In the Darfur region of Sudan, and in eastern Chad, MSF teams are caring for women and girls who have survived horrific sexual violence

Archived

Women and girls in Sudan’s Darfur region are at near-constant risk of sexual violence, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warned.

The true scale of this crisis remains difficult to quantify, as services remain limited, and people face barriers in seeking treatment or speaking about their ordeal. Yet all the victims and survivors who speak with MSF teams in Darfur and across the border in Chad share horrifying stories of brutal violence and rape. With men and boys also at risk, the extent of the suffering is beyond comprehension.

“Women and girls do not feel safe anywhere. They are attacked in their own homes, when fleeing violence, getting food, collecting firewood, working in the fields. They tell us they feel trapped,” says Claire San Filippo, MSF emergency coordinator. “These attacks are heinous and cruel, often involving multiple perpetrators. This must stop. Sexual violence is not a natural or inevitable consequence of war, it can constitute a war crime, a form of torture, and a crime against humanity. The warring parties must hold their fighters accountable and protect people from this sickening violence. Services for survivors must immediately be scaled up, so survivors have access to the medical treatment and psychological care they desperately need.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35815351

Archived

Xi Jinping’s appointment as president [of China] in March 2013 filled [Uygur human rights activist Serikzhan] Bilash with vague dread. He periodically wrote social media posts about Kazakh identity and his foreign travels for a modest online following, and he began using those to call on Chinese Kazakhs to come to Kazakhstan and offer advice on how to find work and apartments and residence papers once they did.

Three years later, he heard that Chen Quanguo was to be the new Party secretary of Xinjiang and that dread hardened into something more definite. He opened some of the messaging groups that Chinese Kazakhs used to forward and share news and he began recording voice notes with anxious urgency. “A storm is coming, Chen Quanguo is coming,” he said. “He made a genocide in Tibet and now he will make a genocide in Xinjiang. Only one thing can be done. Run, just run and run now because if you delay by even a second it might be too late.”

Chen had also been Party secretary in Tibet and had enacted a brutal and insidious extension of the state apparatus there aimed at stamping out any signs of what the government called separatist thought. Surveillance, oppression, control. There were mass arrests, re-education centers and unsparing responses to the slightest protest. People talked of the many disappeared, the unexplained dead. It was all hidden from the rest of China by censors and firewalls, but Bilash spoke good English and he read the reports by international newspapers and human rights organizations. He saw everything wrought by Chen Quanguo and knew it would come to Xinjiang.

crosspostato da: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35703805

Archived

[Op-ed by Benedict Rogers, Senior Director of Fortify Rights and a co-founder and trustee of Hong Kong Watch.]

Dictatorships use solitary confinement as a form of torture, designed to break the prisoner’s spirit. Under international law, “prolonged solitary confinement” is defined as exceeding 15 days.

British citizen and 77 year-old media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, in jail in Hong Kong, has now exceeded 1,600 days in solitary confinement, yet has committed no crime.

He has already served several prison sentences on multiple trumped-up charges, including 13 months for lighting a candle and saying a prayer at a vigil commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35565642

Archived

China’s economy runs on Uyghur forced labour: More than 100 global brands are linked to a scheme that ships Xinjiang ethnic minorities to work in factories thousands of miles away from their home

[...]

By trawling tens of thousands of videos posted on Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese sister app, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) has uncovered a largely hidden force that is helping to fuel China’s economic expansion. Geolocating the videos and reviewing Chinese state media reports allowed TBIJ, The New York Times and Der Spiegel to identify Xinjiang minority workers in 75 factories across 11 regions.

International responses to the oppression of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang have tended to focus on products grown or made within the province, particularly cotton. But this investigation demonstrates that the problem of forced labour goes well beyond the borders of Xinjiang.

The investigation establishes the most detailed picture to date of how China’s programme to move tens of thousands of people from Xinjiang to work in eastern factories has become an inescapable facet of its export economy. The Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz workers make everything from keyboards to cars, as well as components that end up in products shipped around the world, including to the UK.

The link to forced labour pervades entire swathes of the Chinese economy. More than a hundred consumer brands – from Apple to Volkswagen– can be tied to the tainted trade and, for the first time, evidence shows factories directly owned by big brands themselves, like those run by Midea and LG Electronics, have participated in the Chinese government programme. The products implicated include everything from shoes like Skechers to KFC chicken.

[...]

The mass transfer of mostly Muslim minority workers constitutes state-imposed forced labour according to researchers, human rights watchdogs, North American and European governments and the United Nations. This type of forced labour involves authorities recruiting targeted populations who — living in a police state-like environment — are coerced to work in key industries.

