On 23 May 2024 the IACHR Press Office (cidh-prensa@oas.org) informed us that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has issued Resolution 01/2024, recognizing national and international election monitors as human rights defenders based on the intrinsic connection between respecting and protecting human rights and defending democracy.
The Commission highlights the important role of election monitors for the defense of democracy and the rule of law. Through their activities, electoral observers stand up for civil and political rights including the rights to freedom of association, assembly, expression, access to information, equality before the law, and non-discrimination, as well as for the rights to a fair trial and to judicial protection.
The activities of election monitors help to protect the rights held in Article XX of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and in Article 23 of the American Convention on Human Rights, both of which mention the right to vote and to be elected by universal suffrage in periodic elections.
In the case of national observers, election monitoring is a form of political participation and a way of exercising political rights by looking after, defending, and fostering the principles that should prevail in election processes, including transparency, certainty, legality, fairness, and universal suffrage by secret ballot among a plurality of political options.
The actions of electoral observers ultimately seek to ensure the integrity of election processes and therefore to preserve expressions of citizens’ sovereign will, which is one of the main tenets of representative democracy according to inter-American and international instruments for the protection of human rights.
In its resolution, the Commission acknowledges the importance of electoral observation missions. The IACHR calls on States to enable suitable conditions for independent and impartial election monitoring and to ensure that election monitors can do their work freely, without retaliation of any kind, and enjoy protection from any risks they may face as a result of their efforts.
While China is systematically erasing the memory of the brutal repression of student protests on 4 June 1989, 14 prominent participants of that movement are still behind bars, rearrested for their struggle for democracy. Chinese Human Rights Defenders issued an appeal for their release.
“For 35 years, all top Chinese leaders, from Li Peng to Xi Jinping, have been fixated on erasing memories of June 4 by persecuting those who peacefully seek accountability,” reads the CHRD statement. “Everyone who cares about justice should call on Beijing to immediately and unconditionally release these and all other prisoners of conscience in China.”
The appeal includes a list of 27 people who, for various reasons, are still in prison in relation to the Tiananmen Square movement. “[F]ar from being complete, [. . .] it is a window to the severity, scale, and persistence of reprisals by the Chinese government over the past 35 years,” the statement reads. In particular, 14 names belong to people who participated directly in the events of 35 years ago and are currently in prison after they were rearrested for promoting democracy in China.
Zhou Guoqiang (周国强) was imprisoned for organising a strike in support of student protests in Beijing in 1989, and served four years in a re-education camp. He was arrested again for online comments in October 2023. His current whereabouts and charges remain unknown.
Guangdong activist Guo Feixiong (郭飞雄), who took part in the 1989 movement as a student in Shanghai, has been serving a six-year sentence since 2015 for his human rights activism.
Another university student from that time, Chen Shuqing (陈树庆) from Hangzhou, has been serving a 10-and-a-half-year sentence since 2016 for pro-democracy activism.
Lü Gengsong (吕耿松), a teacher fired in 1993 for supporting the pro-democracy movement, has been serving an 11-year sentence since 2016 for his pro-democracy work.
Beijing-based lawyer Xia Lin (夏霖) has been serving an 11-year sentence since 2016 for his professional work as a lawyer; he participated in the 1989 movement as a student at the Southwest Institute of Political Science and Law in Chongqing.
Xinjiang activist Zhao Haitong (赵海通) has been serving a 14-year sentence since 2014 for his activities as a human rights defender. He, too, had been imprisoned in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre.
Xu Na (许那), artist, poet, and a Falun Gong follower, took part in the hunger strike in Tiananmen Square. She was arrested in 2020 and sentenced to eight years in prison for “using an evil cult to disrupt law enforcement.”
Sichuan activist Chen Yunfei (陈云飞) served a four-year sentence from 2015 to 2019, in part for organising a commemoration for the victims of 4 June. He had participated in the 1989 movement as a student at the China Agricultural University in Beijing.
Another member of the student movements at the time, Xu Guang (徐光), was arrested in 2022 and is serving a four-year sentence on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.
Huang Xiaomin (黄晓敏), who was arrested in Sichuan province in 2021, suffered th same fate, and was sentenced to four years, while CaoPeizhi (曹培植) was arrested in 2022 and sentenced to 2.2 years in Henan province.
Zhang Zhongshun (张忠顺), another student who participated in the 1989 protests, was reported to police in 2007 for talking to his students about the events of 4 June. He was jailed for three years and is now in jail for continuing to support activism and faces charges of subversion in Shandong province.
Wang Yifei (王一飞) disappeared into police custody after he was detained in 2021. Before his arrest in 2018, he had been demanding justice for the victims of 1989 for several years.
Shi Tingfu (史庭福), already convicted of organiing a public vigil in Nanjing in 2017 and giving a speech in memory of the victims of Tiananmen, was rearrested in January 2024 and is awaiting trial on several charges, including “spreading false information, and inciting terrorism and extremism in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.”
The other 13 names belong to people who were not directly involved in the events of 1989 in Beijing, but fought in mainland China and Hong Kong to keep alive the memory of what happened.
This second list includes Tong Hao (仝浩), a young doctor born in 1987, who was jailed for 1.5 years for publishing a post on 4 June 2020. He was arrested in August 2023 and has been in police custody in Jiangsu province ever since.
