China’s retaliation against European and British lawmakers who sanctioned the communist regime for its treatment of the Uyghur minority is a test of free speech in Europe, contends Soeren Kern, a senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute. Beijing contends the… Read More ›
Building on the tasteful piece written recently by Commissioner Dunja Mijatovic, this article will endeavour to explore further why the Tromsø Convention (Norwegian International Convention on Access to Official Documents)[1], although adopted more than a decade ago, is in fact deserving… Read More ›
Like many nations, Paraguay faces an uphill battle to procure coronavirus vaccines. But its quest is being complicated by fraught relations between China on one side, and Taiwan and the U.S. on the other. The Paraguayan government has been approached… Read More ›
The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is stepping up policies in the northern region of Inner Mongolia, where protests erupted last year over plans to phase out Mongolian-medium teaching in schools, targeting the region’s ethnic Mongolians with TV shows emphasising… Read More ›
Building on the tasteful piece written recently by Commissioner Dunja Mijatovic, this article will endeavour to explore further why the Tromsø Convention (Norwegian International Convention on Access to Official Documents)[1], although adopted more than a decade ago, is in fact deserving… Read More ›
Since China adopted its National Security Law in June 2020, Hong Kong’s government, under Chief Executive Carrie Lam, and China have sought to extinguish all opposition to Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and to eradicate Hong Kong’s core… Read More ›
“People have the right to know what those in power are doing” Dunja Mijatovic Council of Europe, Commissioner for Human Rights. Access to information legislation was first seen in 1766 in Sweden, with parliamentary interest to access information held by… Read More ›
Chinese women, who allege they were inside China’s concentration camps, claim that “extremely sadistic” guards carried out gang rapes and brutal beatings. Qelbinur Sidik grew up in Xinjiang and spent 28 years teaching elementary school students age 6 to 13…. Read More ›
1. Introduction Trials are the way to avoid injustices, but the fairness of criminal proceedings will depend on what is meant by the concept of justice. The roots of rights in trials are, with other principles and values, as old… Read More ›
“2020 has been a disastrous year for human rights in Europe,” commented Dunja Mijatović, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, at a speech in front of the Council of Europe at the end of last year. In an unprecedented… Read More ›
“Kung Hei Fat Choy!” (恭喜發財 spoken in Hong Kong Cantonese, i.e. Congratulations on making lots of money!) is the most common greeting during the Lunar New Year days among the Chinese people. China’s poverty alleviation mission was declared accomplished in… Read More ›
One of the few issues on which Democrats and Republicans agree is that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has turned back toward Maoism. Xi Jinping’s regime is committed to eradicating the merest possibility that someone might have an independent… Read More ›
China on Monday labeled as “lies” a U.S. designation of abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) as genocide in a report that cites residents it said had flocked to social media to “refute” the claim, but an expert… Read More ›
Authorities in China’s Guizhou and Jiangsu provinces have jailed two journalists and one family member after they were critical of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). On Jan. 8, the Nanming District People’s Court in Guizhou’s provincial capital, Guiyang, jailed… Read More ›
Taiwan’s population shrank for the first time ever in 2020, government data showed Friday, as the island faces a burgeoning demographic crisis similar to those affecting South Korea and Japan. Births last year plunged to 165,000, down seven percent from… Read More ›
In October 2020, a Pew Research Center survey found that a median of 61 percent of citizens in 14 major economies hold unfavorable views of China. In countries such as the United States and Canada, negative views have reached historic… Read More ›
China was among the world’s biggest jailers of journalists in 2020, continuing a pattern of total state control over the media begun under ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “core” leader Xi Jinping. “China, which arrested several journalists for their coverage… Read More ›
The United States imposed travel bans and other sanctions on 14 high-level Chinese officials over the continuing crackdown on the opposition in Hong Kong, as the police in the Chinese territory arrested more pro-democracy figures on Tuesday. The U.S. State… Read More ›
During the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence from the 25th of November to the 10th of December, the Ban Ki-moon Centre for Global Citizens contributes to the Orange the World Campaign globally and in Austria, calling for the… Read More ›
Vice-President of the EU Commission Margaritis Shinas was a keynote speaker at this summer’s Diplomatic Conference in Vienna organised by the International Institute IFIMES, Media Platform Modern Diplomacy and their partners. High dignitary of the Commission seized the occasion to… Read More ›
Early summer days of 2020 in Vienna sow marking the anniversary of Nuremberg Trials with the conference “From the Victory Day to Corona Disarray: 75 years of Europe’s Collective Security and Human Rights System – Legacy of Antifascism for the… Read More ›
It turns out the Chinese Communist Party is bent on permanently locking up much of the Uighur Muslim population of the far-west region of Xinjiang: Satellite images show that Beijing has secretly built 260 high-security concentration camps to hold them…. Read More ›
Early summer days of 2020 in Vienna sow marking the anniversary of Nuremberg Trials with the conference “From the Victory Day to Corona Disarray: 75 years of Europe’s Collective Security and Human Rights System – Legacy of Antifascism for the… Read More ›
China has secretly constructed new prisons and internment camps over the past several years as the Communist Party-ruled country ramps up its mass detention campaign against Muslim minorities, according to a report on Thursday. Since 2017, China has built 260… Read More ›
