A CPJ investigation found Bassène could never have committed the crime, yet Senegal’s Supreme Court dismissed Bassène’s final appeal of a life sentence on May 3, 2025. Bassène was finalizing a fourth book on the separatist conflict in southern Senegal at the time of his arrest.

“As a son of Casamance, I wrote out of duty, for posterity so that the history of this conflict would not disappear from the collective memory and that it would never happen again,” said Bassène from the Aristide Le Dantec hospital in Dakar, the Senegalese capital, where he underwent a June 4 to repair an eardrum perforated during his arrest. He added, “I thank from the bottom of my heart all the signatories who believe in my innocence and are fighting for my release.”

Read the full letter in English here and in French here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

RNZ Pacific

Pacific climate activists this week handed a letter from civil society to this year’s United Nations climate conference hosts, Brazil, emphasising their demands for the end of fossil fuels and transition to renewable energy.

More than 180 indigenous, youth, and environmental organisations from across the world have signed the letter, coordinated by the campaign organisation, 350.org.

A declaration of alliance between Indigenous peoples from the Amazon, the Pacific, and Australia ahead of COP30 has also been announced.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific Climate Warrior reports

The “strongly worded letter” was handed to COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago and Brazil’s Environment and Climate Change Minister Marina Silva who attended the Acampamento Terra Livre (ATL), or Free Land Camp, in Brasília.

“We, climate and social justice organisations from around the world, urgently demand that COP30 renews the global commitment and supports implementation for the just, orderly, and equitable transition away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy,” the letter states.

“This must ensure that solutions progressively meet the needs of Indigenous, Black, marginalised and vulnerable populations and accelerate the expansion of renewables in a way that ensures the world’s wealthiest and most polluting nations pay their fair share, does not harm nature, increase deforestation by burning biomass, while upholding economic, social, and gender justice.”

‘No room for new coal mines’
It adds: “The science is unequivocal: there is no room for new coal mines or oil and gas fields if the world is to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — especially in critical ecosystems like the Amazon, where COP30 will be hosted.

“Tripling renewables by 2030 is essential, but without a managed and rapid phaseout of fossil fuels, it won’t be enough.”

350.org’s Fiji community organiser, George Nacewa, said it was now up to the Brazil COP Presidency if they would act “or lock us into climate catastrophe”.

“This is a critical time for our people — the age of deliberation is long past,” Nacewa said on behalf of the group that call themselves “Pacific Climate Warriors”.

“We need this COP to be the one that spearheads the Just Energy Transition from words to action.”

COP30 will take place in Belém, Brazil, from November 10-21.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Anarchism is an aspect of socialism (among many others) that those of us wishing socialism, or some comparable form of resistance, to survive will have to think about again, this time without a prearranged sneer.

— T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea

This December 9 marked 180 years since the birth of Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), the great Russian anarchist, sociologist, historian, zoologist, economist, and philosopher. Now, of all times, we should be remembering, revitalizing, and creatively reconstructing his legacy.

One might assume that a 19th century Russian anarchist would have nothing to say that could possibly have real bearing on the world today, that his political philosophy, whatever relevance it might have once held, had been long surpassed. I would dare to venture another point of view: not only are we unable to justify confining Kropotkin to the history (or worse, the dustbin) of ideas – rather, this is a thinker that remains still ahead of us, a thinker whose vision has yet to be truly realized. We have not yet caught up with Kropotkin, but there are indications that conditions more favorable to receiving his thought are on the horizon, and that perhaps there is a day approaching when we may even begin to see his ideas implemented on a scale that could radically transform our communities and, most especially, our workplaces.

Kropotkin’s importance for us has only grown because the material conditions, the post-scarcity, the technological advances, have made it possible, no doubt for the first time in history, to truly realize his vision of unfettered human creativity. There is one chapter in The Conquest of Bread (1892) that I want to focus on because it may surprise those who are new to anarcho-communist political philosophy. The chapter is entitled ‘The Need for Luxury,’ and his thesis is quite a simple one: “After bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim.” The anarchist commune — or what is sometimes referred to today as “luxury communism” — recognizes “that while it produces all that is necessary to material life, it must also strive to satisfy all manifestations of the human mind.”

We can agree with Aaron Bastani, who argues in Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2020) that, “There is a tendency in capitalism to automate labor, to turn things previously done by humans into automated functions. In recognition of that, then the only utopian demand can be for the full automation of everything and common ownership of that which is automated.” Bastani is talking about using the levels of post-scarcity and automation that we’ve attained to finally usher in a society free of drudgery, toil, and where the full range of tastes can be satisfied.

Given the multiple crises we are facing, the general name for which is global capitalism, how should we answer the question famously posed by Lenin, “What is to be done?” There are at least three basic principles which can be derived from the work of Kropotkin, and that can and should strategically guide us as we move forward. The first is ending the tyranny of private property which has produced greater economic inequality today than we have ever seen in the history of the world. The concentration of capital has produced a condition in which a handful of individuals possess wealth exceeding that of the combined wealth of the billions of people who share this planet. So, as the great French philosopher Alain Badiou has also reiterated, our first principle must be that of collectivism in opposition to the dictatorship of capital: “It is not a necessity for social organization to reside in private property and monstrous inequalities.”