Some of the jailed are dissidents in Hong Kong, like Lee Cheuk-yan, Albert Ho, and Chow Hang-tung; the latter, a lawyer, was recently issued a new arrest warrant in prison together with seven other people (including her mother) for commemorating the Tainanmen massacre online.
As Chinese Human Rights Defenders note, three witnesses to events in Tianamen Square have died in prison in the past 35 years. The most prominent is Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo (刘晓波), who died in July 2017 from liver cancer in police custody while serving an 11-year sentence since 2009 for his role as a leader in the Charter 08 campaign. A university lecturer in 1989, he was jailed for 18 months for taking part in the 1989 movement.
Jiangsu writer Yang Tongyan (杨同彦) died a few months after Liu, in November 2017, from a brain tumor. He was serving a 12-year sentence imposed in 2006 for his political activism. He had already spent 10 years in prison for taking part in the 1989 movement.
Last but not least, we must remember labour activist LiWangyang (李旺阳), who died under suspicious circumstances on 6 June 2012 while in a hospital guarded by police in Shaoyang, Hunan province. Li, leader of the 1989 pro-democracy movement, was sentenced to a total of 23 years in prison. Chinese authorities claimed he committed suicide by hanging himself in his hospital room, a claim his family has disputed since Li was blind and deaf from torture and would not have been physically able to hang himself. Against the wishes of Li’s family, Hunan authorities conducted their own autopsy and then cremated the body.
Mozilla is highlighting each year the work of 25 digital leaders using technology to amplify voices, effect change, and build new technologies globally through its Rise 25 Awards. On 13 May 2024 was the turn of Raphael Mimoun, a builder dedicated to making tools that empower journalists and human rights defenders. Aron Yohannes talked with Raphael about the launch of his app, Tella, combatting misinformation online, the future of social media platforms and more.
Raphael Mimoun: So I never worked in tech per se and only developed a passion for technology as I was working in human rights. It was really a time when, basically, the power of technology to support movements and to head movements around the world was kind of getting fully understood. You had the Arab Spring, you had Occupy Wall Street, you had all of these movements for social justice, for democracy, for human rights, that were very much kind of spread through technology, right? Technology played a very, very important role. But just after that, it was kind of like a hangover where we all realized, “OK, it’s not just all good and fine.” You also have the flip side, which is government spying on the citizens, identifying citizens through social media, through hacking, and so on and so forth — harassing them, repressing them online, but translating into offline violence, repression, and so on. And so I think that was the moment where I was like, “OK, there is something that needs to be done around technology,” specifically for those people who are on the front lines because if we just treat it as a tool — one of those neutral tools — we end up getting very vulnerable to violence, and it can be from the state, it can also be from online mobs, armed groups, all sort of things.
There’s so much misinformation out there now that it’s so much harder to tell the difference between what’s real and fake news. Twitter was such a reliable tool of information before, but that’s changed. Do you think that any of these other platforms can be able to help make up for so much of the misinformation that is out there?
I think we all feel the weight of that loss of losing Twitter. Twitter was always a large corporation, partially owned by a billionaire. It was never kind of a community tool, but there was still an ethos, right? Like a philosophy, or the values of the platform were still very much like community-oriented, right? It was that place for activists and human rights defenders and journalists and communities in general to voice their opinions. So I think that loss was very hard on all of us.
I see a lot of misinformation on Instagram as well. There is very little moderation there. It’s also all visual, so if you want traction, you’re going to try to put something that is very spectacular that is very eye catchy, and so I think that leads to even more misinformation.
I am pretty optimistic about some of the alternatives that have popped up since Twitter’s downfall. Mastodon actually blew up after Twitter, but it’s much older — I think it’s 10 years old by now. And there’s Bluesky. So I think those two are building up, and they offer spaces that are much more decentralized with much more autonomy and agency to users. You are more likely to be able to customize your feeds. You are more likely to have tools for your own safety online, right? All of those different things that I feel like you could never get on Threads, on Instagram or on Twitter, or anything like that. I’m hoping it’s actually going to be able to recreate the community that is very much what Twitter was. It’s never going to be exactly the same thing, but I’m hoping we will get there. And I think the fact that it is decentralized, open source and with very much a philosophy of agency and autonomy is going to lead us to a place where these social networks can’t actually be taken over by a power hungry billionaire.
What do you think is the biggest challenge that we face in the world this year on and offline, and then how do you think we can combat it?
