Indonesian fishers who sued Bumble Bee, alleging years of forced labor while catching fish sold by the U.S. tuna brand, responded to the company's motion to dismiss their suit, arguing in the U.S. legal filing on July 31 that they have a right to have their allegations heard in court. This image was taken by Greenpeace USA activists in solidarity with these fishers. (Photo: Sandy Huffaker/Greenpeace)

On July 31, Indonesian fishers who sued Bumble Bee, alleging years of forced labor while catching fish sold by the U.S. tuna brand, responded to the company’s motion to dismiss their suit, arguing that they have a right to have their allegations heard in court.

The reply contends that, the plaintiffs plausibly allege, and Bumble Bee does not dispute, that the plaintiffs were forced to labor by the vessel owners and argues the company was long specifically aware of such abuses in its supply chain, asserting this meets the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) standard. The reply also defends the plaintiffs’ negligence claims, stating Bumble Bee’s actions created both risk of forced labor and incentive for the vessel owners to abuse the plaintiffs.

The fishers filed suit against Bumble Bee in March under the TVPRA, one of the first times the seafood industry has been challenged under this Act in a U.S. court. The four fishers allege conditions of forced labor: that they were held in debt bondage, denied fair wages, isolated at sea for months, and subjected to both physical and psychological abuse while catching tuna that was sold by Bumble Bee in the U.S.

Sari Heidenreich, senior human rights advisor at Greenpeace USA, said: “The plaintiffs’ reply is clear — their case meets the high standards required by U.S. law and should be heard by the court. I am confident they will prevail.”

According to the reply, Bumble Bee sources 95% to 100% of its albacore through its Taiwanese parent company, Fong Chun Formosa (FCF), and a ‘trusted network’ of vessels. The reply argues that many of the vessels in that network, including those “the plaintiffs were forced to work” on, fish exclusively for Bumble Bee. The plaintiffs argue their experiences reflect a broader pattern, partially enabled by Bumble Bee’s continued use of transshipment — a practice widely criticized by experts and increasingly abandoned by other major seafood companies due to its links to forced labor.

Heidenreich continued: “Rather than act to ensure that workers in their supply chain are protected from forced labor and abuse, Bumble Bee has attempted to sweep them aside through a procedural motion. This move is more than just a legal strategy; it is an attempt to avoid accountability, silence vulnerable workers, and protect corporate interests over human dignity. Without attempting to remedy any harms that occurred on these vessels and improving that workplace for current and future workers, this is akin to the practice of ‘cut and run’, which experts agree is irresponsible and leaves workers in an even more vulnerable situation.

“In response to consumer demand, Bumble Bee has allowed customers to trace each can of tuna they buy back to the boat that caught it. But in its Motion to Dismiss, it attempted to distance itself from these same suppliers. Bumble Bee cannot have it both ways. The TVPRA and trade law make clear that corporate responsibility doesn’t stop at the U.S. border. Companies that cannot take responsibility for the products they sell have no business profiting from them.

“A just and sustainable seafood industry must prioritize the well-being of all its stakeholders — from the migrant fishers working under dangerous conditions to the American consumers who have made it clear: they do not want seafood tainted by modern slavery or environmental destruction.”

A letter expressing solidarity with these individuals was released today by 45 organizations from eight countries. The signers, which include the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), Friends of the Earth, and Freedom United, condemn human trafficking, while expressing support for the right of all individuals to seek justice and demand accountability. They also highlight the essential and inseparable relationship between healthy oceans and decent work.

Greenpeace USA continues to call for decisive action from every actor in the seafood supply chain to help end isolation at sea. This includes mandating:

• Free, accessible, and secure wifi on all fishing vessels to allow fishers to have contact with their families, unions, and governments;
• Capping time at sea at three months to reduce the risk of human rights abuse, forced labor, and human trafficking; and
• 100% human or electronic observer coverage to ensure vital data on catch composition, bycatch, interactions with protected species, and overall fishing practices are reported by independent and impartial parties.

In addition, unionization and the right of association are essential to empowering workers across all parts of the seafood supply chain. Accessible, secure, and responsive grievance mechanisms — available both on land and at sea — must become a standard in the industrial fishing industry. These tools are critical not just for addressing abuses when they occur but also for preventing them in the first place.

At least 128,000 fishers worldwide are victims of forced labor, which is strongly connected to other fisheries-related crimes, such as illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. These activities significantly contribute to the worsening of the ocean and climate crises.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

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New York Times (7/22/25)

This week on CounterSpin: The mainstream US media debate on the starvation and violence and war crimes in Gaza still, in July 2025, makes room for Bret Stephens, who explains in the country’s paper of record that Israel can’t be committing genocide as rights groups claim, because if they were, they’d be much better at it. Says Stephens:

It may seem harsh to say, but there is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal—if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans—why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly?

“It may seem harsh to say” is a time-honored line from those who want to note but justify human suffering, or excuse the crimes of the powerful. It looks bad to you, is the message, because you’re stupid. If you were smart, like me, you’d understand that your empathy is misplaced; these people suffering need to suffer in order to…. Well, they don’t seem to feel a need to fully explain that part. Something about democracy and freeing the world from, like, suffering.

It’s true that corporate media are now gesturing toward engaging questions of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. But what does that amount to at this late date? We’ll talk about corporate media’s Gaza coverage with independent reporter and frequent FAIR.org contributor Ari Paul.

Disability Scoop (8/1/25)

Also on the show: The Americans with Disabilities Act is generally acknowledged in July, with a lot of anodyne “come a long way, still a long way to go” type of reporting. There’s an opening for a different sort of coverage this month, as the Trump administration is actively taking apart laws that protect disabled people in the workplace, and cutting off healthcare benefits, and disabled kids’ educational rights, and rescinding an order that would have moved disabled workers to at least the federal minimum wage; and, with a recent executive order, calling on localities to forcibly institutionalize any unhoused people someone decides is mentally ill or drug-addicted or just living on the street.

Does that serve the hedge funds pricing homes out of reach of even full-time workers? Yes. Does it undercut years of evidence-based work about moving people into homes and services? Absolutely. Does it aim to rocket us back to a dark era of criminalizing illness and disability and poverty? Of course. But Trump calls it “ending crime and disorder,” so you can bet elite media will honor that viewpoint in their reporting. We’ll get a different view from Scout Katovich, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

New Zealand has joined 24 other countries in calling for an end to the war in Gaza, and criticising what they call the inhumane killing of Palestinians.

The countries — including Britain, France, Canada and Australia plus the European Union — also condemed the Israeli government’s aid delivery model in Gaza as “dangerous”.

“We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.”

• READ MORE: At least 65 killed in Gaza attacks as Israel sends tanks into Deir el-Balah
• UK, France and 23 other nations demand Israel’s war on Gaza ‘must end now’
• PSNA calls on NZ to urgently condemn Israeli weaponisation of starvation
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

They said it was “horrifying” that more than 800 civilians had been killed while seeking aid, the majority at food distribution sites run by a US- and Israeli-backed foundation.

“We call on the Israeli government to immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid and to urgently enable the UN and humanitarian NGOs to do their life saving work safely and effectively,” it said.

“Proposals to remove the Palestinian population into a ‘humanitarian city’ are completely unacceptable. Permanent forced displacement is a violation of international humanitarian law.”

The statement said the countries were “prepared to take further action” to support an immediate ceasefire.

Reuters reported Israel’s foreign ministry said the statement was “disconnected from reality” and it would send the wrong message to Hamas.

“The statement fails to focus the pressure on Hamas and fails to recognise Hamas’s role and responsibility for the situation,” the Israeli statement said.

Having NZ voice heard
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters told RNZ Morning Report, New Zealand had chosen to be part of the statement as a way to have its voice heard on the “dire” humanitarian situation in Gaza.

“The tipping point was some time ago . . .  it’s gotten to the stage where we’ve just lost our patience . . . ”

Peters said he wanted to see what the response to the condemnation was.

“The conflict in the Middle East goes on and on . . .  It’s gone from a situation where it was excusable, due to the October 7 conflict, to inexcusable as innocent people are being swept into it,” he said.

“I do think there has to be change. It must happen now.”

The war in Gaza was triggered when Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1200 people and taking 251 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel’s subsequent air and ground war in Gaza has killed more than 59,000 Palestinians — including at least 17,400 children, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry, while displacing almost the entire population of more than 2 million and spreading a hunger crisis.

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

Israel has rejected a statement by 25 countries calling for an end to the war on Gaza as a move “disconnected from reality and sends the wrong message to Hamas.”

LIVE updates: https://t.co/iILghl87p3 pic.twitter.com/McUxk6PYMr

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) July 21, 2025

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

Having figured out how to parlay presidential authority in foreign affairs in order to sidestep the Constitution, President Trump is using his immigration enforcement powers to lock up—and lock down—the nation.

Under the guise of national security and public safety, the Trump administration is engineering the largest federal expansion of incarceration and detention powers in U.S. history.

At the center of this campaign is Alligator Alcatraz, a federal detention facility built in the Florida Everglades and hailed by the White House as a model for the future of federal incarceration. But this is more than a new prison—it is the architectural symbol of a carceral state being quietly constructed in plain sight.

With over $170 billion allocated through Trump’s megabill, we are witnessing the creation of a vast, permanent enforcement infrastructure aimed at turning the American police state into a prison state.

The scope of this expansion is staggering.

The bill allocates $45 billion just to expand immigrant detention—making ICE the best-funded federal law enforcement agency in American history.

Yet be warned: what begins with ICE rarely ends with ICE.

