Sri Lanka, April 16 -- Kazakhstan has sent 19 people to jail for participating in a peaceful protest against human rights abuses in China's northwestern Xinjiang region.
A court in Taldykorgan, a town about 260km north of Almaty, found all the defendants guilty of "inciting interethnic or social discord" for staging protests in November last year.
The defendants, associated with the Atajurt movement, were arrested following a protest in which they demanded the release of Alimnur Turganbay, an ethnic Kazakh detained in Xinjiang.
Atajurt is an unregistered group which documents alleged rights abuses against ethnic Kazakhs and Uyghurs in Xinjiang and advocates for families separated by the China-Kazakhstan border.
While 11 of the 19 convic...