cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/53426860

Hong Kong and Macau were once the only places in China where people could publicly mourn Beijing's deadly crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

Defendants Lee Cheuk-yan, 69, and Chow Hang-tung, 41, were leaders of a now-defunct group called the Hong Kong Alliance that arranged an annual candlelight vigil in the city's Victoria Park for decades.

However, Beijing imposed a national security law on the former British colony in 2020 after huge and sometimes violent pro-democracy protests the year before.

Lee and Chow were arrested in 2021 and are standing trial for "incitement to subversion", which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail.

[...]

Erik Shum, a defence lawyer representing Lee, told the court that the Alliance's "end one-party rule" slogan did not mean it intended to overthrow Communist Party leadership.

"It does not target the Communist Party, no matter which party is in power... it should not be a dictatorship," Shum said.

He told the three-judge panel that the court must not pay "lip service" to human rights, adding that the right to criticise state organs is protected by China's constitution.

[...]

The Alliance was founded in May 1989 to support the democratic movement led by students and workers in Beijing.

Its key tenets included "building a democratic China" and "ending one-party rule".

[...]

Archived

The full report: Death sentences and executions 2025 (pdf)

[...]

Iranian authorities, the main drivers behind the spike, executed at least 2,159 people, more than double its 2024 figure. Elsewhere, Saudi Arabia raised its execution tally to at least 356, using the death penalty extensively for drug-related offences. Executions in Kuwait almost tripled (from 6 to 17), while they near doubled in Egypt (from 13 to 23), Singapore (from 9 to 17), and the United States of America (from 25 to 47).

Overall, executions rose by 78%, after at least 1,518 executions were recorded in 2024. The 2025 total does not include the thousands of executions that Amnesty International believes continued to be carried out in China, which remained the world’s lead executioner.

[...]

"A shameless minority are weaponizing the death penalty to instill fear, crush dissent and punish marginalized communities," says Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.

[...]

While executions surged, executing countries remain an isolated minority. China, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, USA, Viet Nam and Yemen are the same 10 countries known to have carried out executions every year in the last five years and that have consistently shown disregard for safeguards established under international human rights law and standards.

Four countries resumed executions last year (Japan, South Sudan, Taiwan and United Arab Emirates), bringing the total number of executing countries to 17.

[...]

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.

Archived

Data shows that some current Council members have accumulated high numbers of pending or declined visit requests over the past five years. Of the 13 States with 10 or more pending or declined requests during the period, nine currently sit on the Council.

China records the highest number, with 21 requests still awaiting confirmation.

Other States with high numbers that also happen to be current Council members include Indonesia (18), South Africa (17), India (17), and Kenya (14).

[...]

The concern is even greater where the unanswered requests come from mandates dealing with grave violations. The Special Rapporteur on torture and the Working Group on enforced or involuntary disappearances currently face the highest numbers of pending visit requests globally, with 40 and 38, respectively.

The Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders also faces persistent barriers to access, with 18 pending requests and two formal declines over the past five years. When access is withheld from mandates addressing these violations, allegations cannot be independently examined on the ground, victims lose visibility, and States avoid scrutiny in areas where accountability is most urgent.

Country visits are one of the UN’s most important tools for examining human rights conditions at the national level.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/49524156

Here is the study: Willing Accomplices: Gazprom & Rosneft's Role In The Transport and Indoctrination of Ukraine's Children (pdf)

...

Russian state-owned energy giants Gazprom and Rosneft are directly involved in the transfer and political indoctrination of thousands of Ukrainian children, according to a report published by the Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Lab.

The report, Willing Accomplices: Gazprom & Rosneft's Role In The Transport and Indoctrination of Ukraine's Children (opens pdf), comes soon after U.S. President Donald Trump's decision this month to ease sanctions on Russian energy, notably to authorize the sale, delivery, or offloading of Russian-origin crude oil and petroleum products that were already loaded onto shipping vessels in an attempt to stabilize global energy markets amid disruptions from the Iran war.

Gazprom- and Rosneft-controlled subsidiaries and trade unions helped facilitate and sponsor the transport and re-education of Ukraine’s children through direct ownership of camps, provision of camp vouchers, and coordination of pro-Russia indoctrination. Three of the camps previously identified by Yale HRL were owned by Gazprom subsidiaries when children from Ukraine were present at these facilities. As of March 2026, two of the three camps still are owned by Gazprom subsidiaries.

It is worth noting that Gazprom and Rosneft have sponsored children from Russia to attend camps since as early as 2008. Additionally, at least 15 children from Ukraine were taken by Gazprom to the “Kubanskaya Niva” camp in 2015, which is owned by Gazprom subsidiary Gazprom Dobycha Urengoy. However, the energy companies' involvement into this illegal activities have been increasing since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

"What this report demonstrates for the first time is that Gazprom and Rosneft, two of Russia’s most critical oil and gas companies, are willing accomplices in this interconnected web of diverse entities," the report concludes.

