cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34918680

Since Xi Jinping came to power has centralised the state authority in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), using a mix of patriotism, brutality and 'convenient' events like the COVID pandemic.

[...]

For decades, analysts described China’s governance as “fragmented authoritarianism” —a system where policymaking was shaped by competing bureaucracies, local governments, and state-owned enterprises (SOEs), often resulting in disjointed or incoherent policy outcomes. This model reflected the post-Mao era strategy of decentralisation, as Beijing deliberately delegated authority to provinces and ministries in the 1980s–90s to spur economic innovation.

Under Xi Jinping [there] is a top-down system that is more coherent and centralised yet still allows tactical flexibility. Xi’s central leadership now defines broad strategic goals and strict “red lines,” but grants operational autonomy to lower-level actors to carry out these goals within unwritten but well-understood boundaries.

[...]

China’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic starkly illustrated the CCP’s embedded authoritarianism on the domestic front. As the crisis unfolded, the state dramatically expanded its presence at the grassroots, embedding Party networks throughout society.

During the pandemic, the Party shifted from more direct, top-down control (“integrated domination”) to a strategy of “embedded” domination that penetrated communities in an almost cellular fashion. In practice, this meant an aggressive infusion of Party authority into everyday governance in order to mobilise resources and enforce compliance.

[...]

By embedding Party cells and personnel into community life, the state could indirectly control society in a more pervasive way than through overt coercion alone. This embedded approach allowed the regime to marshal social forces as extensions of the Party-state.

Indeed, Beijing managed to mobilise ordinary citizens and local organisations for Party objectives and state security, blurring the line between voluntary civic action and Party mandate. The result was a consolidation of political control: grassroots governance became an arm of CCP authority, significantly boosting the Party’s influence over both state and society.

[...]

What is clear is that Xi’s tenure has redefined authoritarian governance in China, making it more embedded, expansive, and adaptive. The CCP’s “nexus” with society—once relatively loose—is now much tighter, as Party dominance extends through networks that penetrate everyday life. This has solidified the Party’s grip, but it also commits the Party to addressing social demands more directly, since it has positioned itself as the architect of grassroots governance.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34919929

The Center for Uyghur Studies released its new report titled “Breaking the Roots: China’s Use of Boarding Schools as a Tool of Genocide Against Uyghur Muslims.” This report sheds light on one of the most alarming and underreported aspects of China’s repressive policies against the Uyghur people: the state-run boarding school system that targets Uyghur children in East Turkistan (AKA Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). The report documents how these schools are being used not as centers of learning and development, but as tools of forced assimilation, designed to erase Uyghur identity, language, and culture from a young age.

[...]

The report provides an in-depth examination of how the boarding school system in the Uyghur homeland functions as a mechanism of cultural genocide:

• Policy Origins – Tracing the roots of China’s assimilation campaign against the Uyghurs, including how “counter-terrorism” narratives have been used to justify oppressive policies post-9/11.
• Implementation of Boarding Schools, detailing how children, some as young as primary school age, are forcibly separated from their families and placed into state-run facilities.
• Educational Indoctrination, describing the curriculum and environment within these schools, where the Uyghur language is banned, familial ties are vilified, and loyalty to the state is indoctrinated.
• Eyewitness Testimonies, presenting first-hand accounts from survivors of these schools, offering credible and emotional insight into the long-term psychological and cultural damage inflicted on Uyghur children.

[...]

[Experts say that the matter with the] ‘boarding schools’ is not education, it is forced assimilation, cultural erasure, and psychological trauma. By severing children from their families, language, and identity, the Chinese government is committing a grave injustice that meets the definition of genocide. The international community cannot remain silent in the face of this systematic destruction of an entire people’s future.

[...] [Edit typo.]

China weathered no consequences for abducting a 6-year-old in 1995. That same impunity continues to fuel collective punishment, enforced disappearances, and arbitrary detention.

Archived

[...]

The genuine Panchen Lama and his family are far from Beijing’s only Tibetan victims of enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention. Databases of Tibetans wrongfully detained currently reflect grim descriptions: “life imprisonment,” “forcible disappearance,” and, chillingly, “no further information.” Chinese government restrictions on information make definitive conclusions difficult, but research that likely underestimates counts of political prisoners shows that while Tibetans comprise only half a percent of China’s total population, they made up 8 percent of all prisoners of conscience sentenced between 2019 and 2024.

[...]

It is possible Beijing will never clarify how, let alone how many, Tibetans have died in state custody. Even in high-profile cases authorities have refused to provide the remains of and key information to family and religious community members.

[...]

Some democracies continue to call on Beijing to release the genuine Panchen Lama and his family, and decry other violations against Tibetans, including enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention.

