A Chinese court today rejected prominent Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti's appeal against his life sentence for separatism as veteran former journalist Gao Yu was set to face trial for leaking "state secrets".
Rights groups have decried both cases as an effort to silence prominent critics of the ruling Communist Party.
Tohti, a 44-year-old economics professor, has been an outspoken critic of China's policies towards the mostly Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang, which has been hit by a wave of violence in the past year which has killed at least 200 people.
China blames unrest on militant groups seeking independence for the region. Rights groups say discrimination and government repression of the Uighurs' religion and language has fuelled violence.
Tohti's lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan told AFP that that the scholar had pronounced the verdict as "unjust".
"He maintains that his behaviour has not endangered state security," Liu said. "He is still upholding his point of view. Anti-violence and anti-separatism have been his beliefs all along."
He added that Tohti's brother and sister had attended the hearing in Xinjiang, and that the scholar was still being forced to wear leg shackles when he visited him at a detention centre earlier this week.
The case against Tohti was in part based on recordings of university lectures in which he said that Xinjiang "firstly belonged to the Uighur ethnic group", rather than China's Han majority, the state-run Xinhua news agency has reported.
Rejection of his appeal came as former reporter Gao was set to stand trial in Beijing in a case rights groups described as an attack on freedom of expression.