The second principle involve democratizing our workplaces, through worker self-management, or more precisely through what the economist Richard Wolff calls ‘worker self-directed enterprises – in a word, economic democracy. Experiments with non-traditional, non-hierarchical firms, have largely met with success. Perhaps the greatest example is Spain’s Mondrian Corporation, but there are many others. So that we are well past the stage of asking ourselves whether such non-capitalist forms of organization can succeed and be competitive. It has been amply proven that they indeed can.

The non-capitalist reorganization of our workplaces would undoubtedly improve the condition of workers, which is under assault around the world. In countries around the world, union leaders are routinely threatened with violence or murdered. Indeed, the International Trade Union Confederation reports that 2019 saw “the use of extreme violence against the defenders of workplace rights, large-scale arrests and detentions.” The number of countries which do not allow workers to establish or join a trade union increased from 92 in 2018 to 107 in 2019. In 2018, 53 trade union members were murdered — and in 52 counties workers were subjected to physical violence. In 72 percent of countries, workers have only restricted access to justice or none at all. As Noam Chomsky observed, “Policies are designed to undermine working class organization and the reason is not only the unions fight for workers’ rights, but they also have a democratizing effect. These are institutions in which people without power can get together, support one another, learn about the world, try out their ideas, initiate programs, and that is dangerous.”

And third, it is time we recognize, as Badiou put it two weeks after the election of Trump, “that there is no necessity for a state in the form of a separated and armed power.” The principle of free association as opposed to the state is one that anarchism has long advocated. But we need to be clear here: anarchism is usually taken to mean, if anything, opposition to all government or to government as such. In fact, this is a mistakenly one-sided view of anarchism, and it certainly does not represent a nuanced understanding of Kropotkin, who made a clear and sharp distinction between government and the state.

Anarcho-communism is opposed to the state inasmuch as it represents centralized power in the hands of a few, hierarchical relationships and class domination. But Kropotkin was not necessarily opposed to a condition of society in which certain elements of decentralized community government remain. Martin Buber underscored this point: Kropotkin’s “‘anarchy’ like Proudhon’s, is in reality ‘anocracy’; not absence of government, but absence of domination.” The distinctive feature of anarchist programs is not that governments are excluded from the process and without any meaningful contribution to make. The essential characteristics are voluntarism, anti-authoritarianism, the decentralization of political authority, worker self-management (economic democracy), and in general a tendency to address social problems from the bottom up, rather than by imposing solutions from the top down.

Kropotkin was one of Russia’s finest minds, and one that was among the most dedicated to the ideals of which we are in danger of completely losing sight. There is no better time than now to salvage the very best of Russian thought, to reaffirm its universality, its inherently critical posture towards authoritarianism, and the self-destructive pursuit of power through violence.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sam Ben-Meir.

Thousands of workers walked off their jobs in mid-December, demanding higher wages and the reinstatement of several jailed union leaders and 365 workers they say were unjustly fired from the hotel and casino, which is owned by a Hong Kong-based company believed to have connections to family members of Cambodia Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Cambodian authorities have called the strike “illegal” and alleged that it is supported by foreign donors as a plot to topple the government. But a series of arrests in recent weeks have been attributed to alleged violations of pandemic health regulations in Cambodia’s capital. Activists said the charges were trumped up to break up the strike.

On Monday, dozens of security officers forced the 180 strikers onto buses and transported them to a quarantine center in the city’s suburbs for processing. The workers maintain that they have been following quarantine rules.

“The authorities accuse us relentlessly. I ask where is the will to find a solution for the people who have been exploited by foreign companies? Where is the justice for the Cambodian people?” Miech Srey Oun, a worker who has now been arrested twice, told RFA’s Khmer Service.

“The company tried to turn our dispute with the company over to the authorities, even though we, the workers, had a dispute with the employers only, not with the authorities,” she said.

Miech Srey Oun said that a bus released the workers into the hot sun. The strikers were not given food and water, she said.

Chinn Usaphea, another striking casino employee, told RFA that the strike is a last resort. She and her coworkers exhausted all other options in hope of resolving their dispute with NagaWorld. She is now calling on Hun Sen to step in and solve the dispute.

“As citizen, I would like to ask the Samdech father Hun Sen to look at his children in NagaWorld, because we need to be stable in the workplace and to have unions in the workplace,” she said. 

“He should tell the relevant ministries to stand neutral to encourage the NagaWorld employers to come out and deal with their grieving staff to end this long-standing dispute,” she said.

RFA could not reach Phnom Penh City Hall spokesman Met Meas Pheakdey and Ministry of Labor spokesman Heng Sour for comment.

The authorities should release the detained union representatives and let them solve the issue with NagaWorld, Ny Sokha, president of the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association, told RFA.

Once the union leaders are free, they can negotiate and the strikers would have no reason to demonstrate, he said.

He noted that the government, which has called for talks to end the war in Ukraine, could handle this much smaller dispute.

“This is such a small thing compared to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. So, I think the government is not so incompetent that it cannot solve the NagaWorld issue,” he said.  “But this depends on the will of the government to solve the problem. That requires will of the government to uphold justice for the workers, who need help from the government.”

On March 4, two NagaWorld strikers were placed under judicial surveillance in connection with allegations that they had prevented other NagaWorld workers from taking COVID-19 tests, which the two workers denied. 

As one of the largest casinos in Phnom Penh, NagaWorld had a total of over 8,000 workers before the strike. The number has been reduced to slightly over 6,000 after the cutbacks that caused the strike.

Translated by Sok Ry Sum. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.