[...]

But absent tougher measures, Beijing is unlikely to change its conduct. When diaspora Tibetans go to the polls to elect a new exile government, and when succession to the Dalai Lama begins, democracies should support Tibetans’ choices, and publicly reject Beijing’s efforts to undermine or control either process. No democracy should receive Chinese government officials representing Tibetan issues until the genuine Panchen Lama and his family have been released.

[...]

[Edit typo.]

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/2786240

...

Olena Yahupova was taken into a room where she was interrogated for hours. Russia’s Federal Security Service [FSB] agents beat her over the head with a bottle of water, choked her with a cable, and held her at gunpoint, demanding that Yahupova give them information about her husband’s brigade and that of other people associated with Ukrainian troops in Kamianka Dniprovska. Despite reiterating to the soldiers that she had no information on either, she continued to be detained for hours, blood dripping down her back from head injuries she sustained during interrogation without receiving medical attention. She was eventually taken to a holding cell, where she spent the next two weeks being taken out and routinely interrogated.

Meanwhile Russian soldiers fabricated a case against her. They broke into her apartment, planting guns in her rooms, and two anti-tank launchers in the cellar. The soldiers then returned to her home to conduct a staged “raid,” the videos of which were later broadcast on pro-Kremlin news channels. The first prison that Yahupova was sent to, one of a few where she was detained over the next five months, was where an FSB agent raped Yahupova; but it was far from the last time she would be assaulted by her Russian captors.

Conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) has long been a war crime, and from February 2022 to August 2024, the United Nations Human Rights Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) documented at least 382 cases of CRSV committed by the Russian Federation.

However, Danielle Bell, Head of Mission for the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU), emphasized that the figure does not reflect the full scope of potential cases. The mission is unable to document the experiences of individuals still imprisoned by Russia or living under occupation, as the Russian Federation continues to deny access to territories it controls.

“There are also survivors who have yet to come forward and others who were killed before they could speak up,” said Bell.

Throughout the war, Bell said the HRMMU has documented rape, attempted rape, electric shocks and beatings to the genitals, sexual degradation, threats of rape, and threats of castration. Bell spoke at the organization office in Kyiv and added that they are also documenting “unjustified cavity searches, forced witnessing of sexual violence, prolonged nudity."

...

Belle confirmed that her office has heard of cases of women being subject to the same treatment as Yahupova while in Russian custody.

“Some of the acts that have been described to us are so grotesque that we could not report on them publicly even though we have the consent to use these stories. They’re too awful,” said Bell.

“I’ve been doing this [work] for 25 years and I’ve never seen anything this horrific. The treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war by the Russian Federation is the worst I’ve seen in my career. It’s simply incomparable to what I’ve seen,” Bell said, sighing deeply..

...

For the next five months, Yahupova was shuffled around various Russian labor camps near their frontline positions. The conditions at the camp were “inhumane,” Yahupova said. She was forced to dig trenches for Russian soldiers, wash their clothes, and prepare food for their troops, while doing so, Yahupova said Russian soldiers also raped her.

Prisoners who were detained in the summer were forced to wear the same clothing even during the winter months, with no additional protection provided by soldiers against the bitter Ukrainian winter, which constantly reaches temperatures below freezing.

...

Yahupova was told that she would spend the rest of her life in Russian custody. But in March 2023, she was inexplicably released from the camp after one Russian soldier — perhaps out of sympathy.

...

Yahupova was then sent back to Kamianka Dniprovska, which remains under Russian occupation. When she returned home, a shell of her former self, she found that Russian soldiers had killed her dog.

In Kamianka Dniprovska, one Russian soldier told Yahupova she was forbidden to speak about what happened to her.

...

As Yahupova tried to reintegrate back into Ukrainian society, she hid her rape from her family. “People would just be traumatized, but the problem wouldn’t be solved,” she said.

On May 1, 2023, two months after being freed from the Russian prisons, Yahupova went to a police station in Kyiv to prepare a statement on her experiences while in captivity. Over the next few months, with the help of Ukraine’s Security Service [SBU], Yahupova managed to track down the identities of the Russian men who raped her.

Since then, Yahupova has been building a case against her assaulters and is planning to bring it to international courts, where she hopes the men can be charged with crimes against humanity for the torture, rape, enslavement, and murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war like her.

...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34521810

[...]

Funding parameters

• Project duration: 6 to 12 months
• Funding range: USD 5,000 to 25,000
• Target applicants: Civil society organisations, informal collectives, or Chinese HRD networks based outside China.
• Registration is not required, but applicants must be able to manage funds and activities in accordance with local tax and legal requirements.
• Location: Projects must be implemented outside China, preferably in Europe
• Strategic focus: Activities should contribute to international understanding and documentation of PRC human rights violations in- or outside of China, build community resilience against transnational repression, and/or increase local democratic engagement. Particular attention will be paid to the innovative nature or focus of proposed projects.