Trump’s initial promise to crack down on “violent illegal criminals” has evolved into a sweeping mandate: a mass, quota-driven roundup campaign that detains anyone the administration deems a threat, regardless of legal status and at significant expense to the American taxpayer.

Tellingly, the vast majority of those being detained have no criminal record. And like so many of the Trump administration’s grandiose plans, the math doesn’t add up.

Just as Trump’s tariffs have failed to revive American manufacturing and instead raised consumer prices, this detention-state spending spree will cost taxpayers far more than it saves. It’s estimated that undocumented workers contribute an estimated $96 billion in federal, state and local taxes each year, and billions more in Social Security and Medicare taxes that they can never claim.

Making matters worse, many of these detained immigrants are then exploited as a pool of cheap labor inside the very facilities where they’re held.

The implications for Trump’s detention empire are chilling.

At a time when the administration is promising mass deportations to appease anti-immigrant hardliners, it is simultaneously constructing a parallel economy in which detained migrants can be pressed into near-free labor to satisfy the needs of industries that depend on migrant work.

What Trump is building isn’t just a prison state—it’s a forced labor regime, where confinement and exploitation go hand in hand. And it’s a high price to pay for a policy that creates more problems than it solves.

As the enforcement dragnet expands, so does the definition of who qualifies as an enemy of the state—including legal U.S. residents arrested for their political views.

The Trump administration is now pushing to review and revoke the citizenship of Americans it deems national security risks—targeting them for arrest, detention, and deportation.

Unfortunately, the government’s definition of “national security threat” is so broad, vague, and unconstitutional that it could encompass anyone engaged in peaceful, nonviolent, constitutionally protected activities—including criticism of government policy or the policies of allied governments like Israel.

In Trump’s prison state, no one is beyond the government’s reach.

Critics of the post-9/11 security state—left, right, and libertarian alike—have long warned that the powers granted to fight terrorism and control immigration would eventually be turned inward, used against dissidents, protestors, and ordinary citizens.

That moment has arrived.

Yet Trump’s most vocal supporters remain dangerously convinced they have nothing to fear from this expanding enforcement machine. But history—and the Constitution—say otherwise.

Our founders understood that unchecked government power, particularly in the name of public safety, poses the most significant threat to liberty. That’s why they enshrined rights like due process, trial by jury, and protection from unreasonable searches.

Those safeguards are now being hollowed out.

Trump’s detention expansion—like the mass surveillance programs before it—is not about making America safe. It’s about following the blueprints for authoritarian control in order to lock down the country.

The government’s targets may be the vulnerable today—but the infrastructure is built for everyone: Trump’s administration is laying the legal groundwork for indefinite detention of citizens and noncitizens alike.

This is not just about building prisons. It’s about dismantling the constitutional protections that make us free.

A nation cannot remain free while operating as a security state. And a government that treats liberty as a threat will soon treat the people as enemies.

This is not a partisan warning. It is a constitutional one.

We are dangerously close to losing the constitutional guardrails that keep power in check.

The very people who once warned against Big Government—the ones who decried the surveillance state, the IRS, and federal overreach—are now cheering for the most dangerous part of it: the unchecked power to surveil, detain, and disappear citizens without full due process.

Limited government, not mass incarceration, is the backbone of liberty.

The Founders warned that the greatest threat to liberty was not a foreign enemy, but domestic power left unchecked. That’s exactly what we’re up against now. A nation cannot claim to defend freedom while building a surveillance-fueled, prison-industrial empire.

Trump’s prison state is not a defense of America. It’s the destruction of everything America was meant to defend.

We can pursue justice without abandoning the Constitution. We can secure our borders and our communities without turning every American into a suspect and building a federal gulag.

But we must act now.

History has shown us where this road leads. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, once the machinery of tyranny is built, it rarely stays idle.

If we continue down this path, cheering on bigger prisons, broader police powers, and unchecked executive authority—if we fail to reject the dangerous notion that more prisons, more power, and fewer rights will somehow make us safer—if we fail to restore the foundational limits that protect us from government overreach before those limits are gone for good—we may wake up to find that the prisons and concentration camps the police state is building won’t just hold others.

One day, they may hold us all.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

It is worth noting that Bihar is infamous for such ‘forced’ marriages, also known as ‘Pakadwa Vivah’, in which eligible grooms with secure government jobs are often kidnapped and forced to marry women related to the perpetrators. Over the past few decades, several such cases from Bihar have come to light.

X account @thenewsbasket shared the video of the man being dragged in front of students on June 6, 2025, with the claim that a government school teacher was taken away for ‘forced marriage’ at gunpoint. At the time this was written, the post had over 800,000 views. (Archive)

बेगूसराय के एक सरकारी स्कूल टीचर को बंदूक की नोक पर पकड़वा कर शादी करवाने के लिए ले जाया जा रहा pic.twitter.com/z1jmyoSGOu

— The News Basket (@thenewsbasket) June 6, 2025

X handle @BasavanIndia also shared the video, questioning the state of law and order in Bihar. (Archive)

The video was also shared by X user @iamharunkhan who claimed this was the ‘ground reality’ in Bihar and not a ‘movie plot’. (Archive)

Fact Check

A quick search using keywords related to the video and claims led us to a March 23, 2025, report published on TV9 Bharatvarsh that had the same video. According to the report, the video was recorded at the Dularpur Math Middle School in the Teghra subdivision of Begusarai and depicts the shooting of a film named ‘Pakadwah Byaah’. The video simply shows a movie scene being shot where a teacher is forcibly dragged away. However, some had raised concerns on whether the film was shot during school hours and the District Education Officer even ordered an inquiry. The principal, cited in the report, had clarified that the filming happened on a Sunday.

We also found a video of the same scene recorded from a different angle in a March 12, 2025, Instagram post uploaded by user @rajanrddfilms, a filmmaker and actor associated with the film ‘Pakadwah Byaah’. The post’s caption also makes it clear that the video is from the shooting of the film.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Rajan Rock (@rajanrddfilms)

To sum up, social media users shared a video of a movie scene being filmed in a school in Bihar with misleading claims that a teacher of a government school in Begusarai was actually kidnapped for marriage.

The post School teacher kidnapped in Bihar’s Begusarai for ‘forced marriage’? No; viral video is from a film shooting appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

According to the report by Hague-based rights group Global Rights Compliance, 77 companies and downstream manufacturers of critical minerals-based products operate in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), placing them at risk of participation in the labor transfer programs in the lithium, titanium, beryllium, and magnesium industries.

The findings are likely to add to the due diligence concerns of foreign and multinational companies that source those products. Forced labor is on a long list of serious human rights problems that have been documented in Xinjiang, where the U.S. government determined in 2021 that China was committing genocide against the Uyghurs.

The Uyghur region is a major source of four critical minerals. It is the top source of beryllium, crucial for nuclear applications and advanced electronics, and one of the five province-level jurisdictions that produces raw magnesium. The region is also seeing a surge in lithium exploration, mining, and battery production to feed the electric vehicle industry, and accounts for 11.6% of the world’s titanium sponge, a key input in titanium metal that is used in aerospace and defense.

Over the past decade, Beijing has expanded exploration, mining, processing and manufacturing of critical minerals in the XUAR, transforming the region into a major “extractive hub,” Global Rights Compliance said in its report titled “Risk at the Source: Critical Mineral Supply Chains and State-Imposed Forced Labor in the Uyghur Region.”

China dominates global mineral production. The country leads production of 30 out of the 44 minerals that the U.S. government has designated as critical.

(Global Rights Compliance)

“The emergence of the region as an extractive hub relies, in part, on state-imposed forced labor transfer programs, targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic groups,” the rights group said.

The report highlights the “substantial influence” that these critical minerals – found abundantly in XUAR – have on global supply chains and multinational brands, including leading paint companies, aerospace applications, thermos producers, and defense and nuclear tools and components.

It uncovers 15 companies with documented sourcing directly from Uyghur region-based companies in the last two years and 68 downstream customers of Chinese producers who source inputs from the Uyghur region, highlighting the risk of companies’ direct and indirect participation in the forced labor programs.

“The XUAR’s systemic forced labor practices are not only a means to subsidize operating costs but also facilitate the government’s persecution of the Uyghur population through familial separation, land expropriation, and forced re-education,” Global Rights Alliance said.

The report highlights that China’s practices in the Uyghur region create unfair competitive advantages and trade and environmental violations that extend beyond human rights concerns.

Lax environmental standards and heavy dependence on coal have also made the region the epicenter of the energy-intensive mineral mining and processing industry and have enabled goods to enter global markets at artificially low prices, it said.

“Minerals mined and/or refined in the region routinely enter global supply chains through unregulated or opaque mineral distribution channels. As a result, significant portions of the world’s economy are potentially exposed to products tainted by forced labor and high carbon footprints,” the rights group added.

The report’s findings were based on analyses of state media, shipping records, and marketing and corporate annual reports.

Edited by Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Tenzin Pema for RFA.

In January, following President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the USDA’s communications office instructed employees to “identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change” and flag other pages that mention climate for review — a policy first reported by Politico. The following month, the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, or NOFA-NY, joined the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group in suing the agency to republish the pages, which included information about federal loans for farmers and an interactive climate map. 

This week, the USDA filed a letter to a U.S. district judge in the Southern District of New York saying that it “will restore the climate-change-related web content that was removed post-inauguration, including all USDA web pages and interactive tools enumerated in plaintiffs’ complaint.” The agency said it would also comply with federal laws with respect to “future publication or posting decisions” involving the scrubbed climate information. The letter came days before a hearing regarding the plaintiffs’ move for a preliminary injunction was scheduled to take place.

NOFA-NY, an organization that advocates for sustainable food systems and assists growers with adopting organic farming practices, called the USDA’s about-face “a big win” for its members. 

