Day: July 7, 2021

The U.N. human rights chief pressed ASEAN on Wednesday to urgently appoint an envoy to Myanmar, with the regional bloc having not yet named a special emissary more than two months after Southeast Asian leaders agreed to do so.

Separately, Singapore said it was working with other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to hasten the admittedly slow implementation of a five-point consensus on post-coup Myanmar that ASEAN leaders had reached during a special summit on that troubled country in late April.

ASEAN should start a dialogue with both the military, which toppled an elected government in February, and that country’s shadow civilian government, said Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“It is urgent for ASEAN to appoint a special envoy or team to get some kind of political dialogue underway,” Bachelet said in videotaped comments during a meeting at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

“I encourage ASEAN to engage with the democratic leadership and civil society, not just the military front.”

It was the second time in a month that Bachelet had urged the Southeast Asian bloc to move more quickly in helping resolve a post-coup crisis in Myanmar.

On Wednesday, Bachelet said she had been engaging closely with most ASEAN states, and while she was encouraged by the five-point consensus, the Myanmar leadership had “unfortunately … shown little sign of abiding by it.”

Still, it was “very important to back ASEAN with a united front,” she said.

Myanmar is a member of the 10-nation bloc.

Tom Andrews, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, told the meeting that his door was open for the regional bloc and he was “eager to work with a special ASEAN envoy.”

However, the international community as a whole had failed the people of Myanmar with its inability to stop the junta’s “reign of terror,” he said.

Andrews called for the creation of an Emergency Coalition for the People of Myanmar, which would include nations willing to stand with the people of Myanmar through coordinated action.

“It could reduce the junta’s ability to attack its citizens, save the lives of those in acute crisis, and gain political leverage so that the crisis in Myanmar might come to a just and permanent conclusion,” Andrews said.

“But time is short and the stakes could not be higher.”

Divided bloc

ASEAN is divided, though, as was clear during a U.N. General Assembly vote last month on the adoption of a resolution on Myanmar. It called on the Burmese military to restore democratic rule, and urged U.N. members to “prevent the flow of arms” to the country, where security forces have killed close to 900 people – mostly protesters – since the Feb. 1 coup.

Four of 10 ASEAN member-states abstained from voting on the resolution. They included Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and this year’s ASEAN chair Brunei.

Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore had earlier expressed their frustration at the delay in the bloc’s naming of an envoy, amid reports of differences between member states on the issue and even on how to deal with Myanmar.

Japan’s Kyodo News reported on Tuesday, without naming sources, that Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia wanted their own nominees to be named envoy.

In written responses to parliamentary questions, Singaporean Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan acknowledged on Tuesday that ASEAN’s delay in implementing the consensus “has been slow and a little disappointing.”

Still, he told parliament, “[w]e are working within ASEAN to expedite this process” to set Myanmar back on the path of normalcy through negotiations with all stakeholders.

“This will not be an easy or quick process, and its success ultimately lies in the hands of the Myanmar people. Nonetheless, ASEAN will not waver in its commitment to facilitate and support this process in line with the five-point consensus,” Balakrishnan said.

Critics, though, see ASEAN as having lost any momentum it generated at the April 24 summit in Jakarta. The bloc’s collective inaction on Myanmar, in their view, has put ASEAN’s legitimacy at stake, even while the bloc insisted on playing a lead role in a solution there.

Among the critics, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, questioned this notion of ASEAN’s so-called centrality in resolving the Myanmar crisis.

“Why would anyone wait for ASEAN to take the lead in reversing the Myanmar coup when, five months later, ASEAN, hopelessly divided, cannot even agree on a special envoy,” Roth said via Twitter.

Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

The Chinese social media platform WeChat has deleted dozens of accounts belonging to LGBTQ+ groups at universities in recent days, social media posts have revealed.

Screenshots of notices sent to the holders of the deleted accounts said they had broken laws and regulations governing online content, amid concerns that the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is now targeting gay content and activism.

Many of the accounts were deleted at around the same time on Tuesday evening, Reuters quoted one of the account-holders as saying.

Some of the accounts had disappeared by Wednesday, while others carried notices that they had been suspended due to regulatory violations.

Others were renamed “Unnamed Official Account.”