[...]

How to apply

Please submit a concept note (maximum 2 pages, Word format) including the following:

• Organizational/Network/Personal background (at this stage, do NOT include any sensitive personal information).
• Proposed program background, problem statement and target audience/location.
• Project goals and intended outcomes.
• Main activities and proposed timeline (max. duration 12 months).
• Estimated budget.
• Risk assessment and mitigation strategies

[...]

Archived

The submission by the International Service for Human Rights (ISHR), an independent, non-profit organisation promoting and protecting human rights, exposes alarming intimidation and reprisals patterns exercised against human rights defenders, highlights acts ranging from threats, surveillance, smear campaigns, enforced disappearances, travel bans to judicial harassment and accusations of terrorism, among many others.

• While in Bahrain some human rights defenders are still facing arbitrary detention, they are consistently being denied timely and adequate medical treatment by government authorities.
• Independent Civil society in China continues to face restrictions in accessing the UN and the Human Rights Council, along with strong surveillance and intimidation carried out by Government-Organised NGOs (GONGOs).
• In Egypt, many human rights defenders including from prominent organisations are being subjected to unlawful arrests and judicial harassment. These include human rights lawyer Mohamed El-Baqer who is currently on a terrorist list, unable to travel nor exercise civil work.
• In Israel, Palestinian human rights defenders and organisations continue to face unparalleled intimidation.
• In Morocco, Russia and Vietnam, measures criminalising organisations and defenders continue shrinking civil society’s space.
• In Venezuela, arbitrary detentions and practices to silence dissents continue.

The submission raises concerns over the situation in Guatemala where many individuals involved in the work of the International Commission Against Impunity (CICIG) are suffering grave retaliation. It also raises concerns over the situation of International Criminal Court (ICC) officials, including the ICC prosecutor, who are subject to severe pressure from the current US administration for their investigative work related to Afghanistan and Israel.

Acts of reprisals and smear campaigns are also being directed against UN mandate holders carrying out crucial human rights work, including the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, and Anexa Alfred Cunningham, a member of Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples .

Anexa, who is unable to return to her home country has been included in ISHR’s annual campaign to #EndReprisals focusing on travel bans. Mohamed El-Baqer from Egypt, as well as Loujain Al-Hathloul from Saudi Arabia and Kadar Abdil Ibrahim from Djibouti are also facing travel bans and are featured in the campaign.

ISHR also submitted follow-up information on numerous cases, including in Algeria, the Bahamas, Bangladesh, Belarus, Burundi, Cameroon, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, France, India, Morocco, Nicaragua, Philippines, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, and Yemen.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34400694

Archived

Uyghur genocide committed by China was brought up at the Ethical Trade Conference in Norway

Concentration camp witness Sayragul Sauytbay detailed the Uyghur genocide, including forced labour, at the Ethical Trade Conference 2025. She called on the government to avoid complicity through trade with China in the ongoing genocide.

The Ethical Trade Conference 2025 was hosted by Ethical Trade Norway at Dansens Hus in Oslo on April 29, 2025, under the theme “Make Sustainability Great Again!” The conference marked the 25th anniversary of the organization and brought together over 300 attendees from business, labour unions, government, and civil society. Sayragul Sauytbay, Vice President of the East Turkistan Government in Exile (ETGE), spoke at the opening of the conference, Norway’s leading event for ethical and sustainable commerce.

Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh from East Turkistan and a prominent witness to the Chinese concentration camps, offered a pressing testimony regarding the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Chinese government against the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic ethnic groups. Drawing from her experiences as an educator forced into Chinese concentration camps, she detailed instances of mass internment, torture, forced labour, and indoctrination.

She pointed out that almost one million children from the Uyghur, Kazakh, and other Turkic communities have been forcefully removed from their families and placed in Chinese state-operated boarding schools and orphanages, where they undergo political indoctrination intended to erase their cultural and religious identities.

Sauytbay cautioned that without full transparency and ethical due diligence, continued political and economic engagements with China could render the government of Norway and Norwegian businesses morally and legally complicit in the atrocities committed by the Chinese state.

She asserted that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) serves as a key tool in China’s strategy for global domination, enabling the Chinese Communist Party to extend its authoritarian influence under the pretext of development and trade.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34118585

Hong Kong authorities’ unjust arrests of the father and brother of the prominent US-based activist Anna Kwok is an escalation of the Chinese government’s use of cross-border repression, 87 international and diaspora rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, said today in two joint statements.