I don’t know if that’s the biggest challenge, but one of the really big challenges that we’re seeing is how the digital is meeting real life and how people who are active online or on the phone on the computer are getting repressed for that work in real life. So we developed an app called Tella, which encrypts and hides files on your phone, right? So you take a photo or a video of a demonstration or police violence, or whatever it is, and then if the police tries to catch you and grab your phone to delete it, they won’t be able to find it, or at least it will be much more difficult to find it. Or it would be uploaded already. And things like that, I think is one of the big things that we’re seeing again. I don’t know if that the biggest challenge online at the moment, but one of the big things we’re seeing is just that it’s becoming completely normalized to grab someone’s phone or check someone’s computer at the airport, or at the border, in the street and go through it without any form of accountability. People have no idea what the regulations are, what the rules are, what’s allowed, what’s not allowed. And when they abuse those powers, is there any recourse? Most places in the world, at least, where we are working, there is definitely no recourse. And so I think that connection between thinking you’re just taking a photo for social media but actually the repercussion is so real because you’re going to have someone take your phone, and maybe they’re going to delete the photo, or maybe they’re going to detain you. Or maybe they’re going to beat you up — like all of those different things. I think this is one of the big challenges that we’re seeing at the moment, and something that isn’t traditionally thought of as an internet issue or an online digital rights issue because it’s someone taking a physical device and looking through it. It often gets overlooked, and then we don’t have much kind of advocacy around it, or anything like that.
What do you think is one action everybody can take to make the world and our lives online a little bit better?
I think social media has a lot of negative consequences for everyone’s mental health and many other things, but for people who are active and who want to be active, consider social networks that are open source, privacy-friendly and decentralized. Bluesky, the Fediverse —including Mastodon — are examples because I think it’s our responsibility to kind of build up a community there, so we can move away from those social media platforms that are owned by either billionaires or massive corporations, who only want to extract value from us and who spy on us and who censor us. And I feel like if everyone committed to being active on those social media platforms — one way of doing that is just having an account, and whatever you post on one, you just post on the other — I feel like that’s one thing that can make a big difference in the long run.
We started Rise25 to celebrate Mozilla’s 25th anniversary. What do you hope that people are celebrating in the next 25 years?
I was talking a little bit earlier about how we are building a culture that is more privacy-centric, like people are becoming aware, becoming wary about all these things happening to the data, the identity, and so on. And I do think we are at a turning point in terms of the technology that’s available to us, the practices and what we need as users to maintain our privacy and our security. I feel like in honestly not even 25, I think in 10 years, if things go well — which it’s hard to know in this field — and if we keep on building what we already are building, I can see how we will have an internet that is a lot more privacy-centric where communications are by default are private. Where end-to-end encryption is ubiquitous in our communication, in our emailing. Where social media isn’t extractive and people have actual ownership and agency in the social network networks they use. Where data mining is no longer a thing. I feel like overall, I can see how the infrastructure is now getting built, and that in 10,15 or 25 years, we will be in a place where we can use the internet without having to constantly watch over our shoulder to see if someone is spying on us or seeing who has access and all of those things.
Lastly, what gives you hope about the future of our world?
That people are not getting complacent and that it is always people who are standing up to fight back. We’re seeing it at. We saw it at Google with people standing up as part of No Tech for Apartheid coalition and people losing the jobs. We’re seeing it on university campuses around the country. We’re seeing it on the streets. People fight back. That’s where any change has ever come from: the bottom up. I think now, more than ever, people are willing to put something on the line to make sure that they defend their rights. So I think that really gives me hope.
Nikole Yanez is a computer scientist by training, and a human rights defender from Honduras. She is passionate about feminism, the impact of the internet and protecting activists. She was first drawn to human rights through her work as a reporter with a local community radio station. After surviving the coup d’état in Honduras in 2009, Nikole broadened her approach to focus her activism on technology. When she applied for the Digital Forensics Fellowship with the Amnesty Tech Security Lab in 2022, she was looking to learn more about cybersecurity and apply what she learnt with the organizations and collectives she works with regularly.
She highlighted her commitment to fostering a network of tech-savvy communities across Latin America in an interview with Elina Castillo, Amnesty Tech’s Advocacy and Policy Advisor:
I grew up in Honduras, where I lived through the coup d’état, which took place in 2009. It was a difficult time where rights were non-existent, and people were constantly afraid. I thought it was something you only read about in history books, but it was happening in front of my eyes. I felt myself just trying to survive, but as time went by it made me stronger and want to fight for justice. Despite the difficulties, people in my community remained hopeful and we created a community radio station, which broadcast stories about everyday people and their lives with the aim of informing people about their human rights. I was a reporter, developing stories about individual people and their fight for their rights. From there, I found a passion for working with technology and it inspired me to train to become a computer scientist.
I am always looking for ways to connect technology with activism, and specifically to support women and Indigenous people in their struggles. As much as technology presents risks for human rights defenders, it also offers opportunities for us to better protect ourselves and strengthen our movements. Technology can bring more visibility to our movements, and it can empower our work by allowing us to connect with other people and learn new strategies.
Is there one moment where you realized how to connect what you’ve been doing with feminism with technology?
In my work, my perspective as a feminist helps me centre the experiences and needs of marginalised people for trainings and outreach. It is important for me to publicly identify as an Afrofeminist in a society where there is impunity for gendered and racist violence that occurs every day. In Honduras we need to put our energy into supporting these communities whose rights are most violated, and whose stories are invisible.
For example, in 2006, I was working with a Union to install the Ubuntu operating system (an open-source operating system) on their computers. We realized that the unionists didn’t know how to use a computer, so we created a space for digital literacy and learning about how to use a computer at the same time. This became not just a teaching exercise, but an exercise for me to figure out how to connect these tools to what people are interested in. Something clicked for me in this moment, and this experience helped solidify my approach to working on technology and human rights.
