China denies the allegations.

The 56-year-old lived for some time in Turkey before moving to Germany in 2024 to join her daughter, and applying for asylum.

But the BAMF federal migration office rejected her asylum case and ordered that she be sent back to Turkey, a government source told AFP.

The headquarters of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) in Nuremberg, Germany. Photo: BAMF.

Local authorities are responsible for carrying out deportations in Germany.

But when they received the order from BAMF and went to deport Baikeli from her place of residence in Lower Saxony state on November 3, they discovered she had a Chinese passport and no Turkish ID documents.

They put her on a plane to China as the BAMF order did not explicitly prohibit them from doing so, the local office responsible for deportations told Der Spiegel.

She was not detained on arrival in Beijing however and managed to contact her daughter, who quickly booked her on a flight to Dubai, from where she flew on to Istanbul.

The source confirmed the details of the case to AFP. The BAMF office and local authorities declined to comment.

Germany has not explicitly banned deporting Uyghurs to China, but the interior ministry says that “the current guiding principle” is that “protection should be granted” to them.

The last reported case of Germany deporting a Uyghur was in 2018.

Rights groups and Uyghurs overseas allege that China has detained more than a million Muslims, mostly Uyghurs, in a network of facilities in Xinjiang.

China vehemently denies the claims, saying its policies in Xinjiang have eradicated extremism.