Anna Kwok’s father, Kwok Yin-sang, 68, was arrested and formally charged under a national security law that carries a punishment of up to seven years in prison. Her brother was also arrested and later released on bail.

“The Hong Kong authorities took an unprecedented action by charging the family member of an exiled activist with a national security crime to try to silence her,” said Yalkun Uluyol, China researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Foreign governments should respond to this assault on basic liberties by speaking up about the case and taking concrete actions to protect their citizens and residents from the Chinese government’s long arm.”

The groups said that foreign governments should put in place effective measures to protect exiled activists and other critics of the Chinese government from Beijing’s transnational repression.

[...]

Senior officials and intelligence agencies across Europe have been sounding the alarm that hybrid campaigns orchestrated by Russia and China have increasingly converged, posing an amplified threat to Western security. While, hybrid warfare, characterised by attacking democratic governance through a blend of military and non-military means such as cyber operations, disinformation, sabotage and espionage is nothing new, the strategic alignment of Russia and China in a combined campaign certainly is.

Russia and China both deploy sophisticated cyber capabilities against Western targets, including governments, corporations and critical infrastructure. Chinese state-sponsored groups such as MirrorFace, previously focused primarily on East Asia, have expanded their cyber-espionage campaign into Europe, closely mirroring Russian cyber-espionage patterns. Similarly, Kremlin hackers that have long targeted Europe have also consistently targeted the diplomatic, financial and defence sectors in Japan, South Korea, Australia and Taiwan.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/33586621

Archived

[...]

“Numerous signs of torture and ill-treatment were found on the victim’s body, including abrasions and hemorrhages on various parts of the body, a broken rib, neck injuries, and possible electric shock marks on the feet. However, due to the condition of the body, experts have not yet been able to establish the cause of death." Yuriy Belousov, the head of the War Crimes Unit at the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, described the results of the forensic medical examination to us.

The body was missing some organs: the eyeballs, the brain, part of the larynx, and the hyoid bone was broken, said a source close to the investigation into Viktoriia Roshchyna’s death. It was launched by the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine in March 2025.

A forensic expert, who requested anonymity, suggested in a conversation with journalists that the removal of specific organs could be an attempt to conceal strangulation: “Removing the larynx during an autopsy is not standard practice. The larynx can be good evidence of strangulation. When a person is strangled, the hyoid bone is most often broken. In cases of strangulation, bleeding can be found in the whites of the eyes, and a lack of oxygen in the brain.”

[...]

A person is abducted [in by Russia occupied territories of Ukraine] by people without insignia, they do not identify themselves, do not present any documents, and do not explain anything to relatives. The person simply disappears. No one “knows” about them in the military commandant’s offices, the prosecutor’s office, the police, or the investigative committee. Sometimes, the local police even opens a “missing person” case.

It is unknown who exactly detained Viktoriia. Sevgil Musayeva recalls that in conversations with the journalist, she mentioned that she was trying to establish the identities of FSB officers involved in the abduction and torture of Ukrainians in Enerhodar.

[...]

“She arrived [in the detention center] already pumped full of some unknown medications,” says another former detainee who was held with Vika in the Taganrog pre-trial detention center. “At some point, she stopped eating. Her cellmates started telling the guards and the prison staff — that she’d stopped eating, that something needed to be done. They didn’t give a damn until her condition got seriously bad.”

[...]

But even in this state [of poor health], she maintained her courage. Yevgeny Markevich, a prisoner of war who was held in a cell next to Roshchyna’s in [the detention center of] Taganrog, heard her talking to the guards.

She told the prison guards right to their faces: “You are occupiers, you came to our country, you are killing our people... I will never cooperate with you!” She was probably saved by the fact that she was a woman. If I had said something like that, they would’ve killed me on the spot.

[...]

Ukrainian prisoners call Taganrog Detention Center No. 2 (SIZO-2), where Viktoriia ended up, hell on Earth. “Even the term ‘concentration camp’ would be too mild for SIZO-2,” said one of the prisoners.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/33478681

Archived

Nations Office at Geneva were meant to embody the 20th-century ideal of a postwar world — when countries might seek to avert conflict through diplomacy. During the thousands of meetings held at the Palais des Nations each year, delegates press openly and passionately for their convictions. And yet for 15 human rights activists in March 2024, the U.N. complex held risks.

Fearing retribution from the Chinese government against their families in mainland China and Hong Kong, several of the activists were no longer willing to set foot inside the diplomatic site. Instead, they gathered for a secret meeting on the top floor of a nondescript office building nearby. They were there to discuss human rights abuses in China and Hong Kong with the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk.