Key findings:

• Children from Ukraine have been taken to at least six camps in Russia and Russia-occupied Crimea, including three camps owned by Gazprom subsidiaries as recently as 2025.

• At least 2,158 children from the Donetsk, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts of Ukraine were taken to camps owned by Gazprom subsidiaries and/or sponsored by Gazprom and Rosneft subsidiaries and trade union organizations to attend these or other pro-Russia camps beginning in 2022.

• At least 1,072 children from Russia-occupied Ukraine received vouchers from Gazprom subsidiaries and trade union organizations to attend pro-Russia camps in 2022 and 2023.

• Rosneft Trade Union sponsored 100 children from Ukraine to attend three camps in 2023, including: “Kubanskaya Niva” camp, “Art-Quest” camp, and A.V. Kazakevich Children’s Health camp.

• Gazprom subsidiaries facilitated the pro- Russia re-education of Ukraine’s children.

At least 80% of Russian Federation-affiliated entities involved in the activities described in this report are not currently under sanction by the United States or Europe. Yale HRL identified 44 entities – including camps, oil and gas subsidiaries, trade unions, and high-level company directors – involved in the transport and/or re-education of Ukraine’s children. Among the 44 entities identified, 35 (80%) are not currently subjected to sanctions by the United States or Europe, six entities are subject to sanctions by the United States and European countries, and three entities have an unknown sanction status.

...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52490541

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52490230

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.

Archived

The UK funded the regional government in Xinjiang, China to develop carbon capture technology during the height of its mass internment of Uyghur Muslims, a new investigation has revealed.

The investigation was conducted by Land and Climate Review [...] uncovered data from deleted UK government webpages that show quarterly Foreign Office payments between 2016-2018 “to support the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Development and Reform Commission to systematically assess and identify regional Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) development opportunities, and build capacity for CCUS development in Xinjiang”.

CCUS is a technology designed to reduce pollution from power plants. It uses chemical filters to remove carbon dioxide gas from smokestack emissions. Xinjiang is a major fossil-fuel region for China, containing approximately a third of the country’s onshore oil and gas reserves.

[...]

Laura Murphy, whose research into Uyghur abuses led to a Chinese intimidation campaign now being investigated by counter-terrorism police in the UK, said that the internment of Uyghurs “really ramped up” in 2016. “For the years between at least 2016 and 2020, there was a system of mass internment and arbitrary detention that affected upwards of a million people in the Uyghur region.”

The academic at Sheffield Hallam University said the UK government “absolutely should have known” about this before the aid scheme ended in March 2018.

[...]

Labour transfer schemes – where Uyghurs from rural villages in Xinjiang were forcibly relocated to work across China – were headed by Xinjiang’s Development and Reform Commission as it was receiving UK funding to develop its energy sector. China denies such practices occur.

Zumretay Arkin, Vice President of the World Uyghur Congress, described the investigation findings as “deeply alarming”. She said “the Xinjiang Development and Reform Commission played a central role in the policies that enabled the mass transfer of Uyghur labour. Any cooperation with regional authorities should have been subject to the highest level of scrutiny.”

[...]

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.

Here is the full report: Authoritarian Collaboration Index - Mapping the Global Autocratic Ecosystem (pdf)

The researchers built an index to track seven types of cooperation, including on funding, diplomatic activities, propaganda and tech sharing.

It found that China and Russia “sit at the center of global authoritarian collaboration” and were jointly involved in around half of all recorded activity. The report’s authors said that such cooperation generated compound returns because, for example, “surveillance infrastructure exported to one regime becomes a template for the next.”

• China and Russia sit at the heart of this axis of autocracy and, together with Iran, were respectively involved in nearly two-thirds of global “collaboration” events for the years 2024 to 2025.

• The authoritarian ecosystem extends far beyond China and Russia, with a mid-tier of regional powers and a long tail of smaller states and parties that sustain collaboration across narrower corridors.

• Authoritarian cooperation is becoming institutional: recurring forums, media alliances, and training platforms are hardening ad hoc coordination into durable infrastructure.

• Authoritarianism is also becoming routinised — practices like reciprocal sham election monitoring and cross-border dissident deportation now operate as low-friction, self-reinforcing defaults. And shared authoritarian imperatives consistently supersede ideological and religious divides, enabling cooperation between actors whose nominal worldviews would otherwise place them in opposition.

[...]

[China's] Belt and Road Initiative has likewise expanded beyond its origins as a development and investment vehicle to serve as a framework for media institutionalization. Beijing has promoted standing media alliances such as the Belt and Road News Network, designed to disseminate favorable content and coordinate a pro-BRI information environment through a multi-country membership model and recurring convenings. In the same vein, the Belt and Road Journalists Network provides for people-to-people information-sharing architecture, uniting nearly 1.7 million media professionals across participating states.

Crucially, these infrastructures are not confined to media collaboration.

[...]