There are not many women working in technology and human rights. I don’t want to be one of the only women, so my goal is to see more women colleagues working on technical issues. I want to make it possible for women to work in this field. I also want to motivate more women to create change within the intersection of technology and human rights. Using a feminist perspective and approach, we ask big questions about how we are doing the work, what our approach needs to be, and who we need to work with. Nikole Yanez Honduras Human Rights Defender
For me, building a feminist internet means building an internet for everyone. This means creating a space where we do not reproduce sexist violence, where we find a community that responds to the people, to the groups, and to the organizations that fight for human rights. This includes involving women and marginalised people in building the infrastructure, in the configuration of servers, and in the development of protocols for how we use all these tools.
In Honduras, there aren’t many people trained in digital forensics analysis, yet there are organizations that are always seeking me out to help check their phones. The fellowship helped me learn about forensic analysis on phones and computers and tied the learning to what I’m actually doing in my area with different organizations and women’s rights defenders. The fellowship was practical and rooted in the experience of civil society organizations.
How do you explain the importance of digital forensics? Well first, it’s incredibly relevant for women rights defenders. Everyone wants to know if their phone has been hacked. That’s the first thing they ask:, “Can you actually know whether your phone has been hacked?” and “How do I know? Can you do it for me? How?” Those are the things that come up in my trainings and conversations.
I like to help people to think about protection as a process, something ongoing, because we use technology all day long. There are organizations and people that take years to understand that. So, it’s not something that can be achieved in a single conversation. Sometimes a lot of things need to happen, including bad things, before people really take this topic seriously…
I try to use very basic tools when I’m doing digital security support, to say you can do this on whatever device you’re on, this is a prevention tool. It’s not just applying technical knowledge, it’s also a process of explaining, training, showing how this work is not just for hackers or people who know a lot about computers.
One of the challenges is to spread awareness about cybersecurity among Indigenous and grassroots organizations, which aren’t hyper-connected and don’t think that digital forensics work is relevant to them. Sometimes what we do is completely disconnected from their lives, and they ask us: “But what are you doing?” So, our job is to understand their questions and where they are coming from and ground our knowledge-sharing in what people are actually doing.
To someone reading this piece and saying, oh, this kind of resonates with me, where do I start, what would your recommendation be?
If you are a human rights defender, I would recommend that you share your knowledge with your collective. You can teach them the importance of knowing about them, practicing them, as well as encouraging training to prevent digital attacks, because, in the end, forensic analysis is a reaction to something that has happened.
We can take a lot of preventive measures to ensure the smallest possible impact. That’s the best way to start. And it’s crucial to stay informed, to keep reading, to stay up to date with the news and build community.
If there are girls or gender non-conforming people reading this who are interested in technical issues, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a degree or a formal education, as long as you like it. Most hackers I’ve met become hackers because they dive into a subject, they like it and they’re passionate about it.Nikole Yanez Honduras Human Rights Defender.
In the three decades since I became a lawyer, human rights – once understood as an uncomplicated good, a tool for securing dignity for the vulnerable against abuses by the powerful – have increasingly come under assault. Perhaps never more so than in the current moment: we are constantly talking about human rights, but often in a highly sceptical way. When Liz Truss loudly proclaims “We’ve got to leave the ECHR, abolish the supreme court and abolish the Human Rights Act,” she’s not the fringe voice she might have been in the 1990s. She represents a dangerous current of opinion, as prevalent on parts of the radical left as on the populist right of politics. It seems to be gaining momentum.
As an idealistic youngster, I would have been shocked to know that in 2024 it would be necessary to return to the back-to-basics case, to justify the need for fundamental rights and freedoms. But in a world where facts are made fluid, what were once thought of as core values have become hard to distil and defend. In an atmosphere of intense polarisation, human rights are trashed along all parts of the political spectrum – either as a framework to protect markets, or as a form of undercover socialism. What stands out for me is that the most trenchant critics share a profound nationalism. Nationalists believe that universal human rights – the clue’s in the name – undermine the ability of states to agitate for their narrower interests.
Given that so many of our problems can only be tackled with an international approach, a robust rights framework is more important than ever
It’s no coincidence that the governments keenest on turning inwards – Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary, that of former president Bolsonaro in Brazil – have been least keen on common standards that protect minorities in their own territories and hold them to high standards in the international arena. At a time of insecurity, these leaders leverage fear to maximise their appeal. The prospect of a second Trump administration in the US demonstrates that this trend shows no sign of abating. In that context, it’s vital to make the case for human rights anew.
It boils down to this: given that so many of our problems – in an age of climate change, global disorder and artificial intelligence – can only be tackled with an international approach, a robust rights framework is more important than ever. There are parallels with the postwar period in which human rights were most fully articulated, a time when it was obvious to everybody that cooperation and global standards were the best way to shore up our common humanity after a period of catastrophic conflict and genocide.
Of course everyone believes in some rights – normally their own and those of friends, family and people they identify with. It is “other people’s” freedoms that are more problematic. The greater the divisions between us, the greater this controversy. And yet, it is precisely these extreme disparities in health, wealth, power and opinion that make rights, rather than temporary privileges given and taken away by governments, so essential. They provide a framework for negotiating disputes and providing redress for abuses without recourse to violence.