“I have to say that, for as much as farmers have been through in the past couple of months, this felt really good,” said Marcie Craig, the association’s executive director.

NOFA-NY and the other plaintiffs are represented by the nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. 

The fact that the USDA agreed to restore its climate resources online without a court order and before the scheduled hearing “reinforces what we knew all along,” said Earthjustice associate attorney Jeff Stein, “which is that the purge of climate change-related web pages is blatantly unlawful.”

The development marks a rare moment of optimism for U.S. growers, who have faced numerous setbacks from the Trump administration. Since January, the administration has sent shockwaves through the agricultural sector as it paused federal grant and loan programs that supported local and regional food systems and farmers’ climate resiliency efforts. The administration also froze funding for rural clean energy programs, only to unfreeze it with caveats, creating headaches and financial stress for growers. Federal funding cuts have also threatened the status of agricultural research, including projects designed to boost sustainability in the face of climate change. 

In the face of these roadblocks, Craig noted that her optimism tempered with a healthy dose of skepticism. “I think we all bear a level of cautious optimism about what actually comes to fruition on this action,” she said. As of Thursday, the USDA has restored pages about the Inflation Reduction Act and rural clean energy programs, while other pages remain offline, according to Earthjustice. But Craig agreed with Stein that the USDA’s decision to restore resources that help farmers adapt to climate change without a hearing or court order is a “positive” sign. 

The purge of climate web pages, along with the federal funding freezes, have been “crippling” for farmers, said Craig. 

NOFA-NY staff often responded to growers’ questions by sharing the USDA’s online resources. One particularly helpful tool, said Craig, was a page about loans for “climate-smart agriculture,” or farming practices that help sequester carbon or reduce emissions, on the website of the Farmers Service Agency, a subagency of the USDA. The page included a chart that listed the practical and environmental benefits of different climate-smart agriculture techniques, as well as federal funding opportunities to help farmers implement these practices.

It was a “really great example of very specific, clear information” on climate adaptation, “very user-friendly,” said Craig.

Even if those funding sources were technically still available to farmers this winter and spring, the fact that web pages referring to those grants and loans were scrubbed made them inaccessible, she added.

A few days before the USDA filed its letter to the judge, the agency had alerted the plaintiffs’ lawyers of its decision to reupload its climate data, according to Stein. In its letter on Monday, the USDA said most of the content should be back online over the course of the following two weeks; the department also committed to filing a joint status report with Earthjustice and the Knight First Amendment Institute in three weeks to update the court on its progress. 

The hearing that the USDA and the plaintiffs were set to attend later this month has been adjourned. But, Stein said, the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction — which, if granted by a judge, would have ordered the USDA to put back up its climate-related web pages — is still pending. That means that, should the USDA not make progress toward republishing its climate resources online over the next few weeks, the plaintiffs have another way to push their demands forward.

“We want to make sure that USDA in fact follows through on its commitment,” said Stein.

Editor’s note: Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council are advertisers with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s USDA tried to erase climate data. This lawsuit forced it back online. on May 15, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Idaho Statesman. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Time and again, the U.S. Department of Education has been the last resort for parents who say the state of Idaho has failed to educate their children. The federal agency in 2023 ordered Idaho to stop blocking some students with learning disabilities, like dyslexia, from special education. That same year, it flagged that the state’s own reviews of districts and charters obscured the fact that just 20% were fully complying with the federal disability law. Last year, it told the state it must end long delays in services for infants and toddlers with disabilities, which could include speech or physical therapy.

Now President Donald Trump has pledged to dismantle the department.

Idaho’s superintendent of public instruction Debbie Critchfield has celebrated the proposal. She insisted that the move would not change the requirement that states provide special education to students who need it. That would take an act of Congress.

But parents and advocates for students with disabilities say they are worried that no one will effectively ensure schools follow special education law.

“Historically, when left to their own devices, states don’t necessarily do the right thing for kids with disabilities and their families,” said Larry Wexler, a former division director at the federal Office of Special Education Programs, who retired last year after decades at the department.

Former federal Education Department employees who worked on special education monitoring said oversight measures would likely be hampered by the layoffs, which included attorneys who worked with the special education office to provide state monitoring reports.

Gregg Corr, a former division director with that office, said that without the group of attorneys who were focused on enforcing special education law, it will be “really difficult for staff to finalize and issue these reports to states.” He added there may also be a reluctance to take on more complicated issues without running them by attorneys.

“What might have been, you know, inconsistent with the legal requirements six months ago may be fine now — it just depends on how it’s interpreted,” Wexler said.

For parents who have been fighting for services for years, the federal oversight has been critical.

After Ashley Brittain, an attorney and mom to children with dyslexia, moved to Idaho in 2021, she realized a key problem: Idaho’s criteria for qualifying students with specific learning disabilities such as dyslexia or dysgraphia was so narrow it disqualified some eligible students from receiving services, she said.

Historically, when left to their own devices, states don’t necessarily do the right thing for kids with disabilities and their families.

Together with Robin Zikmund, the founder of Decoding Dyslexia Idaho who has a son with dyslexia and dysgraphia, Brittain has spent years trying to get the state to acknowledge the disability and provide services to dozens of kids who needed help.

“We’re at the table time and time again, at the eligibility table, where school teams wouldn’t qualify our dyslexic students,” Zikmund previously told the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica. “And it was like, ‘What is going on?’”

Brittain called state officials and told them they were breaking the law. State officials disagreed. No one took action, she said. In 2022, she wrote to the Office of Special Education Programs. In the letter she sent to the federal department, she said the Idaho Department of Education, under former superintendent Sherri Ybarra, was “refusing to entertain any conversations” about changing the way it determined which students were eligible for special education. Ybarra could not be reached for comment.

Before Congress passed what is now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975 and created the U.S. Department of Education as an agency under the Cabinet about five years later, Brittain would have been on her own.

At the time, nearly 1.8 million students with disabilities weren’t being served by the public schools, according to estimates. Some states had laws prohibiting students with certain disabilities from attending public schools, according to the federal government’s own history.

The law granted students with disabilities access to a “free appropriate public education” — fitting the individual needs of the student — and gave money to states to fulfill the promise. Now, the law also guarantees infants and toddlers with disabilities access to early interventions, such as physical or speech therapy.

The U.S. Department of Education has since been responsible for making sure states follow the law, providing reviews of state performance, distributing money and offering technical assistance to help states improve learning outcomes for students in special education.

The department conducts an annual review of each state, and a more intensive one that’s supposed to be completed roughly every five years. The annual reviews look at discipline numbers, graduation rates and test scores to identify problems and help states to fix them. A five-year review includes a visit to the state and a look at state policies, student data and annual reports. When states need to take corrective action, the federal special education office monitors that they are making the changes.

Idaho is one of about a dozen states currently being monitored, according to the most recent updates on the federal agency’s website.

We’re at the table time and time again, at the eligibility table, where school teams wouldn’t qualify our dyslexic students. And it was like, ‘What is going on?’

Parent complaints can also trigger a review, as was the case with Brittain in Idaho. After Brittain alleged that the state was wrongfully keeping kids with dyslexia and other disabilities from special education, she waited over a year before she got an answer from the Office of Special Education Programs: She was right. Idaho, it turned out, accepted a lower percentage of students with specific learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, into special education compared to other states — about half the national average, according to the most recent data reported to the U.S. Department of Education from the 2022-2023 school year.

By then, Idaho had a new state superintendent of public instruction, Critchfield, for whom Brittain campaigned. The Office of Special Education Programs told Critchfield in 2023 that the state needed to demonstrate its policies complied with federal law or update them.

In response, the Idaho Department of Education has updated its special education manual, which has since been approved by the Legislature. It has also directed school districts to review every student found ineligible for special education since 2023 to determine if they needed to be reevaluated.

Parents in Idaho celebrated the victory, which could make it easier for some kids to qualify in a state that has one of the lowest percentages of students who receive special education. But they acknowledged the fix wasn’t perfect and left out students who may have been found ineligible for special education before the federal office identified the problem. The state isn’t tracking the number of students who have since qualified due to the change.

Nicole Fuller, a policy manager at the National Center for Learning Disabilities, said a case like this, in which some students are being missed, “truly underscores the need for federal oversight, and, of course, holding states accountable for accurately identifying disabilities.”

Federal oversight isn’t perfect. By the time Idaho addressed Brittain’s complaint, the state had been out of compliance since at least 2015. States that fall out of compliance can be at risk of losing federal funding, although that penalty does not appear to have been used in decades.

The federal government has never fulfilled its promise to fund 40% of each state’s special education costs, but Idaho relied on federal funding for about 18% — around $60 million — of its special education budget during the 2022-2023 school year, state officials said. The rest is made up by the state or by local school districts through referendums. A recent report by an independent Idaho state office estimated special education was underfunded by more than $80 million in 2023.

But U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, appointed by Trump in March, has said that closing the department wouldn’t mean “cutting off funds from those who depend on them” but would eliminate the “bureaucracy” and regulations associated with them.

Critchfield, Idaho’s superintendent, said on Idaho-based The Ranch Podcast that teachers involved in special education spend a lot of time filling out paperwork instead of “focusing on how to help that child be successful.” The changes are about “removing the bureaucracy.”

But Critchfield acknowledged that cuts at the federal level could pose challenges if states have to take on more of an oversight role.

“As much as I am a champion of states doing that, the reality is there would be implications for Idaho and our department,” she said in a statement to the Statesman and ProPublica. The state is looking at what it can do to prepare and “where gaps would exist” should more responsibilities fall to the states.

