Nury Turkel is an Uyghur-American human rights lawyer, foreign policy expert and public official living and working in Washington D.C. He was born in a so-called re-education camp in Kashgar at the time of China’s Cultural Revolution and spent the first months of his life in detention with his mother while his father was detained in another labour camp.

In 2020 Nury was appointed a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and currently serves as its chair. He is the co-founder and chairman of the board for the Uyghur Human Rights Project, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. Nury has worked as a human rights advocate for over two decades defending the rights of Uyghurs in particular but also the rights of every minority, every person to believe in their respective religion including the right not to believe in any religion. Nury has given numerous lectures and speeches about the ample evidence of grave human rights violations against Uyghurs and other minorities in China at many human rights conferences, universities and policy forums around the globe. Recently he testified before Congress about the mass internment of Uyghurs and advocated for a legislative response of the United States to China's crimes against humanity. Several of his proposals have been incorporated into U.S. policies and laws. 2020 Nury was named by TIME as one of the hundred most influential people. 

In 2022 he published his powerful story in the book "No Escape: The True Story of  China's Genocide of the Uyghurs".