New technologies, and AI in particular, require more not less international regulation. As people spend more time online, they become vulnerable to degrading treatment, unfairness and discrimination, breaches of privacy, censorship and other threats. The so-called “black boxes” behind the technology we use make ever more crucial decisions about our daily lives, from banking to education, employment, policing and border control. Anyone who flirts with the notion of computer infallibility should never forget the postmasters and other such abuses, perpetrated and then concealed.
Our shrinking, burning planet is the ultimate reason why nationalism does not work in the interests of humankind
Perhaps most important of all is the growing contribution of human rights litigation to the struggle against climate catastrophe. A whole generation of lawyers and environmentalists is taking notes from earlier struggles, just as suffragists once learned from slavery abolitionists. This is despite the machinations of fossil fuel corporations versed in a thousand lobbying, jurisdictional and other delaying tactics.
Our shrinking, burning planet is the ultimate reason why nationalism does not work in the interests of humankind. Today’s global empires, sailing under logos rather than flags, need to be more directly accountable under human rights treaties. Our existing mechanisms, whether local and national governments, domestic and international courts, or some of the more notoriously tortuous UN institutions, may be imperfect and in need of reform. Yet, like all structures of civilisation, they are easier to casually denigrate than to invest in and adapt to be more effective.
While I have been writing this, I have been voting in the House of Lords on amendments to the so-called safety of Rwanda bill. It is the most regressive anti-human rights measure of recent times, and intended to be that way. It will not stop the boats of desperate people fleeing persecution, but is designed to stop the courts. British judges will be prevented from ensuring refugees’ fair treatment before they are rendered human freight and transported to a place about whose “safety” our supreme court was not satisfied. Rishi Sunak will be able to use this situation as excuse for an election pledge to repudiate the European convention on human rights.
If he gets his way, rights will be removed not just from those arriving by boat, but from every man, woman and child in the UK. By contrast, the golden thread of human rights is equal treatment: protecting others as we would wish to be protected ourselves, if that unhappy day ever came. It’s a thread we must never let go of.
On 4 April 2024 the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA) announced the call for applications for the 2024 ASEAN Human Rights Advocacy Academy. The Academy is a capacity building platform for youth activists in Southeast Asia to gauge a strong understanding and skills to engage with the ASEAN Human Rights mechanism.
Since 2005, FORUM-ASIA has been actively engaged in the development and strengthening of the ASEAN human rights mechanisms. Against the backdrop of a global shrinking civic-space due to the rise of authoritarianism and a lack of capacities for civil society to meaningfully engage and influence law and policy making spaces, the Academy aims to bolster regional civil society participation and capacity to influence the regional human rights mechanisms to strengthen its human rights protection and promotion mandate.
The Academy will be held in-person for a total of five days (including travel days) in one of the Southeast Asian countries. It will consist of a series of knowledge sharing sessions and skills development workshops and field visits to engage with relevant stakeholders.
Programme:
The Academy, which will take place in the last week of May 2024 in one of the Southeast Asia countries (details will be shared upon announcement of successful application). Participants will be engaged in knowledge sharing and interactive group work involving the ASEAN and UN human rights mechanisms. They will meet with AICHR representatives, diplomatic missions, experts, and relevant regional stakeholders and gain first-hand insights into the workings of ASEAN and its human rights mechanisms.
Eligibility Criteria:
Youths of Southeast Asian nationality within the age of 18-35 who are in their early and mid-level stages of work or activism in human rights, peace and democracy. Those based in Southeast Asia will be prioritized.
All Southeast Asian individuals are eligible to apply regardless of race, ethnicity, color, SOGIESC, religion, disability, etc.
Application from FORUM-ASIA’s Southeast Asia member organizations will be welcomed
Prior knowledge or experience in engaging with regional or international human rights mechanisms is a plus. Those without prior knowledge or experience are also welcome to apply.
Interested applicants must complete this application form by midnight of 18 April 2024 (BKK time). Late applications will not be considered.
On 22 February 2024, Human Rights Watch came with a study on governments reaching outside their borders to silence or deter dissent by committing human rights abuses against their own nationals or former nationals. Governments have targeted human rights defenders, journalists, civil society activists, and political opponents, among others, deemed to be a security threat. Many are asylum seekers or recognized refugees in their place of exile. These governmental actions beyond borders leave individuals unable to find genuine safety for themselves and their families. This is transnational repression.
Transnational repression looks different depending on the context. Recent cases include a Rwandan refugee who was killed in Uganda following threats from the Rwandan government; a Cambodian refugee in Thailand only to be extradited to Cambodia and summarily detained; and a Belarusian activist who was abducted while aboard a commercial airline flight. Transnational repression may mean that a person’s family members who remain at home become targets of collective punishment, such as the Tajik activist whose family in Tajikistan, including his 10-year-old daughter, was detained, interrogated, and threatened.
Transnational repression is not new, but it is a phenomenon that has often been downplayed or ignored and warrants a call to action from a global, rights-centered perspective. Human Rights Watch’s general reporting includes over 100 cases of transnational repression. This report includes more than 75 of these cases from the past 15 years, committed by over two dozen governments across four regions. While the term “transnational repression” has at times become shorthand for naming authoritarian governments as perpetrators of rights violations, democratic administrations have assisted in cases of transnational repression.