Every millimeter of Beijing is monitored by state-of-the-art surveillance cameras, according to the Beijing Public Safety Bureau. Facial recognition algorithms matched with images filed away in a secret database could see you in legal trouble for something you did near your… Read More ›
Human rights activists are collecting evidence that people are killed for their organs For decades, the Chinese Communist Party depended on executed prisoners to bolster its organ transplant trade. Then it emerged that government leaders were relying on persecuted minorities to… Read More ›
While much of the international community has focused on abuses against the Uighur Muslims in the Chinese province of Xingang, the human rights horrors against Buddhists in Tibet – a decades-long conflict — have dropped from the limelight. “Tibet is one… Read More ›
Northwest of Beijing’s Forbidden City, outside the Third Ring Road, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has spent seven decades building a campus of national laboratories. Near its center is the Institute of Automation, a sleek silvery-blue building surrounded by camera-studded… Read More ›
Donald Trump taints everything he touches. If he supports a cause, he damages it. If he takes a stance, the instinct of most self-respecting liberals is to rush to the opposing side. So when Trump rails against China, a favourite… Read More ›
Much of the focus on China in recent months has been over the coronavirus that originated there late last year. But that has hardly slowed Beijing’s assault on fundamental freedoms and human rights, from the brutal repression of the Uighurs… Read More ›
Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam on Tuesday urged opponents of Beijing’s plan to impose national security legislation in the financial hub to stop “smearing” the effort, saying those who did were “the enemy of the people.” Beijing last month announced… Read More ›
Hundreds packed into a park in central Taipei on Saturday for a Black Lives Matter protest, with a group of indigenous Taiwanese given prominent billing to draw attention to discrimination against the island’s original inhabitants. The rally, attended by more… Read More ›
Chinese authorities have been trying for three years to reverse the devastating imbalances of their one-child policy and coax couples to have more children. They’ve told couples that it’s their patriotic duty to have two babies. They’ve dangled tax breaks… Read More ›
Strip away the veneer of President Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” policy and you will find 600 million people earning just 1,000 yuan a month. Depending on the conversion rate, that works out at US$140, or $4.6 a day. It was… Read More ›
China on Thursday approved a controversial national security law that would allow Beijing to wield expanded power over Hong Kong. The vote by the National People’s Congress was close to unanimous: 2,878 delegates voted in favor of the proposal while… Read More ›
A Chinese man who was stolen from his family as a toddler has been reunited with his parents after 32 years. Mao Yin was snatched in 1988 when he was walking home from nursery with his father, aged just two… Read More ›
In Singapore, traditional coffee shops are known as kopitiam. The colloquial term is a combination of the word kopi, which means coffee in Malay, and tiam, which translates to shop in Hokkien. This is just one example of how a… Read More ›
United Nations chief António Guterres has said the coronavirus pandemic has unleashed a “tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering”, and appealed for an all-out effort “to end hate speech globally.” The UN secretary-general said anti-foreigner sentiment has surged… Read More ›
The whole world now is once again in a middle of an international humanitarian crisis whose extent and magnitude are utterly pervasive. This is brought about by a virus which is now pandemic and threatens the whole existence of humanity…. Read More ›
Foreign governments criticized the arrest of 15 Hong Kong democracy activists in a police sweep on charges of organizing and participating in anti-government protests last year. The arrests on Saturday were the biggest crackdown on the city’s pro-democracy movement since… Read More ›
African officials are confronting China publicly and in private over racist mistreatment of Africans in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, and the U.S. says African-Americans have been targeted too. Some Africans in the commercial hub have reported being evicted or… Read More ›
China has drawn up new guidelines to reclassify dogs as pets rather than livestock, the agriculture ministry said, part of a response to the coronavirus outbreak that the Humane Society called a potential “game changer” in animal welfare. Though dog… Read More ›
Life is almost back to normal in much of China. Shops, restaurants, bars, and offices are open for business. Manufacturing activity is picking up. Traffic once again jams the highways of major cities. Three-quarters of China’s workforce was back on… Read More ›
Last week, the Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China issued its final report concluding that China engages in the systematic human-rights atrocity of killing political and other prisoners and harvesting their organs. (I wrote… Read More ›
The Chinese communist government increasingly poses an existential threat not just to its own 1.4 billion citizens but to the world at large. China is currently in a dangerously chaotic state. And why not, when a premodern authoritarian society leaps… Read More ›
“His wife wore veils.” “He has one more child than allowed by the family planning policy.” “He prayed after each meal.” These are some of the reasons people in Karakax County in Xinjiang, northwestern China, are being detained in “political… Read More ›
After nearly a week of roaming China’s epidemic-struck city, filming the dead and the sickened in overwhelmed hospitals, the strain of being hounded by both the new virus and the country’s dissent-quelling police started to tell. Chen Qiushi looked haggard… Read More ›
Hong Kong authorities barred the head of Human Rights Watch from entering the Chinese territory on Sunday, the advocacy group said. Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch’s executive director, had planned to launch the organization’s annual world report in Hong Kong… Read More ›
China’s southern province of Guangdong will relax the household registration system that restrains internal migration in all its cities except the powerhouses of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, the provincial governor Ma Xingrui announced on Tuesday. The move is part of the… Read More ›