“When a government official knocks on the door of a Uyghur person and says they should take a job far from home, the person knows this is not merely a request,” said Laura Murphy, a former senior policy adviser to the Biden administration on Xinjiang forced labour.

“They know there are directives that say refusal is punishable by detention. And they know how horrible detention is. Every Uyghur in Xinjiang has either been in detention themselves or has someone close to them who has been. This is not a choice. This is not consent.”

[...]

Search for ‘Xinjiang’ on Douyin, and your feed will light up with mountainous vistas, horseback riding and sizzling kebabs uploaded by Chinese travel bloggers. The occasional talking-head influencer – Han Chinese settlers to the region – offers advice on navigating the government’s various relocation subsidies.

Dig deeper and you’ll find a different kind of video.

[...]

On the outskirts of Wuhan, a security guard at a car parts manufacturer cried: “Plenty of Xinjiang workers here – more than 200!” The company didn’t hire them directly, he said. “It’s all government-organised labour.”

Local state media reports only offer a glimpse of the national programme; Beijing doesn’t publish statistics on such transfers. The written evidence gathered by TBIJ shows transfers of at least 11,000 people in the past decade to factories in nine provinces, all thousands of miles east of Xinjiang, and to the megacities of Tianjin and Chongqing.

This figure is a fraction of the total: Jiangsu province, for instance, hosted 39,000 Xinjiang “migrant workers” in 2023, according to official figures, and just one Xinjiang county transferred more than 10,000 people in the first quarter of the same year, according to local official reports. A state media article tallied more than 100,000 labour transfers out of Xinjiang as far back as 2006, the year the program started.

[...]

In August 2023, President Xi Jinping visited Xinjiang. There he urged authorities to “encourage and guide” Uyghurs to find jobs throughout the country. A few months earlier, the local government had pledged to expand labour transfers out of the region by more than a third.

The measures are just the latest phase of the government’s decades-long crackdown on ethnic minorities. The state has moved millions of mainly rural ethnic minorities — what Beijing calls “surplus labourers” — both within and outside of Xinjiang for work, as part of a broader drive to forcibly re-engineer their identities under the guise of “poverty alleviation”. The repressive programme serves Xi’s vision of forging a more homogenous culture, society and ethnicity, and turbocharging China’s economy in a race to gain the upper hand over the US and EU.

Xi first declared war on “terrorism” and “violent extremism” in Xinjiang in 2014, when unrest was met with brutal crackdowns. Since then, Xinjiang has been wrapped in a web of surveillance and security architecture. More than a million ethnic minorities have been arbitrarily detained, many forced into factory work at internment camps and detention facilities.

[...]

The repression has gone wider still. Beijing has demolished thousands of mosques, collectivised land and herds and built vast new estates to house displaced ethnic minorities and sprawling industrial parks to employ them. High unemployment linked to broad discrimination in the local job market has helped keep Uyghurs in lower-skilled work like farming.

[...]

The region’s current five-year plan requires all able members of ethnic minority households to be employed – a shift from the single family member specified previously. It projects that 13.75 million people will be transferred, mostly within Xinjiang, between 2021 and 2025, and instructs local governments across China to strengthen coordination, including through digitising personnel files for all transfer workers.

This data is integrated into a “real-time’”employment monitoring system, which Beijing established after deploying hundreds of thousands of party officials to assess the income of 12 million rural Xinjiang households. It includes regular home visits by local teams of party officials, like the one seen by the BBC in 2021 reducing a 19-year old girl to tears as they broke down her resistance to labour transfer.

Authorities have identified almost 800,000 people for real-time monitoring, according to state media in 2022, and transfers are the government’s first recourse to stop household incomes dropping.

[...]

When 30 or more workers are transferred together, government minders and security guards accompany them. These minders deliver them to the factory where they will live and work, and stay on to help communicate with management and address concerns. Hubei Hangte, which claims it supplies BMW and other carmakers, said in 2022 that it invited minders to discuss how to stop problem behaviours among workers from Xinjiang “such as drinking and swimming in groups”.

The minders also help with the primary aims of the labour programme: cultural assimilation and political indoctrination. Their own Douyin posts can be revealing.

[...]

The scenes [shown in videos posted on Chinese social media that display members of the Uyghur group and other minorities celebrating and dancing, and enjoying their lives are staged propaganda and] are examples of the sinister destruction of Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz identities, much like the “patriotic” education sessions routinely described in state media, analysts told TBIJ.

