Asia – Page 9 – FoRB in Full

Chinese human rights lawyer Lu Siwei. Credit: Radio Free Asia

China, stop targeting overseas human rights defenders

Posted on 23/08/2023 by cswpress in Asia, China

‘Three policemen have come. They want to take me away. I can’t send you messages anymore.’

Zhang Chunxiao recalled these as the last words her husband left her before his detention in Laos on Friday 28 July 2023.

Lu Siwei was taken by Lao police while trying to travel to Thailand, where he would board a flight to the United States to reunite with Zhang and their 14-year-old daughter.

Mr Lu is a well-known Chinese human rights lawyer, whose license was revoked by authorities in 2021 following years of representing clients deemed to be dissidents by the authorities.

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Joseph Colony in Lahore, Pakistan, which was infamously attacked in March 2013 after Sawan Masih was accused of blasphemy.

Pakistan needs to wake up to its blasphemy law crisis before it is too late

Posted on 24/07/2023 by cswpress in Asia, Pakistan

Last month, the desecration and burning of the Quran in Stockholm, Sweden sparked worldwide condemnation. Pakistan witnessed widespread protests and termed the act as blasphemous and deeply damaging to the sentiments of the Muslim community. A banned extremist group in the country, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, labelled it as an attack by Christians on Muslims and called on their followers to attack Christian settlements and kill Christians, while further vowing that they will make Pakistan a ‘hell for Christians’.

Last week, in the city of Sargodha, in Punjab province, a blasphemous poster was found near a local mosque. It prompted locals to gather in protest and demand that the police find a Christian from the nearby Christian settlement of Maryam Town. Since then, tensions in the area have been high with most of the 3,000-4,000 Christian families fleeing their homes due to fear of a mob related attacks.

Tensions over blasphemy have already had devastating consequences in Pakistan this year. On 6 May, a local cleric in the city of Mardan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, was killed by a mob after he was accused of making a blasphemous reference during a political rally of former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party. In February a mob in the city of Nankana Sahib, Punjab, stormed the police station and proceeded to lynch and kill a man accused of blasphemy.

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‘We don’t know how we can restart our lives’ – stories from Manipur

Posted on 19/07/2023 by cswpress in Asia, India

‘On 3 May, around 10pm, we heard people throwing stones at our house. We didn’t understand what was happening. In the morning, we woke up and we were cooking. We saw that there was a frenzy outside. Everyone was walking out of their homes with their bags packed. They asked us why we were still at home and explained the situation. We were scared.’
Runa, Imphal

India’s Manipur State has been engulfed in violence for two and a half months now. Sparked by a protest on 3 May in which an estimated 60,000 people marched in opposition to the Manipur High Court’s request to the state government to send a recommendation to the central government to include the non-tribal Meitei community in the Scheduled Tribe (ST) category, the unrest has claimed at least 100 lives, with local sources suggesting that the death toll is significantly higher.

Thousands of homes have been burned down and tens of thousands of people have been forcibly displaced in a dispute over whether the predominantly Hindu Meitei community should be granted access to the same benefits afforded to the state’s typically more disadvantaged tribal communities.

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With echoes of ‘the most difficult time in North Korean history’, the international community must do more to bring about change

Posted on 29/06/2023 by cswpress in Asia, North Korea

Earlier this month, the BBC released information gathered from exclusive interviews with three individuals living inside North Korea. Their reports have brought the country back into the headlines, revealing the devastating reality of the situation for North Korean citizens since the COVID-19-triggered border closure in January 2020. They describe widespread starvation and brutal repression, without feasible means of escape.

Hanna Song from the North Korean Database Centre for Human Rights (NKDB) said in an interview with the BBC ‘This [report] takes us back to the most difficult time in North Korean history.’

Song is referring here to the widespread famine of the 1990s known as the arduous march.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was founded in 1948 under the leadership of Kim Il-Sung. The communist nation’s economy was built on a system of state control: a public distribution system for food and material goods, and a state-assigned job system dictating citizen employment.

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Reverend Dr Hkalam Samson, one of Myanmar/Burma’s most senior and internationally renowned Christian pastors.

The continued imprisonment of Reverend Dr Hkalam Samson is proof that no one is safe in Myanmar

Posted on 27/06/2023 by cswpress in Asia, Burma

By Benedict Rogers

When I heard that my friend Reverend Dr Hkalam Samson, one of Myanmar/Burma’s most senior and internationally renowned Christian pastors, had been arrested at Mandalay airport on 5 December as he attempted to travel to Bangkok, several thoughts went through my mind.

On one level I was not surprised, because the current illegal military junta, which seized power in a coup on 1 February 2021, has been even more brutal, ruthless and inhumane than any of the succession of military dictatorships that have ruled Myanmar for most of the past six decades.

On another level, due to his international connections, I thought his arrest might simply lead to a brief detention, for the purposes of interrogation. I half expected him to be released within a matter of days. This is a man, after all, who has met the President of the United States in the White House, a Minister of State in the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, parliamentarians around the world and has attended international fora including the International Ministerial Conference on freedom of religion or belief in Washington, DC in 2019.

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