Zikmund, the advocate who praised Critchfield for being responsive to parents and having an “open-door policy,” said that parents could be better off after the changes with good leadership at the state level, but without it, they could face a “train wreck.”

One test will come in June, when the Office of Special Education Programs is expected to release reports telling states how they performed in their annual reviews. The layoffs and restructuring under Trump are making some advocates question if the federal government will truly hold states to account.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Becca Savransky, Idaho Statesman.

The regime forced tens of thousands of men and women, as strangers, to marry as an effort to populate Democratic Kampuchea.

The documentary “The Stories We Share” looks at this untold legacy of Pol Pot’s rule that left many lasting scars. The filmmakers meet with survivors Oung Phhun and Soeng Chantorn and travel with Khmer Rouge Tribunal educators as they help the younger generation understand their country’s past.

While forced marriage was intended to boost the population, during less than four years under the Khmer Rouge, the population shriveled. An estimated two million people died from starvation, disease and execution.

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

Thich Minh Tue, who departed on a multi-nation journey from Vietnam four months ago, was stopped in his tracks by Sri Lankan police last week who cited a letter from Vietnam’s state-sanctioned Buddhist sangha – or Buddhist religious association – describing him as posing a threat to public order.

His group, which also includes 10 volunteers, has since been provided temporary accommodation at a temple. They were given permission only to meet and receive food from visitors and well-wishers outside the temple, northeast of the capital Colombo, but were barred from continuing their hike, the source, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue, told RFA.

When it became clear that the group would not be allowed to continue their walk in Sri Lanka, the group decided to immediately leave for India instead, he said.

“They don’t give us a green light to resume walking … on the road,” said Phuoc Nghiem, a close associate of Thich Minh Tue, during a YouTube livestream on Wednesday.

The source said Thich Minh Tue is expected to arrive in India’s capital New Delhi by flight from Sri Lanka at around 5:00 a.m. on Friday. From there, he is expected to fly to Bodh Gaya, the place where Buddha attained enlightenment, and will continue his walk there.

(RFA)

Thich Minh Tue became an unlikely internet sensation last year in Vietnam where his simple lifestyle has struck a chord. He undertook barefoot walks that went viral and well-wishers came out in droves. But authorities treat him with some suspicion as he is not officially recognized as a monk.

Last December, he set out from his homeland on what was meant to be a 2,700-kilometer (1,600 mile) journey by foot through several Asian nations.

Since leaving Vietnam, he and his companions have traveled through Laos and Thailand, and then took a detour to Malaysia after he ran into problems trying to enter Myanmar. He had intended to cross that war-torn country to get to India. After Malaysia he went to Sri Lanka and had intended to walk to the north of the South Asian nation and take a ferry to India.

A copy of the letter from a representative of the Vietnamese sangha that was cited by Sri Lankan police has been viewed by RFA. It accuses Thich Minh Tue of impersonating a Buddhist monk, attempting to establish a dissident sect, and posing threat to public order and national reputation.

Edited by Tenzin Pema and Mat Pennington.

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

WASHINGTON, DC - Today, Radio Free Asia (RFA) extended its workforce furloughs to include a portion of its employment-based visa-holding staff in its D.C. headquarters, as the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) continues to withhold RFA’s Congressionally appropriated funds for the month of April. These individuals now enter into a 60-day period in which they have to find a new employer to sponsor their visa or face possible deportation.

“Despite our many appeals to the Trump Administration and Congress for help, we are sadly not able to continue paying staff at risk of deportation,” said Bay Fang, RFA’s President and CEO. “These individuals, who come from countries where they could face reprisal for their work with RFA, have made great personal sacrifices to advance U.S. foreign policy interests overseas. They do not deserve to pay such an unthinkable price that may cost them their freedom and safety.

“Without our Congressionally appropriated funds, we have no other choice. It’s absolutely heartbreaking.”

Employment-based visa holders at RFA total nearly 40 people. Their countries of origin, including China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, routinely target the free press, even jailing journalists. Eleven journalists associated with the U.S.-funded media outlets are behind bars overseas, including RFA contributor Shin Daewe, who is serving 15 years in Myanmar and four RFA contributing journalists jailed in Vietnam. While not all visa holders were furloughed today, RFA will be forced to continue this process if Congressionally-appropriated funds are not disbursed within weeks.

The new round follows on RFA’s initial furloughing last month of three-quarters of its U.S.-based workforce on March 21. Furloughed U.S. employees are on unpaid leave, while continuing to receive health insurance coverage for a limited period. In the meantime, RFA is assisting its most at-risk employees with employment-based visas in seeking outside assistance as they weigh their legal options.

To date, RFA has filed a motion for a temporary injunction in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeking the disbursement of Congressionally appropriated funds.

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

The Maoist regime controlled all aspects of life in Cambodia, including who you married. She was paired up with Lep Plong, 19. Villager leaders marked the occasion with a rare extravagance – they slaughtered a pig.

(Nuon Mayouro via RFA Khmer)

Fifty years ago this week, the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia, turning the country into a vast agrarian labor camp, with tragic results. A quarter of the population died in just three-and-a-half years.

Anyone deemed an enemy of the government was executed.

And when it came to relationships, the state was also in charge. The government separated families and segregated the population according to age and gender.

Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to wed in joyless ceremonies where the only vows were allegiance to the organization or Angkar, as the Khmer Rouge was known.

Weddings were mass production numbers, with multiple couples, all who had to pledge to produce children for Angkar.

At least in Nuon Mayourom’s case, she knew the groom, Lep Plong, who had been chosen for her. But the timing was definitely not of her choosing.

“Yes, I liked him, and he liked me. I thought he looked like a good person. But I argued with the organization because I wasn’t ready to get married. The organization said, ‘Comrade, you have to marry!’”

Nuon Mayoroum recounted to RFA the details of her wedding. In a time of mass starvation and communal living, there were benefits.

“They slaughtered a pig for us. After the marriage, we moved into a separated hut from others,” she said.

But after three days they were separated once more. Months later they successfully argued to be reunited.

Strangers picking strangers

Dr. Theresa de Langis. director for the Southeast Asian studies at the American University in Phnom Penh, has conducted extensive interviews with Khmer Rouge survivors about forced marriages.

She says while there had been arranged marriages in Cambodia previously, there were a number of very distinct differences under the Maoist regime.

“First, it was strangers picking strangers, generally unknown to each other. Second, the parents were ostracized by the Khmer Rouge. The women I interviewed told me that one of the things they worried about the most at the time was that my parents must have been angry because I had accepted the marriage proposal without their knowledge or consultation. And third, there is evidence that you cannot refuse these marriage proposals,” she said.

(RFA Khmer)

When Khieu Samphan, who was head of state under the Khmer Rouge, was sentenced by a special U.N. backed tribunal in Cambodia in December 2022, among the crimes he was convicted for was imposing forced marriages on people. Also charged with genocide and crimes against humanity, he received two life sentences, and remains in prison, aged 93.

De Langis said those who were forced into marriages had often registered their dissatisfaction at the time but were compelled to obey.

“About 70% of the people we interviewed told us that they had refused at least once, but in the end, 97% were forced into marriage because if you continued to refuse to marry, you would be taken to the organization for re-education,” de Langis said.

In Cambodia, ‘re-education’ was associated with punishment, detainment and death.

‘Until today, we were one’

It’s not known how many people were forced to marry, but researchers estimate it could be between 250,000 and 500,000.

“This happened all over the country, so it was a national policy at the time, and many, many people were victims of this crime,” de Langis said.

(Nuon Mayouro via RFA Khmer)

While Nuon Mayourom married against her will at the time, she and her husband Lep Plong survived life under the Khmer Rouge and made a life together.

They eventually moved to the United States as refugees, bringing their two children – a son, Lola Plong, born in Cambodia, and a daughter, Chenda Plong, born in Thailand.

Lep Plong died in 2010.

“To be honest, he loved me from the beginning. He saw me and loved me. When anyone wanted to propose, he would say, ‘Don’t ask, she already has a fiancé’”.

Did she love him?

“Yes, until today, we were one, one,” Nuon Mayoroum said.

Edited by Mat Pennington

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Sok Ry Sum and Ginny Stein for RFA.

The post Parents Forced to Sacrifice Careers to Remain Eligible for Childcare Assistance  appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

United Nations member states are subject to strict sanctions prohibiting the use of North Korean labor. Enforced by the U.N. Security Council, these measures are intended to curb Pyongyang’s practice of exporting labor and goods to finance its weapons programs.

But the Environmental Justice Foundation, or EJF, said in its report on Monday that at least 12 Chinese deep-water fishing vessels employed North Korean crew between 2019 and 2024 in the Indian Ocean.

The group cited Indonesian and Philippine workers who had worked on Chinese fishing boats as saying some North Korean crew were kept at sea for up to a decade, transferred from vessel to vessel and often temporarily transferred to other ships to avoid being detected at foreign ports, with their salary given to their government.

“This indicates that vessel captains, and likely vessel owners, were aware that the use of this labour was prohibited,” said the rights group.

Mauritian authorities in 2022 reportedly detained six North Korean workers when a Chinese fishing vessel docked at Port Louis, the group said.

Under U.N. Security Council Resolution 2397 adopted in 2017, member states were required to repatriate all North Koreans earning income within their jurisdiction by December 2019.

Another crew member testified to having worked with North Koreans who “had never stepped foot on land for eight years.”

“Concerted efforts were made to hide the presence of North Koreans on these vessels, and that those North Koreans on board were forced to work for as many as 10 years at sea, in some instances without ever stepping foot on land,” the group said, citing testimony from other crewmen.