Yalkun Uluyol, China researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), called the videos “extremely unsettling”. He added that HRW’s research showed swearing allegiance to the flag is “political indoctrination” and part of the suite of repressive policies that “constitute crimes against humanity”.

[...]

Last year, the International Labour Organization decided to start measuring state-imposed forced labour by looking at what a given government is doing, rather than the conditions experienced at an individual level. Pointing to factors like a police state and policies targeting specific ethnicities, the organisation highlights how this kind of forced labour feeds on people’s vulnerabilities, such as a lack of job opportunities, but may not always exploit them economically because the political aims are more important.

[...]

In Liaoning, a few hours drive from the North Korean border, a young Uyghur woman turns to show piles of raw chicken on the gleaming aluminum worktops of a poultry processing factory. She sets the 14-second clip to a stanza from a Uyghur poem, spoken in a hushed voice:

>My many sorrows overflow, uncontained.

>But to the world I am lighthearted, companioned with laughter.

>I am bait for my silence, quietly.

>Nobody is aware, and they shall never be.

Archived

More than 6,400 attacks against human rights defenders were reported between 2015 to 2024, according to a new report from nonprofit Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC).

“That’s close to two attacks every day over the past 10 years against defenders who are raising concerns about business-related risks and harms,” said Christen Dobson, co-head of BHRRC’s civic freedoms and human rights defenders’ program, during a media briefing on the report. Dobson said it was “just the tip of the iceberg” since they only used publicly available information, including reporting from journalists and civil society groups, but many attacks are never reported publicly.

“We also, over these past 10 years, have seen a consistent pattern of attacks, and that many defenders face multiple attacks, and there’s often an escalation,” Dobson said.

Of the recorded attacks, three in four were against climate, land and environmental defenders.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35411125

Archived

Through a mix of subsidised tours, university scholarships, TikTok-style propaganda and influencer outreach, Beijing is trying to win over the generation in Taiwan that has grown up with democracy, freedom and a deepening sense of Taiwanese identity separate from China.

But how successful has this campaign been? And what are the political consequences? While Chinese soft power has made cultural inroads—especially through popular apps and lifestyle content—it has largely failed to shift the political convictions of Taiwan’s youth. The result is a more politically aware generation—one increasingly fluent in the coercive tactics used against it.

At the heart of China’s strategy lies a simple idea: if it can’t win over Taiwan’s government, it can win over its youth. Beijing is attempting to influence them by showing attention and affection in an overt and attributable manner through cross-strait youth exchange programmes. This form of soft power includes inviting Taiwanese students to China for subsidised trips featuring choreographed cultural activities and friendly political messaging. Scholarships have also been offered to study at Chinese universities, where students are exposed to Chinese Communist Party ideology and are encouraged to become ambassadors for Beijing’s unification message.

[...]

United-front work targeting Taiwan is orchestrated by a network of Chinese party-state organisations that aim to influence, cultivate and co-opt key figures within Taiwanese civil society. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, the agency responsible for cross-strait relations, has described united-front work as ‘an important magic weapon for the Communist Party of China to unite people and gather strength’. Events that are facilitated by united-front agencies, such as the Taiwan Affairs Office, are intended to co-opt participants, exert malign influence on or redefine Taiwan, its people and its history solely on the CCP’s terms.

[...]

While Chinese soft power has made some cultural inroads, especially among apolitical or disengaged youth, it has not translated into widespread political conversion. Most young Taiwanese still identify strongly with Taiwan, value their democratic freedoms, and remain sceptical of Beijing’s intentions. The memory of Hong Kong’s crushed democracy looms large. So does the daily reality of China’s military and diplomatic pressure.

[...]

Taiwanese youth are not easily fooled. Many are critically aware of Beijing’s tactics. Some are even pushing back, turning digital platforms into spaces for satire, resistance and civic debate. The battle for young minds is real, but it is multi-dimensional.

China’s efforts to charm Taiwan’s youth are part of a broader campaign of influence and coercion. The challenge for Taiwan is not only to expose these tactics, but to offer a better story: one grounded in freedom, identity and the right to choose their own future. That, more than any app or influencer, is what will determine the outcome of this generational contest.

crosspostato da: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35288347

Archived

[...]

In 2023 and 2024, the Spanish government authorized nine extraditions to continue through judicial channels, and at least one person has already been handed over to Chinese authorities. On October 29, 2024, after almost two years in prison, this 41-year-old man, wanted for fraud, was released from Madrid’s Soto del Real prison to be extradited to the People’s Republic of China. “I have no information about his situation or treatment in China, except that he is awaiting trial,” confirms the lawyer who defended him during the process, Carlos Aguirre de Cárcer.