Methods of transnational repression include killings, unlawful removals (expulsions, extraditions, and deportations), abductions and enforced disappearances, targeting of relatives, abuse of consular services, and so-called digital transnational repression, which includes the use of technology to surveil or harass people. These tactics often facilitate further human rights violations, such as torture and ill-treatment.
This report also highlights cases of governments misusing the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol)—an intergovernmental organization with 195 member countries—to target critics abroad.
Victims of transnational repression have included government critics, actual or perceived dissidents, human rights defenders, civil society activists, journalists, and opposition party members and others. Governments have targeted individuals because of their identity, such as ethnicity, religion, or gender. Back home, families and friends of targeted people may also become victims, as governments detain, harass, or harm them as retribution or collective punishment. Transnational repression can have far-reaching consequences, including a chilling effect on the rights to freedom of expression, association, and assembly among those who have been targeted or fear they could be next.
This report is not an exhaustive examination of cases of transnational repression. Instead, it outlines cases that Human Rights Watch has documented in the course of researching global human rights issues that point to key methods and trends of transnational repression.
Human Rights Watch hopes that by drawing attention to cases of transnational repression, international organizations and concerned governments will pursue actions to provide greater safety and security for those at risk. Governments responsible for transnational repression should be on notice that their efforts to silence critics, threaten human rights defenders, and target people based on their identity are no less problematic abroad than they are at home. This report provides governments seeking to tackle transnational repression with concrete recommendations, while raising caution against laws and policies that could restrict other human rights.
Human Rights Watch calls on governments committing transnational repression to respect international human rights standards both within and beyond their territory. Governments combatting transnational repression should recognize such abuses as a threat to human rights generally and act to protect those at risk within their jurisdiction or control.
“Effectively realising human rights for everyone, everywhere is the pathway to free, fair and just communities and a more peaceful and sustainable world“, write ISHR Director Phil Lynch and Board Chair Vrinda Grover on 8 March 2024. Here some excerpts from a piece worth reading:
We face a global climate emergency. We witness atrocity crimes being perpetrated with apparent impunity, from Afghanistan to Sudan, Palestine to Ukraine, and Nicaragua to Xinjiang. We confront rising populism and propaganda, with artificial intelligence misused to fuel disinformation and discrimination, and democracy facing a ‘make-or-break year’ in 2024, with over 70 national elections. Each of these crises and conflicts are complex, yet they are also interconnected in four fundamental ways.
First, repression and rights violations are among the root causes of all these crises and conflicts…
Second, respect for human rights, and accountability for violations, is essential to address and resolve these crises and conflicts. ..
Third, very few States, if any, have been prepared to treat human rights as paramount and apply human rights standards in a principled, consistent way to each crisis and conflict. ..The selective and inconsistent application of international human rights law undermines the integrity of the framework, as well as the credibility, legitimacy and influence of States and other actors who engage in such double standards.
Fourth and finally, the work of human rights defenders at the national level, as well as their engagement and advocacy at the international level, is essential to address and resolve each of these conflicts and crises. Defenders prevent rights violations, document abuses, promote accountability, and propose solutions that are grounded in community priorities and needs. Indigenous rights defenders carry the knowledge that is necessary to live sustainably and to respect and protect the environment. Digital rights activists are pushing for rights-based regulation of artificial intelligence to ensure that humanity benefits from its innovations and efficiencies. Whistleblowers are exposing government wrongdoing and corporate misfeasance, working to safeguard democracy, while corporate accountability activists are campaigning for an international treaty on business and human rights. Women human rights defenders from Afghanistan are leading the campaign to hold the Taliban accountable for the crime of gender apartheid, while also ensuring that humanitarian aid reaches the most vulnerable populations. In Sudan, women defenders are leading peace movements and protests at the local level, as well as international advocacy, which was instrumental in the establishment of a UN investigative mechanism, further adding to the pressure on the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces to end the war. Despite the challenges, complexities and uncertainties we collectively face, we remain convinced that, with international human rights laws and standards providing a compass, human rights defenders can chart a course to a more peaceful, just and inclusive world….
Despite the challenging times, exacerbated by declining funding for international human rights advocacy and organisations by some States and foundations, ISHR continues to pursue a positive and forward-looking agenda.
We’re pleased that in 2023 the Democratic Republic of Congo enacted a specific national law on the protection of defenders, the culmination of years of work by ISHR and national partners. With this development, the DRC joins the ranks of countries like Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Mongolia amongst the countries where we have worked alongside national partners to strengthen legal frameworks for defenders and establish specific defender protection laws and will continue to work to ensure effective implementation.
In the area of women’s rights, we are working with defenders from Afghanistan and Iran, together with international legal experts, to push for the explicit recognition and codification of the atrocity crime of gender apartheid. This would fill an international protection gap for women and girls, as well as impose responsibilities on third States and non-State actors to take concrete steps to prevent and end gender apartheid.
With 2023 marking the 25th anniversary of the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, we are coordinating a broad coalition to develop an authoritative baseline document of international and regional jurisprudence in relation to the protection of defenders, which will be launched in 2024.