“We took all of the necessary precautions,” Zumretay Arkin, vice president of the World Uyghur Congress, which advocates for the rights of the Turkic ethnic group native to China’s northwest Xinjiang region, told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

[...]

One of the women announced that she and the group, who claimed to be from the “Guangdong Human Rights Association,” had arrived for a meeting, though they weren’t invited. She pressed for information as her associates peered through the glass, but the staffer denied a meeting was taking place. “I just disengaged from the conversation, and they left,” the staffer told ICIJ. (ISHR says it submitted a statement to U.N. authorities a week later, and also reported the incident to Swiss authorities.)

Then two Uyghur activists left the office for a smoke. They later reported that a figure in the back of a black Mercedes-Benz van with tinted windows appeared to photograph them. People matching the description of the Guangdong group entered the same vehicle before it pulled away.

“This was an act clearly aimed at intimidating and clearly aimed at sending a message to everyone that was here,” said Raphaël Viana David, a program manager at ISHR. Arkin told ICIJ she believes the Guangdong group was sending a signal from the Chinese government: “We’re watching you. We’re monitoring you. You can’t escape us.”

[...]

ICIJ [International Consortium of Investigatvie Journalists} and its partners spoke to 15 activists and lawyers focused on human rights in China who described being surveilled or harassed by people suspected to be proxies for the Chinese government, including those from Chinese nongovernmental organizations. These incidents occurred both inside the Palais des Nations and in Geneva at large. Some activists say their family members, who they believed were pressured by Chinese authorities, asked them to stop speaking out or warned them of the dangers of their activism. U.N. authorities have also reported activists and lawyers being threatened with physical assault, rape and death.

[...]

Thousands of NGOs at the U.N. hold consultative status, granting them certain privileges with the expectation that they act free from government interference. But an ICIJ analysis of 106 of these NGOs from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan reveals that 59 are closely connected to the Chinese government or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Forty-six are led by people with roles in the government or the party. Ten accept more than 50% of their funding from the Chinese state.

[...]

The Chinese government stands alone in the seriousness of the threat it poses to the global human rights system, according to Kenneth Roth, who ran Human Rights Watch for nearly 30 years. “To deter condemnation of its severe repression, foremost its mass detention of Uyghurs, Beijing has proposed to rewrite international human rights law,” he told ICIJ.

[...]

China has used its clout to garner praise from other U.N. member states. It has also restricted independent experts’ access to the country and stopped internal critics from leaving. And when exiled critics come to Geneva, China’s representatives try to block and intimidate them.

“The U.N. is one of the only forums where we can raise our cause,” said Arkin, who at 10 moved with her family to Montreal from Urumqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang region, to escape anti-Uyghur discrimination. But, she said, “it’s become one of the places where these governments carry out their repression.”

With autocracy on the rise globally, independent organizations at the U.N. carry a heavier burden to speak out about atrocities and persuade those who can to take action. If China’s power continues to go unchecked by U.N. authorities, it threatens the credibility of the institution in its efforts to monitor and document violations and abuses not just in China, but all over the world.

[...]

A ‘deadly reprisal’

More than a decade before the activists’ meeting at the International Service for Human Rights, Cao Shunli, a prominent Chinese human rights activist, was abducted while traveling to the same offices.

Cao had pressed the government to let citizens contribute to a report Beijing was submitting to the Human Rights Council ahead of its 2013 review on China. That summer she staged a two-month-long sit-in outside the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Beijing. She had already been detained several times for her activism.

In September, Cao, 52, tried to board a flight from Beijing Capital International Airport to Geneva, where she planned to attend a training program on U.N. human rights advocacy. Instead, she disappeared. (Several other activists and lawyers from other Chinese cities were reportedly interrogated and warned not to attend the same training program, U.N. authorities said.)

[...]

Creating an army of GONGOs

“GONGO” is a term for government-organized nongovernmental organizations — groups that are expected to be independent but, instead, hold close ties to governments or political parties. Connections can be through funding or staffing, or reflected in public statements.

Chinese diplomats routinely implore U.N. authorities to bar China’s critics. Letters provided to ICIJ by Emma Reilly, a former U.N. human rights officer, show persistent lobbying of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to refuse Tibetans and Uyghurs accreditation to the Human Rights Council, labeling them “secessionists.” As early as 2001, the Chinese ambassador requested the then high commissioner to “avoid meeting with any member of organizations against the Chinese government, such as Falun Gong, Tibetan and the so-called exiled dissidents, just as you did in the last few years.”

Since Xi’s reelection as Communist Party general secretary in 2017 and president the following year, China has sought greater influence within the U.N. human rights system and become more aggressive in silencing dissent.

[...]