The lack of guarantees that extradited individuals would receive humane and fair treatment in China was the reason why the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) prohibited Poland from extraditing Taiwanese Hung Tao Liu in a landmark judgment, Liu v. Poland. Reports by the United Nations and non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International found, in the eyes of the seven judges, “the use of torture and ill-treatment” in Chinese prisons and detention centers “to such an extent that it may amount to a situation of generalized violence.”

The lack of guarantees that extradited individuals would receive humane and fair treatment in China was the reason why the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) prohibited Poland from extraditing Taiwanese Hung Tao Liu in a landmark judgment, Liu v. Poland. Reports by the United Nations and non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International found, in the eyes of the seven judges, “the use of torture and ill-treatment” in Chinese prisons and detention centers “to such an extent that it may amount to a situation of generalized violence.”

Consequently, the ECHR exempted Liu from having to prove a specific personal risk, given that the extradition request indicated that, once in China, he would be placed in a detention center, which was “sufficient” to deny the extradition. “An individual requesting protection must be guaranteed the benefit of the doubt,” reads the judgment of October 6, 2022.

Since the ruling became final in January 2023, Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands and Norway have not handed over any person wanted by the Chinese authorities, as confirmed to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) by various authorities in these countries within the framework of China Targets, an investigation coordinated by the ICIJ, in which EL PAÍS participate.

[...]

Luis Chabaneix, founder and director of a Madrid-based firm specializing in extraditions that has managed to stop two extraditions to China in extremis in recent months, believes that, despite the extradition treaty and the alignment of interests that may exist between governments — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has traveled to China three times on official visits — “deep down, judges are almost ashamed to send someone there” and agree to suspend them for a variety of reasons.

[...]

Sometimes, however, the reasons run much deeper. Chabaneix’s legal firm defended a Chinese businessman detained in Marbella and wanted by Beijing for an alleged corporate crime. The case met all the formal requirements, but Chabaneix claimed that the accusation had been fabricated using a partner’s statement obtained under torture.

The partner, who currently lives in the United States, testified in writing before the Spanish High Court that he spent 14 months imprisoned in the Beijing Municipal Security Bureau “sleeping on the floor, with the lights permanently on, frequently subjected to physical punishment, coercion, and insinuation to fabricate false evidence against himself and the defendant," according to the ruling by the Third Section of the Criminal Chamber of the High Court.

All of this occurred during the same time that the Spanish government was demanding China guarantee in writing that it would respect the human rights of the English teacher it was seeking to extradite.

[...]

Meanwhile, a new appeal originating in Spain and headed to Strasbourg is underway. In addition to the man extradited from the Soto del Real prison in October, the High Court had authorized at least a second extradition, but an appeal has managed to suspend it, for the time being. The extraditable man, another Chinese businessman being pursued by Beijing, is an asylum seeker with a son who holds Spanish nationality and the court ruled that the petition must wait for his request to be resolved, according to his lawyer, Inmaculada Cruz Guillén.

The case will reach Strasbourg via Rome, says Cruz Guillén. An Italian law firm has appealed the case to the ECHR from the Italian capital, where the European Convention on Human Rights, ratified by Spain in 1979, was signed in 1950.

Archived

[...]

Notably, corporations including Glencore, Grupo México, Codelco, Georgian American Alloys, China MinMetals, Sinomine Resource Group, and South32 all crop up in numerous allegations.

The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre has recorded some 834 allegations since 2010. These involve environmental harm, water pollution, land grabs, unsafe working conditions, and attacks on Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

[...]

Key findings from the new research on transition minerals included:

• The top three minerals it most frequently linked to abuses since 2010 were: copper (44% of cases); copper-cobalt (12%); zinc (10%)
• The top three environmental impacts in 2024 were: impact on clean, healthy and sustainable environment; water pollution; violation of environmental standards.
• Some 595 allegations caused at least 853 different impacts on local communities and their environment.
• Just five firms – Georgian American Alloys, China Minmetals, Codelco, Grupo México, and Sinomine Resource Group – were linked to nearly a quarter of allegations.
• South America was the region with the highest number of allegations (48) in 2024. Projects in Peru and Chile accounted for almost one in five allegations in 2024.
• Europe and Central Asia’s emergence as a new hotspot for transition minerals extraction and supply coincides with a 50% rise in allegations in the region.
• Hazardous working conditions led to 10 deaths in 2024.
• Attacks on Human Rights Defenders in the mining sector accounted for just under 8% (12) of last year’s allegations and 20% since 2010.

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.]

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.

[...]

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.

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