Shahrizat and Shahdiyar Shavkat were born in Urumqi in China's Xinjiang province where over a million Uyghur people are held in concentration camps. In 2015 the brothers moved to Kazan in the Russian Federation to study English. In their third year, their parents suddenly stopped returning their calls; they had been arrested and sent to a camp.
The Chinese government now says that they can only renew their Russian visas back in China, so they have decided to overstay. They have been expelled from university and are threatened with deportation.
The brothers ask: “All of our Uyghur friends who went back to China from Russia never returned and don’t pick up their phones and you wonder why we don’t want to go back?”

We; undersigned, demand that the Russian government do not deport the Shavkat brothers to China.