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Human Rights, the U.N. and China
By: The Wall Street Journal, February 9, 2009
The United Nations Human Rights Council will hold a hearing today on China's human-rights record. Like other U.N. confabs, it's unlikely to result in concrete action. But any public attention to Beijing's actions is a discussion worth having, if only to show the Chinese people that the rest of the world cares what happens to them.
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Growing opposition to China's 'black jails'
By: Chris Buckley, Reuters, February 9, 2009
A meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council that started in Geneva on Monday gives groups and governments a chance to press Beijing on secretive executions and jailed dissidents as well as labor camps and other forms of detention. Yet contention over China's restrictions on its citizens is not confined to international conference rooms. Activists at home have also been galvanized, most recently against what locals call "black jails" - detention centers holding protesters without official procedures or right to appeal.
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Thailand: "Free Harry Nicolaides" - Cyber-demonstration
By: RSF, February 9, 2009
Reporters Without Borders is organising a cyber-demonstration on the Internet on 9 February to call for the release of Australian writer Harry Nicolaides, who is serving a three-year prison sentence on a lese majeste charge for referring briefly to the monarchy in a novel set in Thailand. He has been held since 31 August 2008 in Bangkok.
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Burma: Grassroots activist pressured by police
By: Democratic Voice of Burma, February 6, 2009
Grassroots activist Than Soe, who helped local farmers in Magwe's Aung Lan township report land seizures, has gone into hiding after being threatened with arrest by the police.Than Soe, a resident of San Kalay village in Aung Lan provided legal support to local farmers seeking justice after their farms were seized by local authorities who were seeking a monopoly on sugar cane production.
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Tibet: Details of Kardze protests emerge
By: Radio Free Asia, February 5, 2009
Three sources living in the Tibetan exile community have provided further details of protests and a shooting incident at a monastery in China's southwestern Sichuan province. They received the information from contacts living near the area where the event occurred. All three confirmed that the event occurred on Jan. 27, the second day of Chinese New Year, at the Gonchen monastery near Dege in the Kardze [in Chinese, Ganzi] Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture.
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China: Repression continues, but media and dissidents fight back
By: RSF, February 5, 2009
Six months after the Beijing Olympics began on 8 August 2008, Reporters Without Borders urges the Chinese authorities to release all the free speech activists and other citizens still being held in connection with the games. Foreign journalists continue to enjoy the freer regulations introduced for the Olympics (even if they have not been applied in Tibet), but at least 17 Chinese journalists, bloggers and free speech activists have been arrested since the games ended.
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Liang Jing, How far is China from revolution?
By: Xiao Qiang, China Digital Times, February 5, 2009
Could another revolution take place in China? More and more people are pondering this question. No one, however, can have thought about it more and for longer than Hu Jintao. Terror was the main reason for Deng Xiaoping and the CPC patriarchs' reacting so irrationally to the demonstrating students and public on June 4th 1989, twenty years ago: they feared a revolution breaking out suddenly and divesting them of their power.
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"Faceless" artist touches divided Korea
By: Choe Sang-Hun, IHT, February 4, 2009
In one of Sun Mu's best-known paintings from his "Happy Children" series, uniformed North Korean kindergartners sing like birds huddled together on a clothesline, their beaming faces so alike they could be clones. At the bottom of this posterlike image, a red slogan leaps out against a yellow background: "We are all happy children!" When Sun Mu, the pseudonym used by this artist from North Korea, first exhibited paintings like this in Seoul two years ago, the police showed up to investigate.
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