The number of writers jailed reached a new high in a wider range of countries, with at least 375 behind bars in 40 countries during 2024, compared to 339 in 2023, according to the international writers' association PEN. China, already the world’s top jailer of writers, registered another significant increase.

Archived version

• The number of writers jailed reached a new high in a wider range of countries, with at least 375 behind bars in 40 countries during 2024, compared to 339 in 2023, says PEN, the Worldwide Association of Writers NGO, in its Freedom-To-Write Index.

• China, already the world’s top jailer of writers, registered another significant increase of 11 cases, to 118 writers behind bars. The majority were jailed under the pretense of “national security” charges, oftentimes for criticism of the government and official policies, pro-democracy viewpoints, and the promotion of ethnic minority languages and culture. Uyghur writers and intellectuals continue to face particularly harsh treatment.

• War and conflict continued to have a negative impact on writers in 2024, as the crackdown on dissent in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and in Russia resulted in further upticks in the number of jailed and threatened writers, keeping both countries in the Top 10.

**Top 10 Countries of Concern: **

1. China
2. Iran
3. Saudi Arabia
4. Vietnam
5. Israel
6. Russia
7. Türkiye
8. Belarus
9. Egypt
10. Myanmar

Other key countries of concern—which each jailed seven writers during 2024—are Cuba, Eritrea, and Morocco.

Over the past six years of producing the Writers at Risk Database and Freedom to Write Index, the trend is clear: writers are being jailed at a steadily increasing rate over that time period, from 238 cases counted in 2019 to 375 in 2024. This time span has also seen significant negative political developments in a number of key countries currently included in our Top 10 jailers of writers that have had an outsized impact on the climate for free expression and have resulted in sharp upticks in writers being jailed, most notably: the flawed August 2020 presidential election and widespread protest movement in Belarus, the February 2021 coup and anti-military civil disobedience movement in Myanmar, the “Woman, Life, Freedom” demonstrations that erupted following the custodial death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini in the fall of 2022 in Iran, the Russian-instigated war in Ukraine which began in February 2022, and Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

[...]

They said […] they would rape my wife if I do not sit and answer phone calls. They tried all kinds of coercive manoeuvres. You know, using a fire extinguisher to [pretend] to hit me to scare me, using a plastic bag over my head to suffocate me.

...

Experts estimate there are hundreds of thousands of scammers in the industry across Southeast Asia. Some of them are unrepentant criminals, ruthlessly exploiting victims across the world. Others are victims themselves, trafficked and held against their will. Others still are desperate people willing to participate in the industry to survive, but once inside, find they can no longer leave.

...

Investigators have spoken to nearly 100 survivors from compounds mostly located in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. They have also interviewed local and international civil society organisations, policymakers and law enforcement throughout Southeast Asia.

Because the industry is hidden behind high walls mounted with barbed wire and surveillance cameras, they have also spent countless hours tracking the scammers online.

...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32890027

Archived

“If [the] government goes to the bank with a list of 100 Uyghur names and says, you know, ‘give me the bank balance for these people [and] how much money they have.’ The bank will print it out and hand it over to the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. Then, they shut down the bank accounts, freeze their assets, and they take their properties,” she said.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32830658

[This is an op-ed by Valentin Weber, senior research fellow with the German Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of the International Forum for Democratic Studies report “Data-Centric Authoritarianism: How China’s Development of Frontier Technologies Could Globalize Repression.” His research covers the intersection of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and technological spheres of influence.]

[...]

While the financial, economic, technological, and national-security implications of DeepSeek’s achievement have been widely covered, there has been little discussion of its significance for authoritarian governance. DeepSeek has massive potential to enhance China’s already pervasive surveillance state, and it will bring the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) closer than ever to its goal of possessing an automated, autonomous, and scientific tool for repressing its people.

[...]

With the world’s largest public AI-surveillance networks — “smart cities” — Chinese police started to amass vast amounts of data. But some Chinese experts lamented that smart cities were not actually that smart: They could track and find pedestrians and vehicles but could not offer concrete guidance to authorities — such as providing police officers with different options for handling specific situations.

[...]

China’s surveillance-industrial complex took a big leap in the mid-2010s. Now, AI-powered surveillance networks could do more than help the CCP to track the whereabouts of citizens (the chess pawns). It could also suggest to the party which moves to make, which figures to use, and what strategies to take.

[...]

Inside China, such a network of large-scale AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] systems could autonomously improve repression in real time, rooting out the possibility of civic action in urban metropolises. Outside the country, if cities such as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia — where China first exported Alibaba’s City Brain system in 2018 — were either run by a Chinese-developed city brain that had reached AGI or plugged into a Chinese city-brain network, they would quietly lose their governance autonomy to these highly complex systems that were devised to achieve CCP urban-governance goals.