An online post titled “Tonight, we are all unnamed official accounts” listed some of the affected groups, which included ColorsWorld at Peking University, Purple at Tsinghua University and RUC Sex and Gender Research Group at Renmin University.

Similar groups at Shanghai’s Fudan University, Wuhan University, and Nanjing University also had their accounts shut down.

The move by censors comes after the cancelation of Shanghai’s decade-old Pride event in 2020. The organizers, ShanghaiPRIDE, gave no reason for the decision, but local activists said the group had likely come under political pressure from the authorities.

The organization had previously been legally permitted to run the event by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

But ShanghaiPRIDE had also been involved in ongoing civil society activities in support of the LGBTQ community in China, including running seminars for the parents of LGBTQ people.

Activists said at the time that the cancellation of Shanghai Pride likely meant all LGBTQ+ groups would be affected.

The organizers of a planned LGBTQ+ conference in the northern city of Xian were forced to cancel in 2017 after official pressure.

Crackdowns by government censors

Government censors have since carried out a number of crackdowns on LGBTQ representation on social media, in books, comics, TV, and film.

In 2020, education authorities in Jinan, provincial capital of Shandong province, called for the “strengthening of political and ideological education” for students of foreign-invested schools, at both primary and secondary level.

The guidance was to include the view of homosexuality as “corrupt behavior imported from the West [that is] inconsistent with core socialist values.”

Activists said the crackdown stemmed in part from a conservative attitude to sexuality under the indefinite rule of CCP general secretary Xi Jinping, and partly from a fear that civil organizations are a threat to party rule.

Homosexuality was decriminalized in China in 1997, and removed from official psychiatric diagnostic manuals in 2001.

More and more highly educated urban Chinese have begun coming out in recent years, and while some find acceptance among their peers, social attitudes still strongly favor heterosexual marriage and children.

How many Chinese identify as LGBTQ+ is unknown. The country’s health and family planning ministry has estimated that there are between five and 10 million gay men in China, but activists say the actual number is far higher.

LGBTQ activists say there have been a growing number of anti-discrimination lawsuits filed by the community in China since around 2010, as well as some rare though unsuccessful bids to register same-sex marriages.

Reported by Cheng Yut Yiu for RFA’s Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Uyghur groups around the world have held demonstrations commemorating a violent crackdown on Uyghurs by Chinese authorities 12 years ago in the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), while the top U.S. diplomat has discussed the deepening repression of the largely Muslim ethnic minority group in northwestern China.

More than 200 Uyghurs, including many young people who came to the U.S as children, held an anti-China protest in Washington, D.C., marking the anniversary of the violent unrest in Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi). Demonstrators in the U.S. capital held both American flags and the light blue flags of East Turkestan, the Uyghur name for China’s Xinjiang region.

Some 200 people died and 1,700 were injured in the three-day rampage of violence that began on July 5, 2009, between ethnic minority Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Urumqi, according to China’s official figures, although Uyghur rights groups say the numbers are much higher.

The Uyghur Japanese Association held a protest in Shinjuku, a central ward in Tokyo, with the participation of not only Uyghurs living in Japan, but also Japanese citizens, Mongolians, and Hong Kongers.

The Germany-based World Uyghur Congress held a protest on July 5 in London, where Uyghur community members, Tibetans, and representatives from Hong Kong also participated in the event.

The Uyghur community in Switzerland held a protest in Bern, while Uyghurs based in Turkey commemorated the 2009 incident by holding 10 events in Istanbul, Ankara, Konya, and other cities.

Leaders of Uyghur organizations, members of the Uyghur diaspora, and Turkish supporters held a protest and press conference in front of Chinese Consulate in Istanbul on July 5, attended by thousands of people.

Uyghurs in Munich and Amsterdam also organized demonstrations in front of the Chinese embassies in these cities.

Uyghurs in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan gathered in mosques, halls, and cafés because they were not allowed to demonstrate, while diaspora members in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, held a meeting to commemorate the 12-year anniversary of July 5 unrest.

Only about 50 Uyghurs were allowed to attend the meeting organized by the Uyghur Association “Ittipaq” of Kyrgyzstan because of COVID-19 safety protocols limiting the number of people who can gather in public.

Blinken holds roundtable

On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met via videoconference with seven Uyghur internment camp survivors, advocates, and relatives of people detained in the XUAR to hear directly from them about abuses against the minority group.