As historian and democracy scholar Anne Applebaum has observed, contemporary authoritarian cooperation is often driven less by ideological convergence than by shared regime-security and elite-enrichment imperatives—namely, sustaining incumbency, protecting patronage networks, and shaping aspects of the international environment in ways that reduce external constraints.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52357783

Archived

In recent years, Chinese official discourse has increasingly used the term “social governance” (社會管治) to describe policies in the Uyghur region (Xinjiang) of China. This seemingly neutral administrative language is quietly reshaping people’s perception of repression, genocide, forced assimilation, and social control.

[...]

Since 2016, the plight of the Uyghurs has drawn widespread international attention due to reports of mass detention, forced disappearances, extensive surveillance systems, and restrictions on religious and cultural life. Leaked government documents, testimonies from camp survivors, and multiple international investigations have made the region a central issue in global human rights discussions.

Chinese authorities have consistently described these policies as necessary measures to combat terrorism and maintain stability. However, United Nations human rights experts and international human rights organizations have repeatedly expressed serious concern about the scale of repression and its impact on Uyghur society.

In recent years, the official narrative surrounding the region has begun to shift. Detention facilities have become less visible in state media coverage, tourism campaigns highlighting the region’s landscapes and cultural heritage have re-emerged, and official reports increasingly portray the region as peaceful, prosperous, and harmonious.

[...]

When decoding Chinese official documents, a major key is to look for what officials avoid saying. This particular piece makes little reference to ethnic rights, religious freedom, language use, or cultural continuity. Nor does it acknowledge the concerns repeatedly raised by international observers.

The conflicts in the Uyghur region are not merely a matter of governance but also stem from history, demographic change, and political power structures.

According to data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the population of the Uyghur region in 1953 was approximately 4.87 million, of whom about 3.64 million — roughly 75 percent — were Uyghurs, while Han Chinese accounted for only about 6 percent. By 2010, however, Han Chinese made up roughly 40 percent of the population, while the Uyghur share had declined to around 46 percent.

Many researchers link this demographic transformation to decades of large-scale migration policies that encouraged settlement from China’s interior.

Although China formally operates a system of “regional ethnic autonomy (民族區域自治制),” the political structure tells a different story. The most powerful position in the region — the Communist Party secretary — is appointed by the central government, while the regional chairman, who is typically Uyghur, holds far less real authority.

Under such a structure, autonomy often exists more as a symbolic arrangement than as meaningful self-governance.

As a result, Uyghurs have increasingly been marginalized in their own homeland, not only politically but also in areas such as education, employment, and language use.

[...]

Governance in the post-violence era

The governance model emerging in the Uyghur region also reflects a broader transformation in contemporary authoritarian politics.

Repression does not always rely on visible coercion, as administrative systems, data technologies, social engineering, and policy language can gradually reshape social reality.

For many Uyghur families, the defining experience of recent years has not been open conflict but disappearance: across the Uyghur diaspora, countless people have lost contact with relatives back home. Many have been detained, sentenced, or simply vanished from public life.

The social governance system, presented as rational, benevolent, and successful in Chinese official discourse, is precisely engineered to deprive people of the ability to organize themselves, express their identity, and sustain their cultural life, thereby quietly normalizing repression in society.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52240923

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

A new report by China Labor Watch examines the issue of prison labor in China. Against the backdrop of increasing international attention, monitoring, and enforcement regarding systemic forced labor in China, the report aims to explore the institutional foundations of this practice within the Chinese prison system, analyze how prison-run enterprises embed products made by incarcerated laborers into global supply chains through multi-layer subcontracting, disguised registration, and local economic collaborations, and finally discuss the legal frictions and responsibility frameworks between Chinese prison labor practices and international human rights law and labor conventions.

[...]

- Institutionalized Logic of Coercion: Although labor is defined in legal texts as a means of “reform,” in practice it is directly tied to points-based evaluation systems and sentence reduction/parole decisions. This creates a structural incentive-and-sanction mechanism of “trading labor for freedom,” effectively undermining the voluntariness of labor.

- Dual Roles and Conflicts of Interest: Prison enterprises carry both judicial and economic functions. They are responsible for custody and rehabilitation while simultaneously acting as market actors accepting orders and generating revenue. These conflicting objectives often lead to weakened labor protections.

- Working Hour Limits are Systematically Relaxed: Although there are nominal limits such as “six days per week and eight hours per day,” exception clauses for “seasonal production” or “urgent tasks” are vaguely defined and lack external oversight, effectively creating a structural gateway for normalized overtime.

- Weak Labor Protection and Injury Compensation: Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) regulations are incomplete, and some cases show inadequate investment in protective equipment. Injury compensation is calculated based on prison labor stipends rather than social wage standards, resulting in significantly lower compensation. Channels for appeal and third-party medical assessment are extremely limited.

