How is the Chinese government marking international mother language day on February 21? By legalizing the erasure of mother languages.
Read more
Three years ago this week, people across China, outraged by a deadly fire in Urumqi and profoundly frustrated by the government’s harsh “zero-COVID” policies, took part in impromptu protests, some of the most visible expressions public discontent since the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy demonstrations. Most chose to simply hold aloft blank pieces (read more…)
Read more
On Monday, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) addressed the Leaders’ Meeting on Women in Beijing, extolling his government’s support for many aspects of women’s rights. Yet having grown up in China, my vivid memories over the past few decades paint a starkly different picture of how women have fought to (read more…)
Read more
At a time when authoritarian governments are assaulting international human rights law as never before, Argentina’s highest criminal court has taken an extraordinarily positive step. On June 18, the Federal Court of Criminal Cassation held that a case brought by Uyghurs against Chinese government officials for alleged crimes against humanity and genocide should proceed. (read more…)
Read more
Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) has documented deepening repression under Chinese President Xi Jinping since he assumed power in late 2012, including significantly curtailing the human rights of seven million Hong Kong people. Although Beijing’s tactics there include an attempt to gut Hong Kong’s legal protections for human rights, it (read more…)
Read more
“Sitting in a prison cell waiting for daybreak”: this is how Chinese legal activist Xu Zhiyong described the prospect of enduring a 14-year prison sentence, handed down by a Shandong court in 2023. Xu’s “crime”? Advocating for civil liberties.
Read more
For two years Chinese authorities secretly detained the newborn baby, her siblings, and their parents. Their whereabouts and wellbeing remained unknown to family members or lawyers until word began to trickle out in July 2022: the baby and her sister, then 6 years old, had been kept in a psychiatric (read more…)
Read more
The Chinese government’s willingness to censor a documentary on the plight of migrant workers should cast doubt on how Beijing will portray its development progress at the UPR.
Read more
A United Nations review of China’s human rights record set to occur in January should shine a light on Beijing’s atrocity crimes. But there are three ways in which this Universal Periodic Review (UPR) may actually worsen rather than improve the human rights situation inside China.
Read more
A little-known United Nations body, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, is helping to shine a light on the extent of China’s enforced disappearances in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Read more
Starting on July 9, 2015, the Chinese government launched an unprecedented nationwide crackdown on human rights lawyers. In the following few months, police interrogated and detained over 300 lawyers and paralegal assistants and raided three law firms. Dozens of lawyers and legal assistants and activists were detained, and 15 were eventually (read more…)
Read more
“No Deals without Freedom: Freeing Political Prisoners in China”
May 11, 2026 Comments Off on “No Deals without Freedom: Freeing Political Prisoners in China”On behalf of the more than four thousand political prisoners wrongfully held by the Chinese government since 2019—1,451 of them still arbitrarily detained today, and all documented by CHRD—I thank you for the opportunity to join this gathering.
Read more