The North Koreans described in the EJF report were likely sent to work on the boats by their government, which is one of several forms of forced labour which the U.N. office of the human rights high commissioner says has become “deeply institutionalized” in the closed-off authoritarian country.

The group also said that North Korean workers were not allowed to contact their families.

“They never communicated with their wives or others while at sea as they were not allowed to bring a mobile phone,” one interviewee told EJF.

Lin Jian, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, said on Thursday that he was “not familiar with” the report.

“Let me say more broadly that China all along carries out offshore fishing in accordance with laws and regulations. China’s relevant cooperation with the DPRK is conducted within the framework of international law,” Lin told a regular briefing. He did not elaborate.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK, is North Korea’s official name.

(Erik De Castro/Reuters)

China operates the world’s largest deep-sea fishing fleet, with thousands of vessels operating in international waters and along the coasts of other nations.

The fleet has faced widespread criticism for exploitative practices, including the use of forced labor, human trafficking, and inhumane working conditions.

Reports from international media and human rights organizations have documented cases of crew members, often from developing countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines, being subjected to long working hours, withheld wages, physical abuse, and even fatalities due to harsh conditions at sea.

The fleet has also been accused of engaging in illegal fishing practices, depleting marine resources, and violating the sovereignty of other nations' waters. Despite mounting scrutiny, regulatory oversight remains weak, and many abuses go unchecked.

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Tens of thousands are reportedly employed in Chinese factories, seafood processing plants, and textile industries, often under exploitative conditions.

These workers, whose wages are largely funneled back to the North Korean regime, are subjected to strict surveillance, poor living conditions, and limited freedom of movement.

Human rights organizations have raised concerns over forced labor, excessive working hours, and wage confiscation, highlighting violations of U.N. sanctions.

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Taejun Kang for RFA.

The woman, who asked to remain anonymous over safety concerns and is not pictured in this report, said she had grown used to the sounds of bombs falling and gunshots, but did not expect to be a victim of violence.

“One morning in August, I woke up to constant pounding at the door. The moment I opened it, a group from the Arakan Army kicked me to the ground, groped and physically assaulted me in front my family members before slaughtering my father-in-law and two brothers-in-law and dragging them out of our home,” she told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

She added that her husband was able to flee from the attackers.

“Though sometimes my village is caught between the Arakan Army and Myanmar military clashes, I never thought this conflict one day would knock on my door.”

The woman was among at least 60,000 Rohingya who have crossed the border into southeastern Bangladesh since late 2023 to seek refuge from fighting between the Arakan Army (AA) rebels and Burmese junta-affiliated military forces.

Incidents of sexual violence and other abuses against Rohingya came to light in a report published this week by the Burma Task Force, a coalition of 38 U.S. and Canadian Muslim Organizations led by Justice for All.

The report alleged that both military troops and AA insurgents had targeted Rohingya, with the rebels in some cases killing Rohingya while sparing non-Rohingya in the same village. In addition, the AA used Rohingya as human shields in battles with the military.

“The Arakan Army specifically targets girls for sexual abuse. Some women knew of rape victims; most have heard of such incidents,” the report said of interviews in the Bangladesh camps.

(Abdur Rahman/BenarNews)

The Rohingya woman spoke to a BenarNews reporter at the Jadimora camp in Teknaf, a sub-district of Cox’s Bazar, about the ordeal that brought her to Bangladesh.

“I lost consciousness during the assault. When I regained it, I saw the village completely razed and fires smoldering everywhere,” she said on Wednesday. “The villagers who were alive and injured set out on an uncertain journey toward the Bangladesh border. They took me with them.

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“I trudged along with the caravan for three days through the rugged hills, muddy plains and forest and along the way saw hundreds of bodies scattered in the forest or floating in the water.”

On a positive note, the woman reunited with her husband at the camp on the Bangladeshi side of the border.

Arakan Army

Another Rohingya woman who requested anonymity said she and her family were forced out of their homes in Myanmar and moved into a school building.

“One day in August the Arakan Army showed up at the school compound, separated the young girls and took them away, leaving their families in the dark about their whereabouts,” the woman (also not pictured) told BenarNews.

“My family fled the school as my husband feared something worse could happen to me,” she said, adding they arrived at Camp 26 in Cox’s Bazar three months ago.

A BenarNews reporter talked to a dozen women who had arrived as part of the recent influx triggered by the fighting between AA and junta troops. The Burmese military has led Myanmar since launching a coup against the government headed by Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021.

(Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters)

The AA, an insurgent group that has been fighting with the military, is supported by Rakhine state’s Buddhist majority and has been accused of committing rights abuses against Rohingya people.

Aflatun Khatun, a Rohingya woman in her 60s who took shelter recently at the Balupara camp in Ukhia, recalled how she lost her livestock.

“Thirteen of my buffalos were killed in a drone attack in September,” she told Benar News, adding, “Many villagers died in that attack. They used the drones to target Muslim villages.”

Md Yunus, 40, who lived in Maungdaw in Myanmar’s Rakhine state before crossing the border into Bangladesh in November 2024, said AA members arrived at the beginning of that month, threatened the villagers and told them to never return.

“A few days later, they again came back, set fire to the village and fatally shot those who dared to stay back,” he told BenarNews.

“That was the moment I felt a desperate need to leave my home with my wife and children. I moved to the woods, stayed there for three days before we managed to cross the border to take shelter here.”

No food

The Justice for All report said the Rohingya woes did not end after crossing into Bangladesh, as many of the new arrivals had no food or shelter.

Nearly 1 million Rohingya live in refugee camps in and around Cox’s Bazar, including 740,000 who fled a military offensive in Rakhine state, starting in August 2017.

(Abdur Rahman/BenarNews)

Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, commissioner of Office of Refugee, Relief and Repatriation, said the Bangladesh government was working to determine the number of new refugees in the camps and has sought assistance for them.

“We provided headcount data to the World Food Program, which started providing food support to the newly arrived Rohingya,” he told BenarNews.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Abdur Rahman and Mostafa Yousuf for BenarNews.

Thirty-year-old Aung Aung was arrested at gunpoint on a July morning as he left his house in central Myanmar - one of about 30 people rounded up and taken into custody in his town that day. Their crime? Being the right age to be enlisted in the struggling ranks of the Myanmar army.

Less than a month later, during a monsoon downpour, he and 10 others fled No. 7 Basic Military Training Center in Taungdwingyi township, about 70 miles from his home in Yenangchaung in Magwe region. They were clothed in little more than their underwear and were drenched in the heavy rain.

They spent two nights in the forest and had to avoid military checkpoints as they fled northward, relying on local people to provide them food, money, clothing - and directions – until they reached safety three days later.

“The journey was extremely difficult, unlike anything I had ever experienced,” Aung Aung told RFA Burmese. He requested his name be withheld as he remains at large from the military. The punishment for avoiding conscription is up to five years in prison; those who abscond from the military after enlistment could face the death penalty.

(Myanmar Ministry of Information)

It’s not an unusual story in Myanmar. Since the ruling junta declared national conscription in early 2024 for men aged 18-35 and women aged 18-27, growing numbers of men are being forced into the army.

The military’s ranks have been depleted in the civil war that has ensued since army chief Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing launched a coup four years ago against an elected government. The recruits to fill the ranks typically come from poor families that are unable to pay off officials to avoid conscription.

(Ministry of Human Rights, National Unity Government)

The shadow National Unity Government, formed by pro-democrats ousted from power in the coup, says that 23,000 people have been conscripted against their will since the start of 2024.

But the problem actually pre-dates the conscription law.

Killed in action

In November, the relatives of Min Khant Kyaw, 23, got a call out of the blue from authorities that he’d been killed in action. He’d been missing for three years, and it was the first they’d learned that he was in the Myanmar army.

Authorities offered little information. No details about how, when and where Min Khant Kyaw, who had been living in Yangon, died. They were just told that he was dead and the army would provide his next-of-kin with some benefits. It was only because his national registration card was found in his shirt pocket that authorities were able to contact next-of-kin in his native village.

His uncle, Lu Maw, recounts the story with sadness and anger. He had raised Min Khant Kyaw since age 7 after he was orphaned during the massive Cyclone Nargis in 2008 that devastated the Ayeyarwady delta and claimed the lives of his parents and three siblings.

Lu Maw is convinced that his nephew was forced to enlist.

“None of us, no one in our family, knew he had joined the army,” he told RFA Burmese.

“After asking all his relatives, we concluded he didn’t join the army of his own will. If he did, his relatives and everyone close to him would have known. We all knew nothing, but the authorities just informed us he died on the frontline,” Lu Maw said.

“I would not complain if Min Khant Kyaw had joined the army on his own account, but it was not like that. He was dragged into it.”

(Myanmar Ministry of Information)

The Myanmar military has a record of duping recruits and of forced recruitment. The International Labor Organization reported the practice in the 1990s, a time when the military was in the ascendant and was seeking to boost its ranks.

Its need for recruits has become far more acute since the 2021 coup. The ruling junta has suffered mounting losses on the battlefield and has lost control of most of the country.

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Snatched off the street

In an analysis last year, Myanmar expert Ye Myo Hein estimated that by late 2023, it had about 130,000 military personnel – about half of them frontline troops – compared with earlier estimates of between 300,000-400,000. Anecdotal evidence suggests battalions are at a fraction of regular fighting strength.

In February 2024, when the junta enacted a compulsory conscription law that took effect in April, chief junta spokesman, Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, indicated that about 50,000 people would be recruited by year’s end. He said women would only be drafted starting in 2025, which has now begun.

There’s no reliable count of how many have been drafted so far. What is clear is that conscription has accelerated the exodus of able-bodied people from Myanmar. It’s also fueled a cottage industry of graft where families pay administrators the equivalent of hundreds, even thousands, of dollars to avoid the draft.