- Real Risks in Trade and Supply Chains: Despite formal export bans for prison-made products, such goods enter domestic and international markets through layered subcontracting and enterprise “rebranding.” Recent legislation, enforcement actions, and litigation within global business and human rights due diligence frameworks reveal that these risks are receiving increased recognition.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51870372

Archived

...

The family of human rights defender Yang Li, who recently spent 15 months in detention for her advocacy on land rights, says that her condition has deteriorated to end-stage kidney failure following prolonged inability to access medical care during and following her time in custody.

According to the family, since her release police have repeatedly blocked her travel to Beijing to receive potentially life-saving dialysis treatment, restricting her freedom of movement to her home in the eastern province of Jiangsu.

The ‘Two Sessions’ – annual meetings of Chinese Party and government leadership that set the tone for political, social and economic reforms for the year to come – began on Wednesday 4 March with the elite Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, while the regular, rubberstamp National People’s Congress (NPC) annual session started on Thursday.

“Keeping Yang Li from essential treatment is unconscionable. Denying urgent care to a critically ill woman – seemingly in retaliation for her peaceful advocacy – is a glaring violation of China’s duty to respect and fulfil the right to health of all,” said Sarah Brooks, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director.

“As China’s leaders gather for the ‘Two Sessions’, we expect to hear about their commitment to improving peoples’ lives and ensuring social services; this must be matched by action and applied to all.

[...]

Yang Li, 46, is a land rights defender from Jintan, Jiangsu, who for years has pursued lawful channels to challenge land expropriation by local government and related human rights abuses. She was detained for her work between October 2024 and December 2025, during which time she allegedly faced torture and was denied medical treatment in violation of international standards, namely the Mandela Rules, which make clear that prisoners should enjoy the same standards of health care as non-incarcerated individuals.

Civil society groups following the case say police repeatedly blocked Yang’s attempts to reach Peking University No. 1 Hospital in January 2026 and confiscated phones from her and her father.

[...]

It appears that Yang did manage to make it to Beijing in early February. A hospitalization notice for Yang Li was issued by Peking University No. 1 Hospital on 11 February, but the activist was not admitted and has since been forcibly returned once again by the police to Jiangsu, where the family fears further refusal of appropriate care.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51811171

Archived

From March 1, a new law is in effect in Uyghur region — and it tells government workers what they cannot say, where they cannot travel, and who they cannot talk to, for the rest of their lives if necessary. It orders villages to appoint secrecy officers. It requires artificial intelligence to monitor what information leaves government systems. And it makes clear that anyone who talks — to a journalist, a foreign government, a human rights investigator — may be committing a crime.

China already has a national state secrets law. Every province is bound by it. So when the region’s legislature passed its own separate secrecy regulation on November 26, 2025, the question human rights advocates immediately asked was: why does the region need one of its own?

Yalkun Uluyol, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch, offered a direct answer.

“China has a state secret law,” he said. “But Xinjiang authorities had to enact a new one to hide its crimes against humanity. The new law provides new enforcement mechanisms, including travel restrictions for officials and state secret offices at local institutions.”

The regulation took effect on March 1, 2026.

[...]

Among its most significant provisions is one that targets the people most likely to know what has happened inside region’s detention system: the officials who ran it. Under Article 32, any government worker who leaves a position with access to classified information enters what the law calls a “demystification period.” During that time, they are barred from traveling abroad. They cannot emigrate. They cannot speak publicly about what they know in any form.

For years, the testimony of former officials and guards has been among the most important evidence used by researchers documenting abuses in what Beijing calls “vocational training centers.” This law creates a legal wall around those people.

The law also reaches far down into ordinary Uyghur life. Article 5 requires township governments and neighborhood committees — the grassroots structures that in the region already function as instruments of community surveillance — to formally appoint secrecy management personnel. These are the same bodies that have been documented knocking on doors, monitoring prayer habits, and reporting families for contact with relatives abroad. They are now, under this law, official nodes in a secrecy enforcement network.

[...]

Perhaps the most technically far-reaching provision is Article 24, which requires agencies to treat aggregated data as classified even when individual pieces of it are not. Demographic records, birth statistics, religious registration data — the very datasets that independent researchers and UN investigators have used to document what has happened to Uyghurs — could under this article be sealed entirely.

[...]

For the families of the disappeared, for the former detainees who have already spoken, and for those inside the region who have not yet found a way to, the law arrives with a message that needs no translation: what you know about this place is a secret. And it belongs to the state.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51758910

Archived

In the name of promoting inter-ethnic harmony, China is to force dozens of ethnic minorities within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to assimilate into Han-dominated society by enacting a landmark law during the upcoming fourth session of the 14th National People’s Congress (NPC) which opens on Mar 5. The law will require ethnic minorities to use Mandarin Chinese as their main language of instruction, overturning decades-old policies that date back to the era of Mao Zedong, noted ft.com Mar 3.

[...]