The camps are believed by experts to have handled as many as 1.8 million people – roughly one-sixth of the XUAR’s 12 million Uyghurs – since 2017.

China says the camps are vocational training facilities set up to combat religious extremism and terrorism. But many teachers, intellectuals and prominent businessmen have been incarcerated in the system.

Blinken told the Uyghurs that that U.S. was committed to working with allies and partners in calling for an end to China’s ongoing crimes against humanity and genocide, according to a statement issued by State Department spokesman Ned Price.

“The United States will continue to place human rights at the forefront of our China policy and will always support the voices of activists, survivors, and family members of victims who courageously speak out against these atrocities,” the statement said.

The U.S. State Department determined in January that the Chinese government is perpetrating genocide against Uyghurs in the XUAR, citing internment camps that have held some 1.8 million people, some of whom have been tortured or subjected to other abuse.

The U.S. and several other countries have imposed sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for abuses against Uyghurs, as well as on Chinese government agencies and companies suspected of using Uyghur forced labor to make products such as cotton, wigs, tomatoes, and polysilicon for solar panels.

In Beijing on Wednesday, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the chief issue in the XUAR is combating terrorism, when asked about Blinken’s meeting with Uyghurs previously detained in the camps.

“As we’ve stressed time and again, issues relating to Xinjiang are not about ethnicity, religion or human rights, but about fighting violent terrorism, extremism and separatism,” he told a news conference. “The crimes of ‘abuse,’ ‘atrocity,’ or ‘genocide’ can never be attributed to China.”

“U.S. lies and rumors have been exposed by the fact and truth that Xinjiang enjoys stability and prosperity and residents there are leading happy and fulfilling lives,” Weng said, repeating Beijing’s stock response since the well-documented internment camp system came to light in 2017.

“The U.S. attempt to use human rights as a cover to mess up Xinjiang and contain China’s development will never succeed.”

Reported and translated by RFA’s Uygur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

A Hong Kong court on Wednesday found two university students guilty of “rioting” during the 2019 siege of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) campus by riot police.

Cheung Chun-ho, 20, and Tang Hei-man, 24, were seen throwing bricks and molotov cocktails towards the police as students sought to block the advance of riot police at a footbridge outside the university campus on Nov. 12, 2019, District Court judge Clement Lee told the court.

Lee said “the only reasonable conclusion” was that the two had been taking part in a riot.

Cheung was a student at the Institute of Vocational Education at the time, while Tang was at CUHK.

Two other defendants — former CUHK student Chan Hey-hang, 22, and Polytechnic University alumnus Lee Chun-ho, 25 — were acquitted of the same charge, as the prosecution failed to show that they were even at the scene, the court ruled after rejecting the testimony of their arresting officer.

Hong Kong police besieged CUHK on Nov. 12, 2019, tear gassing its president and pursuing fleeing students onto a sports field while unleashing a hail of rubber bullets and tear gas canisters.

A pall of smoke rose above the university after students set up barricades to prevent riot police from entering the campus, as President Rocky Tuan and other senior members of staff tried to negotiate with police to stand down and defuse the standoff.

Police said they had pursued students onto their campus near the New Territories town of Shatin to prevent them from throwing projectiles from a bridge down onto a nearby highway and subway tracks.

As tensions worsened later in the evening, officers opened fire with tear gas and rubber bullets towards Tuan, staff members, and a large group of students surrounding them, saying he should leave if he had no control over the black-clad protesters guarding the bridge with barricades and fires and lobbing petrol bombs and bricks.

The tear gassing that ensued near the No. 2 Bridge lasted for more than an hour, and left the area shrouded in smoke with all present wearing full-face respirators, social media reports and live video streams showed.

Protesters said via Twitter that the students were insisting that police stay away for fear that they would access Hong Kong’s internet exchange, which is located on the CUHK campus, and cut off the city’s access to the internet outside China.

Broken promises

Under the “one country, two systems” terms of the 1997 handover agreement, Hong Kong was promised the continuation of its traditional freedoms of speech, association, and expression, as well as progress towards fully democratic elections and a separate legal jurisdiction.

But plans to allow extradition to mainland China sparked a city-wide mass movement that broadened to demand fully democratic elections and an independent inquiry into police violence.