Even more sinister is that people are being snatched off the street both in cities and rural areas, multiple sources say.

Data collected by RFA showed a spike in youth arrests in Yangon, Mandalay, Naypyitaw and Bago in December. The spike appeared connected to clandestine operations at night, which residents described as “snatch and recruit,” by men wearing plain clothes and driving private vehicles. RFA reporting indicated 250 people were caught in the dragnet in those four cities in a single month.

Zaw Zaw, 27, lives outside the big city. He’s from Salay town in Magwe region. He told RFA Burmese that he was caught in a night raid on his home in early July. He was taken to the local police station before being sent for a medical at another town in the region, Chauk.

“Even those who were mentally unfit passed the test, as it seemed they accepted everyone regardless of their condition,” said Zaw Zaw – not his real name as he wanted to protect his identity.

“When I arrived at the training center, they confiscated everything my family had given me: clothes, watches, phones and money.”

Like Aung Aung, he was at No. 7 Basic Military Training Center in Taungdwingyi, and was among the group that escaped, heading toward an area controlled by an anti-junta People’s Defense Force.

(AA Info Desk)

No option but to enlist

Forcible recruitment takes different forms. Not all are snatched off the streets. Others are simply presented with little option but to enlist.

Moe Pa Pa, a mother of three living in Kungyangon township in Yangon region, says her missing husband, Ye Lin Aung, 29, signed up because he couldn’t afford to bribe his way out of conscription.

“He said that if he did not go this time, the ward administrator would force him again and again. I told him not to go, he should stay and work here so at least we wouldn’t run out of food. I strongly discouraged him, but he went anyway.” she said.

She last saw him, for a 15-minute conversation, just before he was shipped out to the front line in Rakhine state, where junta forces have taken a battering from the rebel Arakan Army.

“The ward administrator told my husband he would pay us 500,000 kyats ($110) up front. He also promised to pay 310,000 kyats per month while my husband was undergoing three months of training, with payments to be made monthly,” Moe Pa Pa told RFA.

All she’s seen is the bonus, no salary.

“He called me two or three times after arriving at the front line in Buthidaung and Maungdaw,” Moe Pa Pa, referring to two battle zones in Rakhine state. “He said he would transfer his salary, but since then, I have been unable to contact him. He never sent his payment, and we have been out of contact ever since.”

She suspects he’s dead. Phone calls made from the Rakhine front line stopped six months ago.

Other RFA Burmese journalists contributed reporting. Edited by Ginny Stein and Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Aye Aye Mon for RFA Burmese.

The ethnic Karen militia force based on Myanmar’s border with Thailand is suspected of enabling extensive internet fraud, human trafficking, forced labor and other crimes, and is being enriched by a business network that extends across Asia, a rights group said in a report last year.

But the case of Chinese TV actor Wang Xing, rescued this month from the notorious KK Park scam facility in eastern Myanmar’s Myawaddy, has brought the issue to public attention across Asia like never before.

The result has been pressure from both the Thai government and the Myanmar military, leading to a meeting on Wednesday between the militias and their business partners in which they agreed to stop human trafficking, said a businessman close to the ethnic Karen militia.

“The current issue of the Chinese actor has brought pressure from Thailand and the junta council in Naypyidaw. That’s why the meeting was held to enforce rules,” the businessman, who declined to be identified as talking to the media, told Radio Free Asia.

Leaders of Myawaddy-based Border Guard Force, or BGF, and the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, or DKBA, which control the border zone under the auspices of the Myanmar military, agreed on a set of five rules with the business leaders, many of them ethnic Chinese, the businessman said.

The list includes no use of force, threats or torture, no child labor, no income from human trafficking and no scam operations, according to a copy of the rules that the businessman cited. Anyone found breaking the rules will lose their business and be expelled from the area.

RFA tried to contact senior members of the ethnic Karen forces, Maj. Naing Maung Zaw of the BGF and Lt. Gen Saw Shwe Wa of the DKBA, but neither of them answered their telephones.

(AEC News)

The Karen militia force in power in the eastern region emerged from a split in the 1990s in Myanmar’s oldest ethnic minority guerrilla force, the largely Christian-led Karen National Union, when Buddhist fighters broke away, formed the DKBA and sided with the military.

The military let the DKBA rule in areas under its control in Kayin state, set up a Border Guard Force to help the army, and to profit from cross-border trade, and later from online gambling and scam operations.

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Tricking investors

The scam centers in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos have ensnared thousands of human trafficking victims from all over Asia, and as far away as Africa.

Many victims say they were lured by false job offers, then forced to scam people by convincing them over the phone or online to put money into bogus investments.

University of Texas researchers estimated in a report in March last year that scammers had tricked investors out of more than US$75 billion since January 2020.

People forced to work at the scam centers are often tortured if they refuse to comply, victims and rights groups say.

The rules announced by the militias and scam operators come after a string of high-profile kidnappings, including that of Chinese actor Wang.

Hong Kong authorities have sent a task force to Thailand in a bid to rescue an estimated 12 victims in Myanmar and have imposed a yellow travel advisory for Thailand and Myanmar, warning of “signs of threat,” but without mentioning the scam parks.

The Bangkok Post reported on Wednesday that Thai hotels and airlines have been getting a flood of cancellations from Chinese tour groups for the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday.

Authorities in the region have accused Chinese gangsters of organizing the centers but Chinese nationals in Thailand said Chinese state-owned companies were behind operations in Myanmar, and behind them is the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department.

“Wherever you have these scam parks, you will find Chinese companies plying the biggest trade,” a realtor who only gave the surname Pan for fear of reprisals recently told RFA Mandarin. “The Myawaddy park was built by Chinese state-owned companies.”

Pan said the parks were the criminal face of the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s United Front outreach and influence operations.

“All of the big bosses are back in China,” he said.

The Justice for Myanmar human rights group has accused governments and businesses across the region of enabling the cyber scam operations by failing to take action against the profitable flows they generate.

Edited by RFA Staff.

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

Chinese exports of tomatoes, chili peppers, marigolds and other farm products grown in the far-western region of Xinjiang are tainted by forced labor as well as the coercive transfer of land from Uyghur peasants to Chinese businesses, new research shows.

The growing of these goods is also tainted by the forced assimilation and political indoctrination of Uyghur workers, according to 136-page report by Adrian Zenz and I-Lin Lin of the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Dozens of Western companies, including Kraft Heinz, Nestlé, Del Monte, PepsiCo, McCormick, Unilever and L’Oreal, are importing these goods, although they often enter supply chains through intermediaries, blurring their origin, the report found.

The report identified 72 international companies and 18 Chinese firms with production in Xinjiang or supply chain links, or a risk of such links, to the region’s agricultural products.

“It means that we have a much bigger system of forced labor and forced land transfer that is affecting many agricultural communities in Xinjiang and is directly serving the political goals of the regime to achieve political long-term transformation of these populations and taint the supply chains as a result,” Zenz told Radio Free Asia in an interview.

Sources of information

The investigation used planning documents from various Chinese administrative levels, state reports, budgets, academic papers, propaganda narratives and witness reports.

It was also based on internal state documents, corporate documents, information from the Made-in-China website, data from e-commerce platforms, the global supply chain intelligence platform Sayari and the U.S. customs database ImportInfo.

(Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

Chinese companies implicated in Uyghur forced labor included COFCO Tunhe Tomato, Xinjiang Chalkis, which processes tomatoes and fruits, and Chenguang Biotech Group, a high-tech firm that specializes in the extraction and application of plant active ingredients.

The three companies operate subsidies in the United States or Europe and have been implicated in rights abuses in Xinjiang, the report says.

The report singles out U.S. ketchup-maker Kraft Heinz for ongoing collaboration with China’s COFCO Tunhe Tomato, providing the Chinese company with tomato seeds and technical collaboration.

It also says cosmetics maker L’Oreal buys products from non-Chinese-based intermediaries in Asia whose supply chains are connected to Chinese-based companies or to suppliers of products whose domestic goods are sold in Western supermarkets.

Unilever Pakistan Foods, a Unilever subsidiary, buys tomato products from COFCO Tunhe Tomato and exports them to the U.S. Canada and the United Kingdom.

Abuses in Xinjiang

The Chinese government has come under attack in recent years for abuses in Xinjiang that include the mass detainment of the mostly Muslim Uyghurs who live in Xinjiang and the use of Uyghur forced labor there.

“Xinjiang operates the world’s largest contemporary system of state-imposed forced labor, with up to 2.5 million Uyghurs and members of other ethnic groups at risk of coerced work,” the report says.

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The report also cites pressure on Uyghurs to give up the right to farm their land to commercial operators who coerce them into wage labor in processing bases operated by Chinese agribusinesses.

The report’s findings show that land-use transfer shares in Xinjiang grew nearly 50-fold between 2001 and 2021, indicating a “staggering scale at which ethnic peasants were rendered landless and then pushed into state-mandated work.”

“This is resulting in profound livelihood changes and [the] tearing apart of organic communities, ensuring that Uyghurs are more easily and thoroughly controlled, surveilled, and assimilated,” it says.

The U.S. government and over 10 Western parliaments have declared that the abuses in Xinjiang amount to genocide and crimes against humanity. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which took effect in the U.S. in June 2022, prevents companies from importing any goods produced in Xinjiang unless they can prove forced labor was not used.

‘Vicious lie’

When asked to comment on the report, Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said China has “repeatedly emphasized that the so-called ‘forced labor’ issue is a vicious lie fabricated by anti-China forces.”