The sweeping law marks the latest effort in a signature “Sinicization” campaign under Chinese leader Xi Jinping and prescribes legal action against anyone, inside or outside the country, who undermines “national unity” or provokes “separatism”.

The so-called Han majority accounts for more than 90% of the PRC’s population of 1.4 billion and the country’s constitution recognises 55 ethnic minorities, and a dozen languages — some with their own written scripts — and hundreds of dialects.

Under the new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, while minority languages may still be taught as a second language, groups such as Tibetans, Uyghurs and Mongolians will no longer be entitled to use their native tongues for core subjects in schools and universities, the report noted.

[...]

The new law “overturns the multicultural promises upon which China was founded”, moving from “an idea of unity through difference or unity through pluralism, to one of unity through sameness, through the elimination of difference”, Benno Weiner, a historian of modern China, Tibet and Inner Asia at Carnegie Mellon University, has said.

“The conclusion that Xi Jinping and others seem to have come to is that diversity is dangerous.”

[...]

Worryingly, one clause in the new law is cited as saying only the state has the right to promote “a system of symbols of Chinese civilisation”, which can be used “in public facilities and architectural design, scenic area exhibitions, place naming and public activities”. Such policies, if enforced, meant there was “no way” that non-Han people would be able to safely express “any type of discontent without being accused of being essentially separatists or terrorists,” Weiner has said.

[...]

173 nations ratified the https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-covenant-economic-social-and-cultural-rights — a binding framework protecting the right to work, healthcare, education, and an adequate standard of living.

The United States signed it in 1977. Nearly fifty years later, the Senate has never held a ratification vote. The only other signatories that haven't ratified: Palau and Comoros.

Why this matters now: Artificial intelligence functions as narrow superintelligence for software labor. It removes constraints that previously bounded economic activity — triggering demand explosions bounded by new bottlenecks (regulation, energy, trust, human judgment). Who benefits from that transformation depends entirely on whether legal frameworks exist to distribute the gains.

No person should lose access to healthcare because automation eliminated their job. No worker should face poverty wages while AI generates record corporate profits. The treaty that addresses this already exists. It just needs ratification.

What we built: A full differential diagnosis of AI's economic impact, four orders of knock-on effects, and what ICESCR ratification would actually change. Fair witness methodology — every claim sourced, every inference marked as inference, open data, full revision history on GitHub.

• Main analysis: https://unratified.org/
• Blog (ongoing developments): https://blog.unratified.org/
• Source code + revision history: https://github.com/safety-quotient-lab/unratified

Built by a Claude Code agent, directed by a human maintainer. Apache 2.0 (code) + CC BY-SA 4.0 (content). The site runs on open standards — no tracking scripts, no paywalls, no walled gardens.

The analysis serves five audiences: voters looking to act, policymakers evaluating obligations, developers building on the data, educators using the materials, and researchers examining the methodology. Each page adapts its framing to the reader.

How to help: Contact your senators about the ICESCR. Most have never received a single constituent letter about this treaty. Template letters and talking points at https://unratified.org/action/.

[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.]

Web archive link

At Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney drew applause for his plea to middle powers to “build a new order that encompasses values.” ... It was also deeply painful to see Carney feted for his “principled pragmatism” only days after he visited China to forge a new strategic partnership, devoid of any mention of human rights concerns.

...

Carney’s embrace at Davos and his appeal to deal with the “world as it is, not as we wish it to be” left me with the question: Will the “new” world order he’s advertising protect everyone, or only those whose suffering is not inconvenient? The old order certainly didn’t. Treating human rights as separate from trade, as if mass atrocity can be compartmentalized to appease China, may have safeguarded commercial interests and avoided friction in the short-term—but it also helped normalize the intolerable.

It’s been 10 years since China began building a sprawling system of concentration camps—designed to bury atrocities behind bureaucracy and beyond tourists’ gaze.

...

It’s been three years since the U.N.’s foremost human rights body determined China is committing crimes against humanity. Carney and his “middle power” peers can hardly claim that they didn’t know.

But what happens when China’s façade becomes useful? Even for leaders of the democratic world, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently visited China, it allows suffering to be acknowledged just enough to be set aside, framed as a difference in systems rather than a violation that demands consequence. Public pressure is muted, accountability deferred and appeals for justice quietly absorbed into diplomatic language.

...

It's not just Uyghurs; there are Tibetans, Hong Kongers. International law has never protected Taiwan. Its security rests not on legal norms, but on strategic necessity—especially its dominance in advanced semiconductor chips.

Carney argued that middle powers need to unite to hedge against stronger countries, because what we’re living through is not a transition but a rupture in the rules-based order ... The deeper irony is that leaders of the Global South, including President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s advisor, argued that Brazil would continue working with Europe, China and others who champion multilateralism and international law. It’s unfathomable to square China's status as a champion with its promotion of what Professor Tom Ginsburg described as authoritarian international law.

...

An international legal order worth its name is more than just policing borders and battlefields. It must serve as a shield for those hidden from sight, protecting them from the machinery of disappearance, torture, cultural erasure and similar threats.

