Saudi crackdown targeting women’s rights activists
One year ago, just as the Saudi government finally ended the ban on women driving, many activists who had campaigned against the ban and for women’s rights more generally were… Read more »
Category: Dissidents
Cuba – ‘facing worst economic crisis since the 1990s’ – cracks down on civil society
Cuba’s Communist government has told citizens to brace for hard times, although some economists don’t expect a repeat of the meltdown after the fall of the Soviet Union that lasted… Read more »
China steps up infiltration efforts: counter sources of CCP misconduct
Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said on Friday that China has stepped up efforts to infiltrate and gain influence in the self-ruled and democratic island, and asked national security agencies to… Read more »
Hong Kong crackdown: extradition law would extend Beijing’s ‘coercive reach’
A U.S. congressional commission fears that a proposed new extradition law in Hong Kong could extend China’s “coercive reach” into the financial hub and create serious risks for U.S. national… Read more »
Russia’s crony capitalism: from market economy to kleptocracy?
Russia’s main problem isn’t populism, but elitism in two basic forms, says analyst Emil Pain, the paternalist one in the state based on tradition and the “snobbish” version held many… Read more »
Counter resurgent Russia by fostering principled engagement?
In his Nobel Peace Prize lecture in 1975, Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov listed the names of over 120 political prisoners he knew of at the time. Now the Russian human… Read more »
Kremlin advancing political agenda by crushing dissent
The Russian government has created a series of often ill-defined laws that threatened fines or even jail time for broad categories of banned content. The authorities have thrown the book… Read more »
Downplaying Islamism, regime aims to demobilize Iran’s ‘underground but still vibrant’ civil society
The European Union decided on Monday to extend restrictive measures imposed against Iran to last for an additional year until April 13, 2020, due to “serious human rights violations”… Read more »
Why the U.S. shouldn’t welcome a Chinese ‘king’
China’s steady slide toward totalitarian rule is the exact opposite of what’s in the interests of the United States and the world, not to mention the Chinese people. The concentration… Read more »
Middle East’s ‘distasteful theocracies’ under fire for rights abuses
The prominent human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh’s draconian sentence for her peaceful activism shows the threat posed by Iran’s revolutionary courts to human rights work, the Center for Human… Read more »