“Xinjiang implements proactive labor and employment policies, effectively safeguarding the basic employment rights of people from all ethnic groups,” he said via email.

(Carolyn Kaster/AP)

Liu accused the U.S. of repeatedly spreading rumors and stirring up trouble regarding Xinjiang by using human rights to engage in political manipulation and economic bullying in an attempt to undermine the region’s prosperity and stability and curb China’s development.

Liu further said that Zenz, known as Zheng Guoen in China, is a member of a far-right organization established by the U.S. government, and a key member of an anti-China research institution set up and manipulated by U.S. intelligence agencies.

“He makes a living by fabricating anti-China rumors and slandering China,” Liu said. “His so-called report has no credibility, academic value, or academic integrity.”

Company responses

Zenz and Lin said they contacted the companies named in the report with detailed requests for comment, but several could not be reached, while others provided invalid email addresses.

Some did respond. U.S. ketchup-maker Kraft Heinz said it used COFCO-supplied tomato products only in China and Central Asia, despite information by the researchers that its subsidiaries in Indonesia and India also bought tomato paste from COFCO in 2023 and 2024.

French cosmetics manufacturer L’Oreal denied a direct supply chain relationship with suppliers linked to Xinjiang, but did not address the indirect supply chain ties outlined in the report.

(Gou Lifeng/Xinhua News Agency/Reuters)

U.S. spice-maker McCormick didn’t comment on specific allegations, but said its policy prohibits the use of forced labor in its supply chain.

American fruits and vegetables distributor Del Monte said its multiple COFCO Tunhe suppliers certified that they did not use forced labor.

Concern over findings

Rushan Abbas, executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs, said the research findings present the most comprehensive evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide against the Uyghurs extending deep into the agricultural sector, affecting global supply chains, and implicating major international brands.

“The forced transfer of land rights from Uyghur farmers to Chinese corporations, combined with coercive labor practices and political indoctrination, represents yet another facet of the regime’s systematic assault on Uyghur rights and identity,” she said in a statement.

“Of particular concern is the ongoing strategic relationship between Kraft Heinz and COFCO, a state-owned enterprise in East Turkistan that actively participates in the surveillance of Uyghur households and enforces policies linked to cultural assimilation and forced labor,” Abbas said, using Uyghurs’ preferred name for Xinjiang.

The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a ‍group of international lawmakers from democratic countries focused on relations with China also raised concern over the report’s findings.

“Disturbingly, goods linked to forced labor are being sold worldwide under trusted, household brand names deceiving consumers and perpetuating the cycle of exploitation,” 46 lawmakers from the group said in a statement.

Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Mettursun Beydulla for RFA Uyghur.

International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) Kolkata vice-president Radharamn Das, who has been called out for sharing communally charged misinformation on social media multiple times, shared the video on X. (Archive)

Bangladeshi Muslims are ’empowering’ a girl by making her wear a hijab. In gratitude, she thanks them by kissing their feet. This is the ‘respect’ Islam gives to girls.

Pray for all the Hindu girls, as the world has left them at the mercy of these Jihadis. pic.twitter.com/zRA4U5JMoL

— Radharamn Das राधारमण दास (@RadharamnDas) October 7, 2024

At the time of this article being written, his post had garnered nearly 130,000 views and was shared 2,000 times.

The same video was also shared by X account Voice of Hindus (@Warlock_Shabby). This user directly claimed the woman, a Hindu, was being forced to wear a hijab. The tweet said, “Horrible! No Hindu girl can even walk in Bangladesh without wearing Hijab, Welcome to new Bangladesh of Muhammad Yunus, Now No one stand for hindus in Bangladesh so we have to speak #SaveBangladesiHindus”. (Archive)

The post was viewed nearly 970,000 times and reshared 11,000 times.

Another X account, Baba Banaras, (@RealBababanaras) shared the same clip with the caption, “Atrocities against minorities continue in Bangladesh. A young Hindu girl was beaten and molested by the radical Islamist in Bangladesh for wearing a religious locket in her neck. They forced her to wear a Hijab. She wore but still she was misbehaved by radical Islamists.”

Note that Alt News has previously debunked misinformation posted by this account on several occasions.

Several other verified accounts, including Jitendra Pratap Singh (@jpsin1) and Amitabh Chaudhary (@MithilaWaala), also shared the video with similar claims. Several false claims shared by these accounts in the past have been fact-checked by Alt News (Readers can find them here and here). 

Alt News received many requests to fact check the video and corresponding claim on its WhatsApp Helpline number (+91 76000 11160).

Fact Check

A reverse image search of some key frames from the video led us to a Facebook reel posted by Shaha Newaj. The post says, “Tiktoker Kohinoor was caught stealing at Ramu”. The frames in the reel are very similar to the viral video.

While investigating, we found a longer version of the viral video where the woman is seen being dragged from across the road and being hit from a different angle. The video is titled “Tiktoker caught stealing mobile from Ramu’s at Cox’s Bazar.” This video has now been deleted, but one can access its archived version here.

To be sure, we carefully analysed screengrabs and determined that it is indeed the same video. In the screenshots below you can see that she is wearing the same clothes, has the same collapsible gate behind her and is surrounded by the same people. See comparisons:

Taking cue from this, we did a keyword search on Facebook. We found that she had been apprehended for theft more than once in the past.

A Bangladeshi journalist, Mohammad Nur, uploaded a video on June 4 showing one such instance. The Facebook post reads: “A TikToker from Rohingya camp in Ukhiya caught stealing in Taknef and rest becomes history.”

Another user, Xobair Nur, uploaded a similar video on June 3 that said, “Tiktoker Kohinoor of Cox’s Bazar got caught red-handed while stealing gold and 1.5 lakh rupees from a woman at the Tekanf market.”

In this, one can hear her being referred to as Kohinoor.

We also came across a video uploaded by user Md. Nurol Kabir on August 30 saying, “Again the Tiktoker from Taknef has been caught stealing and detained by the committee members of the market.” At the 2:30-minute mark of this video, she can be heard saying that her name is Kohinoor Akhtar.

Many others also uploaded similar videos, identifying her as Kohinoor, a creator on TikTok. (1, 2, 3, 4)

A video compilation by Digital Bangla TV, a local news outlet in Bangladesh, uploaded on August 29 identifies her as “Tiktoker Kohinoor” who has been caught for repeatedly swindling.  

Alt News thus found that a video showing a woman being beaten up in Bangladesh on charges/suspicion of stealing is viral with the false claim that Islamists were forcing her to wear a hijab. 

The post Bangladeshi TikToker thrashed for ‘stealing’: Video viral with ‘Hindu woman forced to wear Hijab’ claims appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Ankita Mahalanobish.

A disturbing video showing three minor boys being thrashed by an individual has surfaced on social media. In the video, the aggressor — who also appears to be a minor — can be seen hitting and hurling expletives at the others alleging they had been smoking.

The incident, which took place near the Amrit Sagar Talab in Madhya Pradesh’s Ratlam over a month ago, soon turned communal. Here’s what happened.

A Violent Ordeal

When struck, one of the boys cries out “Allah” in pain, which enrages the assaulter. He proceeds to remove his shoe and starts hitting them with it again, forcing them to chant “Jai Sri Ram”.

“Kya bola, kya bola? Allah?” (“What did you say, what did you say? Allah?”), the aggressor is heard saying repeatedly. The next 30 seconds of the footage show him relentlessly beating the three with his footwear as they cry and beg for mercy. At one point, one of the boys hits his head on the guardrail next to which he is sitting.

“Ab nahi bolunga” (“I won’t say it anymore”), one of the minors pleads after being repeatedly struck. Another child cries out “Jai Sri Ram”, which seems to momentarily calm down the aggressor, prompting the third child to say the same. But the aggressor repeatedly hits the the kid who initially invoked “Allah” until he too repeats the chant “Jai Sri Ram.”

This minor can also be heard saying, “Khoon nikal raha hai” (“I’m bleeding”) but the tormentor does not stop. All this while, even as the kids weep in pain, someone continues to film the ordeal. Finally, the aggressor turns to the other two hurling expletives as he puts his shoe back on.

Alt News has blurred the video to protect the identities of all individuals involved, as they are minors.

The Assailants

According to the First Information Report (FIR) accessed by Alt News, the three young boys were sitting near a construction area when the altercation happened. The report also says that after the attack, the aggressors — the one who is seen assaulting the boys and the other who made the video — allegedly threatened to kill them if they disclosed the incident. The report states the date of the offence as October 20.

In the FIR, the victims state that the aggressors even forcibly picked up one of them in an attempt to take him away. “We somehow saved our lives, ran away from there and went home. Due to fear, we did not tell anyone,” it reads.

Our investigation found that of the three boys, the youngest is aged 7-8 years while the other two are 13. “After the assault ended, the two individuals decided to take one of the boys with them. They grabbed the youngest and started leading him away. The minors became even more frightened… They told me that the aggressors had gone quite a distance with the child before they somehow managed to rescue him and escape,” advocate Imran Khokar, who helped file the FIR, told Alt News.

Khokar confirmed that the one beating up the boys was indeed a minor and has been arrested and presented in juvenile court. However, the one recording the whole thing, an adult named Veer Parmar, is still absconding. Both the perpetrators are from Ratlam.

The advocate also told us that on the afternoon of December 5, an intoxicated Parmar, showed someone the video, bragging about the incident. This person happened to be an acquaintance of Khokar’s and somehow managed to get hold of the video. It was then circulated and reached Khokar at 5 pm that evening. He immediately approached the additional superintendent of police and an FIR was lodged subsequently.