And throughout 2024 we’ll continue allying with Black-led organisations to promote racial justice, with feminist and LGBTIQ+ organisations to resist anti-rights narratives and movements, with corporate accountability activists to strengthen laws on business and human rights, and with Global South defenders to ensure that key multilateral fora are relevant, accessible and responsive to them.
Reflecting on our collective wins over 2023, we identified one golden thread: human rights defenders working in dynamic coalitions, movements and networks to strategically leverage international law and mechanisms to contribute to positive change. With 2023 marking both the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 25th anniversary of the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, and 2024 marking ISHR’s own 40th anniversary, it is apt to recall that the work of defenders and the integrity of the international framework are essential to the realisation of human rights on the ground.
The promise of the Universal Declaration will only be fulfilled when we work in coalition to ensure that defenders are protected and that standards are consistently respected and applied.
DefendDefenders in January 2024 has chosen as HRDs of the MonthPamela Angwech from Uganda.
For most of her life, Pamela Angwech’s existence has always been a defiant and simultaneous act of survival and resistance. In 1976 when she was born, the anti-Amin movement was gathering pace, and her family was one of the earliest victims in Northern Uganda. Her father, a passionate educationist in Kitgum district was one of the most vocal critics of the dictatorship’s human rights excesses, which made him an obvious target of the state’s marauding vigilantes. Fearing for his life and that of his young family, he escaped North, to Sudan, leaving behind his wife, then pregnant with Pamela, to follow him as soon as she could. It was on the treacherous journey to rejoin her father that Pamela was born, somewhere between Uganda and Sudan, and named Angwench, an Acholi word to mean “on the run,” in keeping with the circumstances of her birth.
Unfortunately, those precarious circumstances would continue to define most of Angwech’s childhood. Although Amin was eventually overthrown, paving way for her family’s return home, the immediate post-Amin years were equally tumultuous, and when President Museveni’s National Resistance Army took power in 1986, Northern Uganda was immediately engulfed in a civil war by the Lord’s Resistance Army(LRA) rebels that would rage on for the next 20 years, bringing wanton anguish and suffering to the region’s people and communities.
Angwench navigated those precarious circumstances to pursue an education, convinced that only then could she impact her community for the better. At University, she studied Gender and Women Studies and immediately returned home to seek work with the UN’s World Food Program Office in Gulu, determined to join the relief effort to alleviate the suffering of her people in Internally Displaced People’s (IDP)Camps.
Initially, they told me there was no job. But I was determined to work with the UN and nowhere else. So, I camped at their office for 14 straight days. Sometimes, I would volunteer as a gatekeeper when the substantive gatekeeper was away, and other times, I would sit at the front patch of the Office Head the whole day. When they realized I was determined not to leave, they allowed me to start officially volunteering with them. “I would go with them to distribute food in the IDP camps, until later, I was formally integrated as official staff.
Yet, despite her dogged stubbornness and resilience, she was not prepared for the heart-rending experience of life in the IDPs, particularly the plight of women and girls.
“I started to notice that after picking their food rations, women and children would start picking residue beans from the floor, to take for either their little children or their elderly parents who could not queue. One other time, I noticed a visibly tired woman carrying a baby on her back, being pushed out of the queue by others. I called her to the front and assured her that I would give her a special ration but asked her to first untie her baby from the back, so she could protect her from the sun and breastfeed her. When she untied her baby, I noticed that the baby’s neck was twisted – it had suffocated and died! That changed me, forever,”
From Humanitarian to Human Rights Activist
Angwech realized that like a balm, humanitarian work could only soothe the suffering of her people but fell short of tackling the root causes of the same suffering. “So I decided that someone had to speak up about the heartbreaking indignity and human rights violations surrounding the conflict in Northern Uganda. I turned full scale, from a humanitarian to a human rights activist, particularly championing the rights of women who were most vulnerable “she says.
Angwech would move on the streets rallying women to stand up for their rights, holding placards signaling injustices against women in IDP camps like molestation and rape. Overtime, she won followers: Emboldened by her courage and audacity, other women started to show up and speak up against the conflict and related violence. Angwech mobilized grassroot women groups to pursue LRA leader Joseph Kony in Congo’s Garamba forest, to dramatize their cries for peace, under UN resolution 13/25 which provides for women’s participation in peace processes.
In 2004, Angwech started Gulu Women’s Economic Development & Globalization (GWED-G) to rehabilitate victims of the war, from victims of conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence to those physically harmed by the conflict. Since then, Angwech says GWED-G has rehabilitated over 1700 war victims through physical rehabilitation projects, giving them prosthesis, among other forms of support. It has also continued to sensitise and organise grassroot women into human rights defenders’ groups, through which they can report and address GBV cases, issues of women economic rights among others. Today, Angwech says there are about 600 of these groups across Gulu, Lamwo, Amuru and Kitgum, each with a membership of 30 -40 members.
Today, GWED-G is arguably the largest grassroots human rights organisation in Northern Uganda. It has also expanded to cover other social and economic causes, including environmental protection advocacy. Angwech says the environment is the local communities’ last refugee, and yet deforestation and charcoal burning are threatening it. “For post-conflict communities like us in Northern Uganda, land is our primary resource. It is the land from which people make an income to feed their families, send their children to school, and access medical care. War destroyed everything else. So, if we don’t protect the environment, our land will be degraded, rainy seasons will begin to change which will affect food production and bring back hunger,” she says.
