My latest column for New Matilda is about China’s crackdown on internal dissent and its fear of the internet: Although China is also battling a seemingly unsurmountable pollution problem, the regime appears determined to ignore Western calls for greater openness. “Why can’t China accept that dissent and argument are part of being a normal country?”…
Your search for “China human rights” returned 189 results
Let the words run free
China’s Beijing Games will have to contend with the blogging phenomenon: The International Olympic Committee is for the first time permitting athletes to write blogs. The IOC has set out guidelines for blogging at the Beijing Games to ensure copyright agreements are not infringed. They include bans on posting any audio or visual material of…
Welcome to Beijing
This is China, 2008: Any attempt to use the Beijing Olympics to discredit China or force it to change policy is doomed to failure, the leading Communist party newspaper insisted in a commentary piece yesterday. Let nobody believe that human rights will improve before the August Olympic Games. Tragically, the opposite is occurring.
Friends who torture
Who knew? Canada’s foreign ministry has put the United States and Israel on a watch list of countries where prisoners risk being tortured and also classifies some U.S. interrogation techniques as torture, according to a document obtained by Reuters on Thursday. The revelation is likely to embarrass the minority Conservative government, which is a staunch…
Stealing dollars through censorship
The debate over Chinese internet censorship is only beginning. The role of Western multinationals operating in a country that forces filtering is both a human rights issue and, according to this group, something more economic: A California free speech group whose board of directors includes Google and Yahoo said on Monday it had asked U.S.…
More futile silencing
Just another oppressive day in China: Reporters Without Borders strongly condemned a five-year prison sentence and 40,000 yuan (€4,000) fine imposed today by a district court in Tianhe (in the southeastern province of Guangdong) on cyber-dissident Yang Maodong (better known as Guo Feixiong) for “illegal commercial activity.” “We are shocked by this harsh and unjustified…
From one torturer to another
One of America’s favourite torturing client states is at it again: The Arabic Network for Human Rights information and Hisham Mubarak Centre for Law sent a communiqué to the Egyptian Prosecutor-General , demanding to investigate into the issue of torturing Karim Amer in his prison. Karim who is an Egyptian blogger sentenced to prison for…
Yahoo! takes a dive
It’s a rare example indeed when a Western multinational is chastised in public for putting profit before principle: They sat just two feet apart, the mother of a journalist confined to a Chinese prison and the wealthy head of the giant U.S. company that helped put him behind bars. But before Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive…
News bytes
– The “left-wing” Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega continues to expand a program that completely bans abortion. Human Rights Watch is rightly outraged. – A former US official in Iraq reveals the cowboy-attitude of Blackwater. -… Yet more evidence that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is deliberately undermining the services of Palestinians themselves to please the Israelis…
The moral boycott
Steven Rose, The Independent, June 4: Entirely suppressed in this harrumphing has been any thought about why Palestinian university teachers and their union, as well as all the NGOs in the Occupied Territories, have called for a boycott. Academic freedom, it appears, applies to Israelis but not Palestinians, whose universities have been arbitrarily closed, Bir…