[...]

As China’s surveillance state begins its third evolution, the technology is beginning to shift from merely providing decision-making support to actually acting on the CCP’s behalf.

[...]

The next step in the evolution of China’s surveillance state will be to integrate generative-AI models like DeepSeek into urban surveillance infrastructures. Lenovo, a Hong Kong corporation with headquarters in Beijing, is already rolling out programs that fuse LLMs with public-surveillance systems. In [the Spanish city of] Barcelona, the company is administering its Visual Insights Network for AI (VINA), which allows law enforcement and city-management personnel to search and summarize large amounts of video footage instantaneously.

[...]

The CCP, with its vast access to the data of China-based companies, could use DeepSeek to enforce laws and intimidate adversaries in myriad ways — for example, deploying AI police agents to cancel a Lunar New Year holiday trip planned by someone required by the state to stay within a geofenced area; or telephoning activists after a protest to warn of the consequences of joining future demonstrations. It could also save police officers’ time. Rather than issuing “invitations to tea” (a euphemism for questioning), AI agents could conduct phone interviews and analyze suspects’ voices and emotional cues for signs of repentance. Police operators would, however, still need to confirm any action taken by AI agents.

[...]

DeepSeek and similar generative-AI tools make surveillance technology smarter and cheaper. This will likely allow the CCP to stay in power longer, and propel the export of Chinese AI surveillance systems across the world — to the detriment of global freedom.

[Edit typo.]

Since 2020, the five richest men in the world have doubled their fortunes while almost five billion people have become poorer. A growing sense of economic injustice and insecurity is contributing to the rise of authoritarian movements around the world. Meanwhile, the world is set to blast past global heating targets. But this is not inevitable. What if, instead, economic decisions were made with people and the planet at the center?

This is the idea behind the concept of a human rights economy, which means putting rights at the heart of economic policymaking. The concept draws from the work of human rights scholars and organizations around the world, while supporting transformative economic approaches emerging from other movements, including climate justice, gender justice, and decolonization.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32482359

Archived

The World Uyghur Congress (WUC) has filed a legal complaint in Paris against Dahua Technology France, Hikvision France, and Huawei France. The submission, made by prominent French human rights lawyer William Bourdon of Bourdon & Associés, accuses the three Chinese companies of complicity in crimes against humanity perpetrated against the Uyghur people in East Turkistan.

“This submission is an important reminder to all companies complicit in the Chinese government’s genocide that they bear legal responsibility,” said WUC President Turgunjan Alawdun. “We are confident that the French judiciary will take this matter seriously.”

The legal complaint outlines four serious charges:

• Concealment of complicity in the crime of aggravated servitude
• Concealment of complicity in the crime of trafficking in human beings as part of an organized gang
• Concealment of complicity in genocide
• Concealment of complicity in crimes against humanity

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32050493

Archived

[This is an op-ed by Salih Hudayar who is serving as the Foreign Minister of the East Turkistan Government in Exile. He is also the leader of the East Turkistan National Movement and has been a prominent voice for the rights and self-determination of the East Turkistani people.]

For over a decade, the world has witnessed mounting evidence of internment camps, forced sterilizations, family separations, religious and cultural persecution, organ harvesting, forced labor, and high-tech surveillance emerging from East Turkistan—an occupied nation China refers to as the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” These atrocities, targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples, have led multiple governments, including the United States, to designate China’s actions as genocide, while the United Nations has identified them as crimes against humanity. The genocide of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other Turkic peoples is routinely framed as mere human rights violation or a symptom of authoritarian overreach. Such framing obscures the root cause: the illegal occupation and ongoing colonization of East Turkistan by China.

[...]

East Turkistan, home to the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples, has a long and distinct sovereign history, culture, and identity separate from that of China. While the Manchu Qing Empire occupied the nation in 1759, Qing occupation over East Turkistan has never been continuous or consensual. The people of East Turkistan persistently resisted, launching 42 uprisings between 1759 and 1864, and regained independence as the State of Yette Sheher (1864–1877), before being re-occupied by the Qing Empire in December 1877.

[...]

The ongoing Uyghur genocide is the latest phase in [a] decades-long campaign. It has moved beyond political repression into a full-fledged effort to destroy the East Turkistani nation physically, culturally, and psychologically. Millions of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples have been arbitrarily detained in concentration camps, where they are subjected to indoctrination, torture, sexual violence, and forced labor. Furthermore, experts estimate that at least 25,000 to 50,000 Uyghurs are being killed annually solely for their organs. Uyghur and other Turkic women are forcibly sterilized or forced to undergo abortions to prevent the birth of future generations. Over a million Uyghur and other Turkic children are separated from their families and placed in state-run boarding schools designed to sever their cultural and linguistic ties. Over 16,000 Mosques, cemeteries, and historic sites have been demolished, while Uyghur and other Turkic language instruction has been eliminated from public education.