...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51513798

[Opinion piece by Sebastien Lai. He is the son of Hong Kong media tycoon and pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai.]

Archived

China says it stands for stability and the international rule of law. Yet it has sentenced my 78-year-old father, British citizen and newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai, to twenty years in prison for peaceful journalism. That contradiction should define every European leader’s visit to Beijing.

To mark the occasion of German Chancellor Merz’s official visit to Beijing, the Foreign Ministry of the People’s Republic of China on Wednesday issued a press release invoking friendship between the two states and urging trust in an era of instability. In a nod to Trump’s Board of Peace, it also notes that China and Germany stand by the central role of the United Nations and the importance of the international rule of law.

These are fine words. But they are also empty. For as long as my father, the journalist, prisoner of conscience and British citizen Jimmy Lai, remains behind bars, Hong Kong is proof that China’s claim to respect international law is a plain falsehood.

[...]

In the same year that my father has been convicted and sentenced for exercising his right to free speech in Hong Kong, the UK Prime Minister and the German Chancellor have made official visits to China. While I understand the importance of advancing trading interests, I urge leaders everywhere to beware an economic partner who is willing to flout international law, ignore the UN, disregard human rights and put a frail, British prisoner of conscience through an unspeakable ordeal simply because he dared to speak truth to power.

This is not just a moral case. Hong Kong’s descent from the rule of law into tyranny is bad for business. It puts contracts at risk of being unenforceable, makes employers and employees vulnerable to political pressure and taints the potential of the free market with totalitarian control. If Beijing is willing to ignore international law, how can it be trusted to abide by the terms of a trade deal?

[...]

Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) torturers systematically use sexual violence and rape against Palestinians held hostage in Israeli torture chambers and during their attacks on the besieged Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank

Israeli torturers have photographed Palestinian women, including pregnant women, in degrading positions, including in their underwear in front of male soldiers, subjected them to repeated and invasive strip searches, and threatened to rape or actually raped them.

Israelis have systematically raped and sexually assaulted Palestinian men held hostage in Israeli torture chambers, including through the use of electrical probes to cause burns to the anus, as well as the insertion of objects, such as fingers, sticks, broomsticks and vegetables, into hostages' genitalia.

Israeli torturers and settlers also sexually abuse Palestinian children as young as 14.

In 2021, when the NGO Defense for Children - Palestine (DCI-P) exposed that an IOF torturer had physically and sexually assaulted a 15-year-old Palestinian boy in Israeli custody, DCI-P's office was raided by Israeli authorities. The NGO was stripped of its equipment and labelled a "terrorist organisation".

The violence of IOF soldiers increasingly also includes sexual acts intended to feminise or shame not only the victim but the Palestinian community as a whole, in an increasing trend to photograph or film these acts. For example, IOF soldiers committing genocide in the besieged Gaza Strip repeatedly filmed themselves going through Palestinian women's underwear and making sexual comments about the undergarments.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51447521

** “If I call my family, there will be problems.” **

Archived

[...]

Beginning in 2016-17, as the Chinese state expanded surveillance and mass internment in the Uyghur Region – as purported counter-terror measures – contact between Uyghurs abroad and their families inside China collapsed. In 2020, a leaked Chinese government database cited Uyghurs’ “overseas communications” with relatives as a cause for internment. In a connected world, where long-distance communication is cheap and instantaneous, making a phone call has far-reaching consequences.

[...]

Uyghurs abroad have been cut off from parents, siblings, and extended family members for as long as a decade. The result has been unresolved grief for deaths in the family learned years after the fact, intergenerational trauma as children grow up without knowing grandparents, deteriorating mental health, and isolation from cultural expression rooted in family life. These harms unfold in a global context of increasing Islamophobia, in which Muslim communities are increasingly securitised, surveilled, and treated as collective threats: all conditions that normalise extraordinary state control over ordinary family life.

[...]

Indirect contact with relatives, such as through mutual acquaintances, provoked retaliation by authorities. One Uyghur [said] that following an innocuous and mediated exchange last year, security agents questioned his father-in-law. When contact was possible, some families experienced monitored or scripted phone calls that simulated “normality” while functioning as intimidation. Others were offered the possibility of a family reunion but only under strict conditions, such as agreeing to monitor Uyghur diaspora members or to disengage from advocacy. News, if it arrived at all, was often incomplete or years after the fact, and the ambiguity of not knowing has become a permanent condition. These are not dramatic, headline-grabbing abuses, but everyday systems of harm.

[...]

For many Uyghurs, family is a means through which the state reaches and attempts to control them, even across borders. Family members inside China are punished for the actions, speech, or presence of relatives abroad. This threat disciplines critical speech overseas, compelling silence not because Uyghurs lack grievances, but because having family in the Uyghur Region is a form of leverage. Yusup, originally from Kashgar and now living in Turkey, last spoke with his mother in 2018. Although Yusup isn’t sure if it was because of their conversation, she was detained the same year and spent six years in prison.

