"This report is the product of an effort to understand the scale and scope of “transnational repression,” in which governments reach across national borders to silence dissent among their diaspora and exile communities. Freedom House assembled cases of transnational repression from public source
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s, including UN and government documents, human rights reports, and credible news outlets, in order to generate a detailed picture of this global phenomenon.
The project compiled a catalogue of 608 direct, physical cases of transnational repression since 2014. In each incident, the origin country’s authorities physically reached an individual living abroad, whether through detention, assault, physical intimidation, unlawful deportation, rendition, or suspected assassination. The list includes 31 origin states conducting physical transnational repression in 79 host countries. This total is certainly only partial; hundreds of other physical cases that lacked sufficient documentation, especially detentions and unlawful deportations, are not included in Freedom House’s count. Nevertheless, even this conservative enumeration shows that what often appear to be isolated incidents—an assassination here, a kidnapping there—in fact represent a pernicious and pervasive threat to human freedom and security.
Moreover, physical transnational repression is only the tip of the iceberg. The consequences of each physical attack ripple out into a larger community. And beyond the physical cases compiled for this report are the much more widespread tactics of “everyday” transnational repression: digital threats, spyware, and coercion by proxy, such as the imprisonment of exiles’ families. For millions of people around the world, transnational repression has become not an exceptional tool, but a common and institutionalized practice used by dozens of regimes to control people outside their borders." (Executive summary)
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"Social media platforms are taking down “terrorist and violent extremist content” more and more quickly, often in response to the demands of governments, but in a way that prevents the content from being used to support investigations into serious crimes, including war crimes. “Video Unavailab
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le”: Social Media Platforms Remove Evidence of War Crimes, examines the value of social media content in human rights investigations and the impacts that content takedowns are having for international and national investigators, civil society organizations, and the media. Human Rights Watch is calling for a broad consultative process with all relevant stakeholders, including social media companies, to develop a mechanism to preserve potential evidence of serious crimes that was posted publicly online and make it available to support national and international prosecutions, as well as investigations by civil society organizations, journalists and academics." (Back cover)
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"This chapter deals with lèse-majesté laws and their impact on the exercise of freedom of political expression and journalism from the perspective of international human rights law. In doing so, it addresses the chilling effects of the application of a particular crime of lèse-majesté, namely
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defaming a head of state”, which are emphasized with historical and current examples from Turkey: a country that exemplifies the excesses in practice. Said excesses are assessed in light of the standards of freedom of political expression set by the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, which also demonstrates the excesses in other European countries and provides a comparative outlook. In conclusion, it is inferred that the mere existence of lèse-majesté crimes puts the rule of law at risk, thereby forcing journalists and other citizens alike to resort to self-censorship in violation of international human rights law as interpreted by the regional human rights mechanism." (Abstract)
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"This report presents the results of in-depth interviews conducted with eight individuals with recent direct experience inside detention facilities in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Findings are based on four face-to-face and four remote interviews conducted between November 201
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9 and May 2020 [...] Many detainees were unclear about the reasons behind their initial arrests and grappled with why they were targeted. Justifications for detaining interviewees included innocuous differences in appearance or behavior, perceived by the state as indicators of religiosity or Uyghur nationalism. Some got no explanation for their arrests. Two participants heard police directly mention being given quotas or financial incentives for Uyghur arrests [...] Participants recommended that RFA continue to convey the reality of the ongoing repression in the Uyghur region in as transparent and high-profile a way as possible. Participants said that international coverage failed to present the reality of Uyghurs’ experiences in the XUAR in sufficient scale and depth. To address this, they recommended that RFA: Continues to provide detailed, factually strong reports about conditions within the XUAR, supported by photographic and video materials whenever possible; Focus on original reporting rather than translating reports from other outlets; Humanize Uyghurs in general and detainees in particular, sharing their real lives and stories, challenging the PRC narrative portraying them as Islamic extremists or terrorists; Broadcast more interviews with émigrés who had direct experience of detention – including those who were detained in pre-trial facilities rather than re-education camps; Translate content into other languages, including Mandarin and Russian." (Executive summary)
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"1944 entstanden im Vernichtungslager Auschwitz-Birkenau eine Vielzahl von Fotografien, die zumeist den SS-Fotografen Bernhard Walter und Ernst Hoffmann zuzuordnen sind. Erhalten blieben die Bilder in Form eines Albums im Besitz der Holocaust-Überlebenden Lili Jacob, die es auf Vermittlung Serge Kl
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arsfelds 1980 der Gedenkstätte Yad Vashem übergab. Viele der in ihrer offenen oder subtilen Brutalität unerträglichen Aufnahmen zeigen aus der Distanz die Ankunft größerer Gruppen im Lager, andere bilden das Unbegreifliche aus nächster Nähe ab. Auf einigen Fotos sind Selektionen oder „Lagerarbeiten“ zu sehen, manche zeigen die Transportzüge sowie Koffer und Kleidung Verschleppter und Ermordeter, andere die Vernichtungsanlagen. Tal Bruttmann, Stefan Hördler und Christoph Kreutzmüller haben in akribischer Forschungsarbeit die Herkunft der abgebildeten Menschen, die Entstehung und den ideologischen Kontext des Albums analysiert und ordnen die Bilder in diese Zusammenhänge ein. Bewusst setzen sich die Autoren mit der Diskrepanz und den Deutungsebenen auseinander, die der Fotografie als (miss)interpretierbarer, (schein)objektiver Visualisierung eigen sind. Sie durchbrechen so zugleich die Intention des Albums – die Inszenierung des durchgeplanten und in Auschwitz und anderswo vollzogenen Menschheitsverbrechens der Nationalsozialisten als einen rationalen Akt." (Klappentext)
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"The aim of this document is to provide an introduction for companies to consider the relevance of the following issues for their operations, as well as inspiration and resources to begin to formalise their management of human rights. It is recognised that many of these issues cannot be solved by on