[...]

What makes this genocide even more insidious is its bureaucratic and technological sophistication. The CCP uses AI surveillance, biometric data collection, and big data policing to monitor and control every aspect of East Turkistani life. Genocide in East Turkistan is not committed with bombs or mass graves—it is executed with facial recognition cameras, QR codes, “predictive policing” apps, forced sterilizations, forced abortions, organ harvesting, and crematoriums to hide the evidence.

[...]

Chinese strategists have long seen East Turkistan as a buffer protecting the Chinese state from perceived threats to its west and north. This logic continues to shape Beijing’s approach today: the occupation of East Turkistan is central to advancing China’s geopolitical ambitions, including control over critical infrastructure, access to Central Asia, and the stability of its broader colonial system. The erasure of East Turkistan is not about internal security—it is about imperial consolidation and expansion.

[...]

International legal mechanisms must be pursued with urgency. This includes supporting East Turkistan’s case at the International Criminal Court and filing additional cases at the International Court of Justice, sanctioning Chinese officials and entities involved in the genocide, and supporting investigations under universal jurisdiction laws in national courts.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20326500

Archived

The pursuit of net zero has relied on Uighur Muslims forced to work in appalling conditions. Experts say Britain should follow other countries and take tougher stance.

...

Many of the Chinese workers who are helping us to go green do not want to be at those factories. They do not arrive at work to manually crush silicon and load it into blazing furnaces because of a love of renewables, much less to earn a decent wage.

They are there as part of a mass forced labour programme by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that critics describe as a genocide. A reliance on men and women from the Uighur Muslim minority living in detention centres has helped the Xinjiang region to become the epicentre of the solar industry over the last 15 years.

At its peak, analysts believe that 95 per cent of the world’s solar modules were potentially tainted by forced labour in the region [of Xinjiang, in northwestern China]. This reliance on products partly made through working conditions that would be unfathomable in modern Britain represents what the Conservative MP Alicia Kearns calls an ethical “blind spot”.

...

It is not only solar panels that are linked to widespread human rights abuses in the so-called Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region. Fuelled by an abundance of cheap, coal-driven electricity, the region produces vast amounts of everything from cotton to the lithium batteries that are ever more essential to our tech-driven lives.

But as governments across the world invest in solar energy in the race to reach net zero, experts have described a critical opportunity to curtail what has been one of Xinjiang’s champion industries.

...

Alan Crawford, a chemical engineer who authored a 2023 report that exposed several companies with ties to forced labour, said that transparency from Chinese producers had decreased as a result. “Transparency has gotten worse because the Chinese know that people like us are looking,” he said.

While the Chinese authorities maintain that the Uighur community is free, images of internment camps have shown razor-wire fences manned by police. Leaked police files revealed a shoot-to-kill policy for escapers.

...

The pervasiveness of forced labour across the early stages of the production process makes it difficult to find polysilicon from Xinjiang that has not been contaminated by forced labour. Hoshine Silicon, the dominant MGS producer in Xinjiang and a major supplier to the region’s polysilicon producers, has engaged in “surplus labour” programmes at its factories.

One propaganda account from 2018 details how a married couple were engaged in a “poverty alleviation” scheme in which they were moved 30 miles from their home in the rural Dikan township to work at a Hoshine factory in Shanshan county, leaving behind their children. The couple were described as being “relieved” of their worries by transferring their seven-acre grape farm to the state.

...

[Laura] Murphy, a senior associate at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said legislation introduced in the US in 2021 showed how supply chains can be cleaned up. The Uighur Forced Labour Prevention Act, which bans the import of goods linked to the region, has led to thousands of solar panel shipments being stopped by US customs.

...

It is for this reason that Murphy believes the UK should mirror the US approach, a strategy already being pursued by the European Union. If the UK’s controls against forced labour are not robust, there is a high probability that the UK will simply become a “dumping ground” for the tainted goods not wanted by the US.

...

Andrew Yeh, executive director of the China Strategic Risks Institute, said relying too heavily on China for solar energy products could also leave Britain vulnerable in a geopolitical crisis.

...

For Murphy, legislation is the only meaningful response to the issue. [...] She said: “Whatever it is that other countries think they might be doing to discourage it, shy of legislation, shy of enforcement, it is not working.

“We can be morally outraged all we want and we can express our desires not to have forced labour-made goods, even at governmental level. But until we actually put it in law and enforce it, companies will continue to import goods made with forced labour into the UK.”