And an international alliance of scholars signed a petition condemning the use of “disproportionate force and retaliatory brutality” by the Hong Kong police against students in university campuses.

Rights groups have hit out at the rapid deterioration of human rights protections since the national security law was imposed on Hong Kong by China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) standing committee.

Chinese and Hong Kong officials say the law was needed to deal with an attempt by foreign powers to foment a “color revolution” in Hong Kong.

But its sweeping provisions allowed China’s feared state security police to set up a headquarters in Hong Kong, granted sweeping powers to police to search private property and require the deletion of public content, and criminalized criticism of the city government and the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Dozens of opposition lawmakers are awaiting trial for subversion for taking part in a democratic primary, while at least seven journalists have been arrested for “colluding with a foreign power” in connection with opinion pieces in the Apple Daily newspaper, which was forced to close after its assets were frozen in a raid by national security police on June 17.

The government has also asserted editorial control over public broadcaster RTHK, where a number of prominent journalists have been fired or sanctioned for producing content critical of the authorities.

And there are growing constraints on academic freedom at Hong Kong’s universities, with events canceled, debates modified, and lecturers reported by student informants over potential violations of the law.

Reported by Lau Siu Fung for RFA’s Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Proposed amendments to Hong Kong’s privacy laws banning “doxxing” are unnecesary and will likely add to the cost of doing business in the city, industry analysts told RFA.

The city government is tabling amendments to its Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance that would criminalize the sharing of other people’s personal data online.

But an industry group that includes Twitter, Facebook and Google recently wrote to the Hong Kong government with concerns over the use of the vaguely defined term “doxxing” in the planned amendments.

“Given that at present there is no universally accepted or acknowledged definition for ‘doxxing’, this gives rise to legitimate concerns that ‘doxxing; in the proposed amendments could have an overly broad interpretation such that even innocent acts of sharing of information online could be deemed unlawful,” the Asian Internet Coalition (AIC) said in a letter to Hong Kong’s government.

The lack of a clear definition for “doxxing,” which the letter said was described in the amendment as “acts that intrude into personal data privacy,” the government would hold huge discretionary power to restrict online content, the AIC warned.

“The scope of any restrictions on content and free expression should be clearly defined so that both intermediaries and users can better understand the aim, impact, and application of these regulations,” it said.

“By keeping the scope of the restrictions vague, significant discretionary authority lies with regulators to restrict content,” the AIC — whose members also include Airbnb, Amazon, Apple, Expedia, LinkedIn, LINE, Twitter, and Booking.com — warned.

“Introducing these amendments would effectively empower an independent statutory authority to a level akin to the Hong Kong Police Force itself, and in a manner that is highly unusual and out of step with international privacy developments,” it said.

Superfluous powers

Francis Fong of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation, said amendments to the privacy law appeared unnecessary, given that the government already holds powers to order the removal of online content under existing legislation.

“Government agencies can already request that social media platforms remove content under obscenity laws, the Copyright Ordinance and libel laws,” Fong told RFA.

“Google and Facebook transparency reports also show that these companies  have already been cooperating with the government to some extent.”

Simon Lee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) business school said the move will likely have an impact on Hong Kong’s perceived status as an international financial center.

“We had the [now-shelved] amendments to extradition laws in 2019, changes to company registration and to the Companies Ordinance,” Lee said.

“It seems there’s a convergence of not-so-positive developments happening in Hong Kong right now,” Lee told RFA. “These will all have a considerable impact over the medium-to-long term.”

He added: “While everyone understands the need for security, there is also the need to balance security with the freedom to do business in an international city, and an international financial hub.”

Lee said the recent forced closure of the pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper under a draconian national security law imposed by China from July 1, 2020 had also given the international community plenty of cause for concern.

“The possibility of having one’s home searched at any point is always there, because it’s very hard to gauge the level of risk,” he said.

Hong Kong’s constitutional and mainland affairs bureau dismissed an earlier report in the Wall Street Journal as “misleading,” saying the proposed amendments would likely be submitted to the Legislative Council, which is now devoid of any opposition members, by the end of the legislative year.

Reported by Gigi Lee and Cheng Yut Yiu for RFA’s Mandarin and Cantonese Services. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.