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e company alone and require collaboration across the mobile sector and working with other stakeholders. For each of the human rights issues covered here, the guidance: explains and defines what the human rights issue is and why it is salient for the mobile industry; outlines steps mobile operators can consider taking to operate responsibly and manage related risks; suggests examples of potential indicators that could be used to measure and report progress; briefly introduces supporting initiatives and resources in the sector that address these issues; and provides some case studies from GSMA members on addressing the topic." (Page 3)
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"Many local journalists covering issues like corruption and organised crime can be considered human rights defenders (HRDs) exposed to high levels of violence and impunity. In this chapter, Mitchell examines what protection is available for such journalists via the dedicated international normative
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framework. She then explores the overlap between such journalists and the HRD concept, before outlining the international protection regime for HRDs and how it compares to the equivalent journalists’ system. Given the similarities between the security situations of such journalists and HRDs and the challenges faced by the regimes, she suggests there are ways international actors can better collaborate that could potentially lead to improved protection for both groups—albeit on a small scale in the absence of increased resources and political will." (Abstract)
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"There is no doubt that technology has improved the ability to document war crimes and human rights abuses, even in otherwise inaccessible locations. The world now sees, often in close to real-time, atrocities that would have been lost to the world only a handful of years ago. But does knowing neces
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sarily translate into doing? Whether such access can be directly linked to changes in international policy-making processes remains undecided. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that changes in the technical capacity to gather evidence have had negligible effect on states' willingness to intervene in mass atrocity events. Syria, for example, has been mapped, photographed and crowdsourced in detail for (as of this writing) seven years, yet the war there is expected to continue for years more. Reported war crimes have so far had no clear, unequivocal effect on policy. The use of chemical weapons by the Syrian military underscores the point." (Pages 569-570)
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"Sin desconocer el esfuerzo del periodismo por contar las historias, cabe reconocer que se han cometido errores en el cubrimiento, de ahí la importancia de los periodistas, ya que el peso que tiene cada pequeña noticia, escrita o leída, puede convertirse en una pieza clave en la reconstrucción d
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e las historias y la verdad ante una desaparición. Consejo de Redacción (CdR), la Unidad de Búsqueda de Personas Dadas por Desaparecidas (UBPD), el Comité Internacional de la Cruz Roja (CICR) y el Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (PNUD) decidieron unirse alrededor de este fenómeno para ofrecer una guía que aporte a mejorar el cubrimiento del tema y la construcción de registros de búsqueda de personas. Cada capítulo tiene ideas que dan luz para investigar historias y preguntas inspiradoras, que ayudan a que los reporteros de todo el país puedan remediar sus omisiones y contar todo aquello que aún no se cuenta. Algunos de los temas que se encontrarán son: el repaso histórico de cómo el Estado colombiano aceptó añadir este delito en el código penal, los casos esclarecidos por las cortes, los NN que aumentan la lista de desaparecidos, el daño que ha producido en la sociedad y los familiares la desaparición, el mal manejo de estas historias, entre otros." (https://consejoderedaccion.org)
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"In 2013 I became the co-organizer of the Human Rights, Human Dignity Film Festival in Yangon. We organized the festival for a simple reason - we were very suspicious of the political reform process initiated by the Thein Sein administration, the transformed military government. Like many of our fel
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low citizens, we wanted to push the boundaries of the so-called quasi-civilian rule, by using the human rights film festival as a tool. That's how Myanmar's first international human rights film festival came to be. The landmark human rights event was held in Yangon for five years. A mobile film festival that brought human rights films to audiences across Myanmar also grew in scope. The abolition of pre-publication censorship in Myanmar resulted in a certain level of media freedom for the print media, but not for the film industry. In 2014 the film censorship board was recreated as the "Film Classification Board" under the Ministry of Information. In order to screen human rights films in downtown cinemas, authorization was required from the Film Classification Board. Without that official piece of paper, none of the commercial entertainment companies would allow us to host the human rights film festival in their theatres. Therefore, in order to keep the festival running, we did not select overly sensitive films. That might be called self-censorship; yet, in 2013, the first year of the festival, all films submitted to the Film Classification Board - including a documentary film about human rights violations in Myanmar prisons based on the story of a political prisoner - got the go-ahead to be publicly screened." (Pages 307-308)
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"1. The current use of imagery, particularly photography, in the anti-slavery movement risks harming anti-slavery efforts and survivors through misinformation and re-exploitation [...] 2. In order to utilise photography effectively and ethically, organisations looking to generate or use photography
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should seek out practices which incorporate survivor voice and perspective [...] 3. Participatory photography is an ideal methodology for creating original and impactful imagery. 4. Informed consent should be a priority in anti-slavery imagery [...] 5. Creativity and originality are vital when generating survivor imagery." (Summary of findings)
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"Governments with strict control over the information that their citizens hear from foreign sources are regular targets of human rights pressure, but we know little about how this information matters in the domestic realm. I argue that authoritarian regimes strategically pass on certain types of ext
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ernal pressure to their public to “internationalize” human rights violations, making citizens view human rights in terms of defending their nation internationally rather than in terms of individual violations, and making them more likely to be satisfied with their government’s behavior. I find strong support for this model through statistical analysis of Chinese state media reports of external human rights pressure and a survey experiment on Chinese citizens’ responses to pressure on women’s rights. This analysis demonstrates that authoritarian regimes may be able to manipulate international human rights diplomacy to help them retain the support of their population while suppressing their human rights." (Abstract)
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