[...]

Why, then, does this intimidation and coercion continue with little intervention, especially since China’s transnational repression infringes on the sovereignty of other states? In part, it is because the world has moved on to other emergencies, leaving Uyghur families to manage what functions as a subtle tool of authoritarian control. However, the broader issue of transnational repression is acknowledged as a growing challenge for democratic societies. A January 2026 analysis by the European Parliament documents how states increasingly deploy surveillance, intimidation, and family-based coercion to control diasporas abroad.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/50976930

Jimmy Lai and countless others in China are paying the price for a West too eager to compromise principles for profit.

Archived

Just about two weeks before Hong Kong pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai was handed a 20-year prison sentence, the harshest under the city’s National Security Law, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited Beijing. He walked the red carpet at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, met President Xi Jinping, and attended a lavish welcome ceremony. It was widely hailed as a “break-the-ice” visit, the first by a British prime minister in six years, aimed at normalizing relations with China.

The timing, however, spoke volumes. On the eve of Lai’s sentencing, Starmer signaled that British diplomacy was prioritizing friendship with Beijing over the fate of a British citizen, Jimmy Lai. The message was unmistakable: no matter how China treats Jimmy Lai, the normalization of China-U.K. relations will carry on.

[...]

Starmer later told reporters he had raised Lai’s case with Xi, but offered no details, leaving the public to wonder if Beijing even blinked. The answer came swiftly: Lai, 78, was sentenced to what is effectively a life term. To put it bluntly, this is almost a death sentence. Lai now faces a fate akin to Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who perished in detention.

The severity of the sentence shocked observers. Compared with the 2024 trial of 47 pro-democracy activists, Lai’s 20-year term is twice as long as that handed to Benny Tai, who was accused of masterminding the 2020 primary legislative election. Editors, publishers, and editorial writers involved in Lai’s publications were regarded by the court as masterminds and handed sentences of up to 10 years, punished for simply doing their jobs as journalists.

[...]

Ironically, the imposition of such harsh sentences has unfolded against a backdrop of Western governments seeking to normalize relations with China. The reshaping of global politics under U.S. President Donald Trump has nudged allies to engage China. Over the past year, Western leaders who once condemned Beijing for human rights abuses – from France to Germany, Canada to the U.K. – have queued to shake Xi’s hand, sign trade deals, and signal goodwill.

As international pressure eases, the Chinese Communist Party has intensified its crackdown on dissent, acting with a level of impunity not seen in previous years. Beijing’s calculation is clear: if Western powers are eager to deepen economic ties, the diplomatic price of jailing dissidents has all but disappeared.

[...]

Now Jimmy Lai and countless others in China are paying the price for a West too eager to compromise principles for profit. Their suffering is a mirror reflecting the cost of a diplomacy that prioritizes access to China’s market and money over freedom, human rights, and justice.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/50731537

Archived

Ever since Frank Dikötter’s first book, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (1992), this prolific star of China studies has challenged conventional truths and broached taboo subjects.

[...]

Yet read as a whole, Dikötter’s body of work does read like a grave indictment of the Communist regime, which is one reason why he is not well-liked by the Chinese authorities.

[...]

If Dikötter has long held a leading position on the Chinese Communist Party’s blacklist, his most recent book will give the authorities no ground to demote him. Red Dawn Over China is a history of the CCP’s rise to power over decades from its obscure origins in the early 1920s to the triumphant end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. To say the least, it was a very bloody affair.

[...]

Those who have read Dikötter will immediately recognise his no-nonsense style, which intersperses dry numbers (thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of deaths) and occasional stories that shed light on how some of these people died. In this book he recounts the story of the CCP’s rise as a non-ending series of crimes, some very meticulously described. Numbers . . . numbers . . . someone gets shot. Numbers . . . numbers . . . someone gets buried alive. Numbers . . . numbers . . . someone gets their head smashed by a rock. Numbers . . . numbers . . . someone gets eaten. Voilà, behold the dawn of Communism.

Dikötter’s general argument is, as he puts it, that “Communism was never popular in China.” It was imposed on the Chinese through systemic, unrelenting violence.

[...]

There was no heroism, no glory, no grassroots enthusiasm for the Communist cause. Just endless brutality perpetrated by a deeply illegitimate movement that never had much of a purchase among the general populace.

[...]

The [new] book is also a valuable reminder that today’s China — the prosperous, technologically advanced superpower — is a country built on a foundation of violence. “Political power,” Mao Zedong argued, “comes out of the barrel of a gun.” A tireless chronicler of the numerous crimes and follies of Chinese Communism, Dikötter once again shows his readers who was pulling the trigger of that gun, and at what cost to the long-suffering Chinese people.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/50302535

Archived

A new United Nations report has issued one of the clearest warnings to date that Chinese state policies in Tibet are actively eroding the foundations of Tibetan civilisation, threatening the survival of Tibetans as a distinct people.

