Category: Communist regimes

Leading Cuban Dissident’s ‘Moments of Optimism’ About Political Change

     

“We are suffering more arrests. They [state security forces] are beating us hard,” dissident Antonio Rodiles tells The Guardian’s Naomi Larson: It seems he has become desensitised to this violence…. Read more »

Post-Soviet Eurasia: What’s Gone Wrong?

     

After a quarter-century, the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union looks like a de-democratizing event. Leading up to that fateful year, Mikhail Gorbachev had been one of the world’s great… Read more »

China: TV Trials ‘Signal New Phase in Attack on Rights’

     

Chinese lawyers and rights activists appeared in televised trials throughout this week in what seemed to be a new, more public phase of President Xi Jinping’s campaign to cleanse the… Read more »

Zhou Shifeng sentence highlights China’s crackdown on dissent

     

  A court in China jailed a prominent human rights lawyer for seven years on Thursday for subverting the government, state media said, the latest in a string of convictions… Read more »

Government specter hovers over foreign NGOs in China

     

  The European Union should press China to end its crackdown on civil society and peaceful dissent, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to European Commission President Jean-Claude… Read more »

China’s Lhasa Consensus ‘can’t hide the rot underneath’

     

  China last week held a two-day Tibet Development Forum in Lhasa attended by 130 people from 30 countries and organized by the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department, VOA’s Yeshi Dorje… Read more »

Elie Wiesel stood for solidarity, not neutrality

     

  “We must always take sides,” said Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who passed away last week. “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.  Silence… Read more »

Why China is the big winner from Brexit

     

  Publicly, China has lamented Britain’s decision to walk out on the EU. But there was a definite silver lining for Xi Jinping’s increasingly authoritarian China, “[and] it won’t have taken… Read more »

Cuba ‘open for business’, closed to dissent

     

Cuba may be open for business, but it remains closed to dissent, according to a retired career American diplomat. “Despite President Obama’s best intentions, no improvement on the human rights… Read more »