Category: Human rights

Nepal – no national unity without inclusive democracy

     

Nepal’s Parliament recently elected Pushpa Kamal Dahal as prime minister, in the country’s 25th change in leadership in 26 years, The New York Times notes: Political instability is harming Nepal’s… Read more »

Hong Kong: Student Protest Leaders Sentenced

     

  Three student leaders in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, who led mass rallies and sit-ins in 2014, have been sentenced, the BBC reports: Joshua Wong, who became the teenage face… Read more »

Vietnam’s growing protest culture explained

     

The Formosa scandal in Vietnam has recently made international headlines and offered the international community a rare glimpse into the fringe, but steadily growing, culture of protest and activism in… Read more »

Democracy in China: It’s in the eye of the beholder?

     

China watchers in the West have been fruitlessly searching for signs of democracy for more than 25 years, notes Bruce J. Dickson, professor of political science at George Washington University. But… Read more »

China’s crackdown on dissent the harshest in decades

     

China is in the midst of what many overseas scholars say is its harshest crackdown on human rights and civil society in decades, marked by officially-sponsored paranoia about foreign forces… Read more »

Leading Cuban Dissident’s ‘Moments of Optimism’ About Political Change

     

“We are suffering more arrests. They [state security forces] are beating us hard,” dissident Antonio Rodiles tells The Guardian’s Naomi Larson: It seems he has become desensitised to this violence…. Read more »

After decade of Raul Castro, reform still lagging

     

Veteran Cuban dissident Guillermo Farinas was briefly hospitalized in Santa Clara on Friday after losing consciousness in his home on the 16th day of a hunger strike to protest government… Read more »

Russia dreams of Turkey pivoting to ‘authoritarian international’

     

Turkey on Tuesday warned of rising anti-American sentiment and risks to a migrant deal with the European Union, ramping up the rhetoric in the face of Western alarm over the… Read more »

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 »