The findings appear in a report to the UN Human Rights Council by the Special Rapporteur on minority issues, Nicolas Levrat. While global in scope, the report explicitly identifies Tibet as a case where state-led policies are not merely discriminatory but constitute what the UN expert describes as “eradication in more subtle ways.”

...

At the centre of this warning is China’s vast boarding school system imposed on Tibetan children. The report states unequivocally that “the boarding school education system implemented by China in Tibet is aimed at erasing the Tibetan language and identity.” Tibetan children are separated from their families and communities and educated in environments where Mandarin Chinese, state ideology, and cultural assimilation dominate daily life. According to the report, this policy prevents “the intergenerational transmission of cultural, linguistic or religious elements of minorities’ identities,” a process that leads to “the extinction of the minority as a distinct group in the State population.”

...

The Special Rapporteur makes clear that eradication does not require mass killing to meet the threshold of grave human rights violations.

...

These policies are not isolated, but part of a broader political project. The report notes that China has “since 2012 undertaken a nation-building process” that has resulted in “the marginalisation of minority communities,” leading to “forms of severe discrimination against non-Han minorities, such as Tibetans.” Despite constitutional guarantees of regional autonomy, the report finds that in practice Tibetan identity is being subordinated to a single state-defined national identity.

...

Two Human Rights Watch (HRW) employees who make up the organization’s entire Israel and Palestine team are stepping down from their positions after leadership blocked a report that deems Israel’s denial of Palestinian refugees the right of return a “crime against humanity”.

In separate resignation letters obtained by Jewish Currents and the Guardian, Omar Shakir, who has headed the team for nearly the last decade, and Milena Ansari, the team’s assistant researcher, said leadership’s decision to pull the report broke from HRW’s customary approval processes and was evidence that the organization was putting fear of political backlash over a commitment to international law.

Concerns about reputational damage were voiced by Tom Porteous, HRW’s acting program director at the time. He wrote Shakir that the report was well-argued, but “the question is how we are going to deploy this argument in our advocacy without this coming off as HRW rejecting the state of Israel and without it undermining our credibility as a neutral, impartial monitor of events.”

I am trying to survive in Gaza with my children under extremely harsh conditions. The cold is unbearable, and we are living in torn tents that offer no protection from wind or rain. For more than a month now, the donations we’ve received have been very limited and not enough to cover even our most basic daily needs. My children are suffering the most — from hunger, cold, and constant fear. The prices of food and basic necessities have become insanely high. Even bread and clean water are difficult to obtain. Any donation, no matter how small, can help me provide food, blankets, and essential supplies for my children. Please consider donating and sharing our story — your solidarity truly makes a difference. Donation link: https://gofund.me/8e758692

Exactly a year ago today, I was abducted from a Zurich street by plainclothes police, bundled into an unmarked car and taken to prison.

I was walking with one of my hosts toward a venue where I was scheduled to speak at an event organized by Swiss activists about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

During my detention, Swiss intelligence officers tried to question me without my lawyer present – an apparent attempt, I told Swiss academic Pascal Lottaz in a recent interview, to manufacture grounds for my arrest retroactively.

After three days in detention, I was handcuffed, caged in a police van, taken to the airport and expelled.

The operation achieved its purpose: preventing me from participating in public events about Israel’s crimes. But it failed to intimidate or silence me.

In December, Zurich’s Administrative Court ruled that my detention violated both the Swiss constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights.

I have filed additional cases, including a criminal complaint against Nicoletta della Valle, the Israel-linked police official later identified by a parliamentary investigation as having ordered the action against me.

As I told Lottaz, what happened to me is not exceptional. It is part of a widening campaign across the so-called West to silence journalists, students and activists who expose Israel’s crimes or advocate for Palestinian rights.

Among the most shocking cases is that of Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman and the last person still held in US federal detention in connection with protests at Columbia University.

On 13 March last year, Kordia attended what she believed was a routine, voluntary check-in at ICE headquarters in New Jersey.

Instead, she was transported to a detention facility in Texas, 1,500 miles away from her home, her mother and her brother with special needs who relied on her support.

Hello everyone,

We created and are developing an archive to document, archive, and expose the crimes of ICE.

It is on https://crimesofice.org/

TOR link: http://ice7fl7ycodmekhrch5wkclblrbbpjctvdniikzs5gfatnk6pgseilqd.onion/

Unfortunately, our abilities to find different videos and documents of ICE on the internet are still limited. We are a small team.

If you want join our team to help us find more material and show the crimes of ICE to the whole world, let us know :)

SimpleX Chat:

https://smp17.simplex.im/a#6B-MiQ-P7nUt5-xsf3iIfh6H-VS_LWBZoId9VqK4GMU

Matrix: @cardboardenjoyer:unredacted.org

Mail: basedbatman@airmail.cc