Global democratic recession – for now
The politicians who captured the spirit of the early 1990s were inspirational democrats such as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia — and liberal reformers such as Mikhail… Read more »
Category: Asia
China’s sham show trials ‘like a theater of the absurd’
Human rights groups and observers say China’s latest wave of “sham trials” against legal advocates, arrested amid an orchestrated crackdown last July, is mostly a political charade, and to some… Read more »
China: TV Trials ‘Signal New Phase in Attack on Rights’
Chinese lawyers and rights activists appeared in televised trials throughout this week in what seemed to be a new, more public phase of President Xi Jinping’s campaign to cleanse the… Read more »
Zhou Shifeng sentence highlights China’s crackdown on dissent
A court in China jailed a prominent human rights lawyer for seven years on Thursday for subverting the government, state media said, the latest in a string of convictions… Read more »
Government specter hovers over foreign NGOs in China
The European Union should press China to end its crackdown on civil society and peaceful dissent, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to European Commission President Jean-Claude… Read more »
China ‘waging ideological war’ against Western ideas, civil society
China’s Communist Party and its military are waging an ideological war against hostile Western ideas on the Internet. Through censorship, intimidation and repression, and with the help of an army… Read more »
The Fractious Path: Pakistan’s Democratic Transition
Since its creation in 1947, Pakistan has oscillated between weak democratic governments and military dictatorships. In 2013, for the first time, there was a peaceful transfer of power from… Read more »
China’s Lhasa Consensus ‘can’t hide the rot underneath’
China last week held a two-day Tibet Development Forum in Lhasa attended by 130 people from 30 countries and organized by the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department, VOA’s Yeshi Dorje… Read more »
Transitional Sri Lanka: Workers in Post-Civil War Jaffna
Sri Lanka continues to recover from a long and brutal civil war (1983–2009) between the ruling Buddhist Sinhalese and the primarily Hindu Tamil minority. During the conflict, which penetrated all… Read more »
Democracies join authoritarians in rejecting civil society space
The United Nations Human Rights Council has passed a resolution for the “promotion, protection, and enjoyment of human rights on the internet” which condemns any country that intentionally disrupts the internet access of its… Read more »