Lorenzo Tondo in Palermo reported in the Guardian of 22 February 2024 that people and groups who assist asylum seekers are reporting a disturbing trend of escalating intimidation, with aid workers facing direct threats including being held at gunpoint and having their phone communications monitored by government authorities, according to a report from the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights.
“Organisations and people assisting refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants have been subjected to beatings, had their vehicles or equipment destroyed, or have been targeted by vandalism of their property, and even by arson or bomb attacks,” she wrote.
Mijatović said she had observed in certain member states how authorities had engaged with human rights defenders in an aggressive or intimidating manner. During the humanitarian crisis at the Poland-Belarus border, thousands of refugees from the Middle East were offered a route by the Lukashenko regime to try to reach the EU from Belarus, highlighting the restrictions by Poland on access to the border zone for people and organisations providing humanitarian assistance and legal aid.
The commissioner noted how “the emergence of an approach in which migration issues are increasingly addressed by member states from a security perspective” had led to the building of fences and deployment of military personnel, equipment and surveillance in border areas that has also affected NGOs.
“These physical obstacles deny asylum seekers the chance to seek protection and the right to a fair and efficient asylum procedure [and] this approach has also created an extremely difficult environment for human rights defenders,” she wrote.
“Those who assist refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants may be seen by states as an obstacle to the implementation of asylum and migration policies focused on deterrence and security, and therefore are faced with hostility. The rolling back of human rights, which is often part of states’ policies in this area, also leads to measures explicitly or implicitly targeting those helping.”
NGO rescue boats have also faced violence, including the use of firearms, from non-European countries with which Council of Europe member states cooperate on external migration control. NGO workers on some of these vessels have documented how often the Libyan coastguard has fired gunshots and endangered crew members and people in distress in the central Mediterranean. [see e.g. https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2019/12/18/international-migrants-day-the-story-of-the-ocean-viking/]
Mijatović also noted the growing use of surveillance technologies. “During discussions for the preparation of this document concerns were raised that, in some member states, pervasive surveillance activities created mounting challenges for human rights defenders, including lawyers and journalists,” she wrote.
“Governments, in the name of national security concerns, often employ advanced surveillance tools to intercept communications and monitor online activities, including human rights defenders’ social media.”
In 2022, the Greek journalists Thanasis Koukakis and Stavros Malichudis were allegedly targeted for investigating sensitive topics such as financial crime cases and migration. The Italian justice minister in 2021 dispatched inspectors to Sicily after revelations that prosecutors had intercepted hundreds of telephone conversations involving no fewer than 15 journalists and covering migration issues and aid workers in the central Mediterranean.
Mijatović wrote: “Invasive surveillance practices, whether through physical surveillance, phone and internet tapping or by using spyware not only infringes on the personal security and privacy of individual human rights defenders, but also threaten the confidentiality between human rights defenders and the refugees, asylum seekers and migrants they assist, which is often crucial to working effectively.”
She added that people helping refugees, asylum seekers and migrants often experience extremely high levels of online hate and even death threats. Human rights defenders who are themselves refugees or from an ethnic minority background may also receive racist abuse, online and offline.
On 3 March 2024 Gary Price from the University of Minnesota Libraries reports that the University of Minnesota now has one of the largest human rights archives at a public university, and it’s already helping researchers, educators, and human rights advocates across the globe.
“With everything that’s happening in the world, if we can highlight aspects of the history of human rights, maybe that provides us an opportunity to learn what not to do in the future,” said Kris Kiesling, director of the U of M’s Archives and Special Collections (ASC).
Unlike other collections in ASC, the Minnesota Human Rights Archive (MHRA) is an umbrella archive composed of new human rights materials donated to the Libraries, as well as existing materials housed in other collections.
From the Givens Collection of African American Literature to the Immigration History Research Center Archives, there’s a trove of materials about civil rights, LGBTQ rights, child labor, domestic violence, public health, and more. ASC archivists and curators are already investigating how their materials relate to human rights, and how their collections are positioned under the MHRA umbrella.
Planning for MHRA began around eight years ago when Barbara Frey — the former director of the U of M Human Rights Program and a founder and previous director of the advocates for human rights — began contacting The Advocates, CVT, and other organizations across the state.
Kiesling — alongside University Archivist Erik Moore and Social Welfare History Archivist Linnea Anderson — met with Frey, Weissbrodt, and Meyer Weinshel, former collections and outreach lead for UMN’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, to build the MHRA.
The team transferred some materials from HRC in 2016, and later on, Patrick Finnegan, former assistant director of HRC and administrative associate for The Advocates, surveyed and listed Weissbrodt’s personal papers and research materials.
Pooling new and existing materials under the human rights umbrella not only helps researchers by condensing the initial hunt-and-gather phase of their projects, but it also helps potential donors. It’s easier for them to articulate their goals for their material, Moore explained, and it’s easier to connect their work to the broad framework of human rights, than a more granular collection like the University Archives.
