Human Rights✊⚖

Dictatorial regimes are retaliating against democratic activists who talk to foreign governments and international bodies.

I don’t have a link to the full complaint but I heard it’s around 80 pages.

The CoE whose job it is to protect peoples’ human rights under the Social Charter of Council of Europa has hired an exclusive US tech giant to confine their website to Cloudflare’s walled-garden.

Of course what this means is people who are not in Trump’s exclusive fiefdom will be excuded from access, at least for a period of time.

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The report was adopted on Tuesday by 434 votes in favour, 128 against and 104 abstentions, the parliamentary press service announced.

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The campaign of repression against the Uyghurs has entered a new phase.

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The meeting will be a stark display of Trump and Xi’s shared anti-human rights vision of transactional geopolitics. Accountability will have to come from elsewhere.

Op-ed by Kylie Moore-Gilbert, Research Fellow, Security Studies at Macquarie University.

On May 7, in a historic verdict, Peter Wai and Bill Yuen were found guilty of assisting a foreign intelligence service under the U.K. National Security Act. Their convictions send an unambiguous message: transnational repression by the Chinese Communist Party has no place on British soil. Remarkably, on the same day, the United States and Norway delivered that message too. That three liberal democracies acted against Beijing’s long arm on a single day was not coordinated – but perhaps it should have been.

*This is a Q&A with Christian Göbel, professor of Chinese studies with emphasis on social studies at the Department of East Asian Studies, Sinology division, at the University of Vienna, austria. His research focuses on state-society relations, local governance and protests in the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. *

A coalition of over 130 civil society organisations and digital rights actors has condemned the Government of Zambia for the cancellation of RightsCon 2026, which was scheduled to take place in Lusaka and online.

[Op-ed by Michael Caster, Head of the Global China Program at ARTICLE 19, and co-founder of Safeguard Defenders, a human rights organization focused on China.]

In a joint resolution, members of the European Parliament across the political spectrum condemned “China’s repressive assimilation policies and consequent violations of universal human rights, including in Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia”, the resolution reads.

This is an opinion piece by David Brophy, an Australian socialist scholar of Chinese and Uyghur history. He delivers a critical response to a recently published article on “The Idea of the ‘Uyghur Genocide’ and the Realities of Xinjiang,” that attempts to downplay the Chinese communist Party’s atrocities in East Turkestan, also known as Xinjiang.

Here is the full report: Collaboration and Resistance: Tracking Transnational Repression in 202 (pdf)

Op-ed by Rushan Abbas, Founder and executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs Chairperson of the Executive Committee at World Uyghur Congress; and Dean Baxendale, CEO of China Democracy Fund.

Firsthand testimony from Zhang Yabo — a former Han Chinese police officer who served in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region from 2014 to 2023 — proves that state-imposed forced labor in Xinjiang has not ended but has grown more pervasive and deliberately harder to detect.

A woman who was tortured in one of China’s notorious Uyghur detention camps has launched a blistering attack on [UK Prime Minister} Sir Keir Starmer, accusing him of “disrespecting human rights” by approving plans for a Chinese mega-embassy in London.

[Opinion piece by Samir Goswami, director of Forced Labor Programs at Global Rights Compliance, and Nyrola Elimä, researcher with expertise in supply chain tracing, forced labor and transnational repression.]

Hubei authorities should release activist Yin Dengzhen from Wuhan Women’s Prison and ensure she receives adequate medical treatment. Yin is serving a 4.5-year prison sentence and is suffering from lymphoma (cancer of the lymph nodes), which was diagnosed in December 2024. Her health has deteriorated due to a denial of adequate medical care in detention.

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In 2019, Chinese diplomat Jiang Duan told UNHCR delegates in Geneva that “the experience in Xinjiang in this field can be introduced to other countries.” While “this field” referred to management of minoritized peoples, the “experience” he touted was China’s vast system of internment camps, so-called “vocational training centers,” targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples. Survivor testimony has implicated the camps in a systematic campaign of forced labor, cultural assimilation, political indoctrination, torture, and forced sterilization. The Uyghur Tribunal determined these abuses to constitute genocide, while the very body Jiang Duan addressed, UNHCR, found they may amount to crimes against humanity.

China is intensifying its exploitation of Uyghur people in Xinjiang to maintain control over global mineral supply chains. “The system of coercive labor allocation applied to minority communities in Xinjiang will continue under the 15th five-year Plan,” a study authored by Uyghur researcher Nyrola Elimä Global Rights Compliance (GRC), an international NGO, and directed by Samir Goswami, finds.

Several sitting members of the Human Rights Council are among the States showing weak cooperation with UN Special Procedures, whether by leaving country visit requests unanswered for years or by failing to provide substantive replies to communications. The pattern raises serious concerns about whether Council members are meeting the level of cooperation expected of States elected to the UN’s principal human rights body.

Yes, it is batshit crazy that this happened, and that municipalities actually stripped people of Belgian nationality that they already acquired.

Moscow and Beijing are driving closer collaboration between authoritarian states and such networks help advance repression globally, according to researchers [at the] nonprofit Action for Democracy.

UK foreign aid helped to develop Chinese fossil fuel extraction in a region where the oil sector is associated with forced labour risks, a new investigation has found.

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Here is the full report: Invisible Corners of the Factory Floor: Forced Labor in China’s Prisons (pdf)

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[This is an opinion piece by Rayhan Asat, a human rights lawyer of Uyghur descent, an international law scholar at Harvard Law School and a senior legal and policy advisor at the Atlantic Council Strategic Litigation Project.]

The US can be credited with starting the Orwellian idea of forcing all “visa-free” visitors to file an ETA¹. It’s not just a money grab for us$ 20. It’s a snooping mechanism to link people to social media accounts, and then perform a background check on travelers to look for any speech that’s critical of the US.

Hello everyone,

According to the linked leaflet, the EU’s payment services directive ensures that “You can no longer be charged extra costs by a merchant when you pay using a card issued in the EU.” But they neglect to extend reciprocity to cash payers.

(crossposted from !exclusive_public_resources)