Khokar also told us that the youngest one beaten up was an orphan, whose parents had died in an accident recently. He lives with his grandmother, aunt and siblings now. “After the video went viral, we went to his house to call him. He was so traumatized that he locked himself in a room. We had to break the door down with the help of the police to get him out.”

Alt News also reached out to the parents of the other two victims of the attack. The father of one of the 13-year-old victims said that he received the video from his friends, who recognized his son. “It was a Friday. After prayers, they went to play at Amrit Talab… These people started beating them and during the attack, my son shouted ‘Allah.’ After hearing that, they forced them to say ‘Jai Sri Ram’ and hit them repeatedly… They told the children not to tell anyone at home… I don’t know the individuals who assaulted them. This is the first time I’m seeing them,” he said. When asked about his son’s condition, the father said, “He is fine but scared… He had to go to the police station, the police are investigating…”

“When it happened, my son was unusually quiet and seemed scared. He was scared of how people around him would react… This is the first case in Ratlam that I know of. These cases usually do not happen in Ratlam. Ours is a peaceful area. I just hope the accused are penalised so that these cases don’t happen in the future,” said the parent of the other victim.

The perpetrators have been charged under sections 296 (uttering indecent or obscene expressions in public places); 115(2) (voluntarily hurting someone); 126(2) (wrongfully restraining someone); 351(2) (criminal intimidation); 196 (promoting enmity between groups); and 3(5) (dealing with criminal acts by more than one person) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023.

The post Muslim minors thrashed in Madhya Pradesh’s Ratlam, forced to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.

The post #24. Forced Labor Traps Adopted Children in Paraguay appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

Troops stationed at junta security checkpoints are forcing civilians passing through a major highway in central Myanmar to perform landmine clearance operations, residents told Radio Free Asia.

Landmines have become an increasingly common and deadly problem since insurgents across the country took up arms to fight the military who took power in a 2021 coup. While deadly warfare with rocket launchers, explosives and guns has killed thousands of soldiers and civilians, both rebels and junta troops have denied responsibility for mines and their casualties.

“They started doing it from the first week of November…They ask us to cross through fields they assume have landmines. If they ask us to do one check, it’s for about one hour,” said a resident in the Burmese city Monywa.

“At their gates, they don’t stop and ask every car to do the inspections, some don’t have to,” the resident added, declining to be named as talking to the media.

Travelers are being selected from three of the 11 junta security checkpoints that stretch across the Monywa-Mandalay Highway, connecting the capitals of Sagaing to Mandalay region, some 132 kilometers (82 miles).

The practice is particularly rampant near Myay Ne, Mon Yway and Taw Pu villages, residents said, adding that they’re often told to go look for landmines after soldiers inspect their vehicle.

Junta soldiers typically select middle-aged people, asking them to go to areas they’re suspicious of, said another resident who added that no casualties had been reported yet.

“Until the 26th, they were still asking us to cross the field. I haven’t heard of anyone having their arms or legs cut off because of crossing the landmine fields yet,” they said, asking to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.

Travelers along the Monywa-Mandalay have decreased following forced clearance operations, residents said.

Myanmar military spokesperson Zaw Min Tun has not responded to RFA’s inquiries.

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As of 2023, Myanmar saw the highest record in landmine and heavy weapons-related deaths at 1,003, according to a report published on Nov. 20 by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

It was also the first time that Myanmar had the most recorded landmine deaths out of any country worldwide.

Translated by Kiana Duncan. Edited by Taejun Kang.

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

In 2016, things became even more dire when her family was saddled with repayment of a loan to a local bank.

So when a neighbor approached her that year with the opportunity to make a higher salary in China, Sok Suosdey - who asked to use a pseudonym for this report to protect her privacy - leapt at the chance.

After making the necessary preparations, she departed to the bustling city of Shanghai, excited with the prospect of becoming financially independent in China and helping her family get free from debt back home.

But around a month after her arrival, the woman who had promised her a job told her she would have to marry a deaf Chinese man and if she refused, she would be on the hook for the costs associated with her relocation to China - a sum far beyond her ability to pay.

Sok Suosdey agreed, but said that after her marriage, she was reduced to “a slave” in her husband’s home.

She was made to take a job to earn money for the family, but her mother-in-law also forced her to do household chores whenever she had a break, and subjected her to relentless physical and mental abuse, she said.

“Every day, my mother-in-law chased me to work from 10 am-11 pm, sometimes until 2 am,” she told RFA Khmer. “I only slept three hours a night, and I worked very hard. When I was at home, I also worked as a seamstress, sometimes as a laborer, or putting springs into children’s water guns.”

Sok Suosdey said that if she needed new clothes, she was made to buy them with her own money.

Her mother-in-law also refused to let her communicate with Cambodian friends she made or with family members back home, as “she was afraid I would run away from home.”

“My Chinese mother-in-law insulted me and made me hurtful and fed up,” she said.

Things were no different after having a child with her husband.

“The most painful thing was that after I gave birth to a son, my mother-in-law kept me away from him and didn’t let him know who I was,” she said. “She wouldn’t let me take care of him and would even call the police when I tried to take him to school.”

Trafficking to China

According to a report by the human rights group Adhoc, in the first nine months of 2024, at least 29 Cambodian women were trafficked to China. Of the trafficked women, 28 were forced to marry Chinese men.

According to the same source, in 2023, 28 Cambodian women were rescued from human trafficking in China.

The NGO said that some of the women who married Chinese men were beaten, abused and forced to work as slaves by their husbands and families. In addition to physically and mentally abusing the women, some families also forced them into sex work, leaving them traumatized, it said.

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‘He told me that if I ran away he would report me to the Chinese police’

Sok Suosdey told RFA that, because she could no longer endure the abuse, she saved enough money to buy a mobile phone and started to seek help via social media.

She started a group on Facebook for Cambodians in China and spent time searching for people she knew lived close to her parents back home. It was through these sources that she was able to contact her mother and get authorities at the Cambodian Consulate to intervene on her behalf.

On July 16, 2024 - seven years after being trafficked to China - Sok Suosdey finally returned home to her family in Cambodia.

Now 35, things have not been easy for Sok Suosdey back home, according to Sun Maly, the head of Adhoc’s Women’s Unit. She is the sole breadwinner of a household with an elderly mother, a father who was blinded during Cambodia’s civil war, and a younger brother with a mental disorder.

But despite the challenges, Sok Suosdey is thankful for her rescue and overjoyed to be reunited with her loved ones, she said.

Assisting victims

When victims of human trafficking return to Cambodia, they receive assistance from the Ministry of Social Affairs' Veterans and Youth Rehabilitation agency, which provides them with mental health treatment and rehabilitation.

However, the assistance is only temporary, and many victims face a long road to recovery.

Once a victim is released from the Ministry of Social Affairs, humanitarian groups such as Adhoc step in to provide additional help.

Adhoc’s Sun Maly said that her NGO now provides victims with sewing machines to help them achieve financial stability by starting their own business following their rescue.

“My case manager has helped to find skilled trainers who can help women victims in tailoring,” she said. “Most villages have tailors, but as they age out, a victim with the ability to sew can replace them by setting up their own garment business.”

Some victims told RFA that the Cambodian government needs to do more to pressure Chinese authorities to investigate claims of trafficking inside China.

Chou Bun Eng, the permanent deputy chair of the Ministry of Interior’s Anti-Trafficking Committee, told RFA that she has met with Chinese authorities in the past to highlight the need to investigate such claims.

However, she said that her Chinese counterparts regularly deny that there are any cases of Cambodian women being trafficked and forced into marriage in China - only consensual marriages. Domestic violence they classify as a “family dispute,” she said.

“I’m not saying that all cases involve trafficking - some Cambodian women pay money to be smuggled into China,” she acknowledged.

“But in general, most Cambodian women who go to China already have relatives in China who promise to help them find a husband with a good family. So, if they sign a marriage certificate and then domestic violence occurs, the authorities say it is a family dispute.”

The U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons report ranked Cambodia as a “tier 3″ nation - the worst possible ranking - in 2023 and 2024.

In July, the State Department released a report which found that the Cambodian government did not meet international standards in its efforts to eradicate human trafficking, largely due to corruption amongst senior government officials.

Translated by Sum Sok Ry. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

Members of the press were ejected by sheriff’s deputies from a Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting in Redding, California, on Nov. 7, 2024. The deputies claimed that the room was cleared for safety reasons as they arrested a protester who had seated herself in front of the dais.

The protester, one of two, held a sign supporting a county official who had been criticized over election monitoring practices. When the board chair called a recess and ordered the public to leave the room, three journalists remained — Doni Chamberlain of A News Cafe, Annelise Pierce of Shasta Scout and David Benda of the Record Searchlight.

The second protester soon left, but the first refused. Pierce told County Counsel Joseph Larmour, who had also ordered the reporters out of the room, that she was staying to document a citizen’s actions, the Shasta Scout reported. Larmour responded that the protester was “a ‘target’ of law enforcement and therefore didn’t ‘count’ as a citizen.”

A group of sheriff’s deputies then entered, some of whom arrested the remaining protester. Another joined security guards in ordering the journalists to move further back in the room, telling them that safety issues and an “ongoing investigation” required that they leave and threatening them with arrest. The lights in the room were also turned off as the arrest proceeded.

Pierce and Benda left the room; Chamberlain was grabbed and forcibly removed by a sheriff’s deputy. After the protester was removed, the meeting reconvened and the journalists reentered.

Later, Supervisor Tim Garman posted an apology on Facebook to media forced out of the meeting room.

“The constitution protects their rights to be where the news is happening, and someone being arrested in a public building is certainly news,” he wrote. “There was zero safety threat inside the board chambers.”

Meanwhile, the Shasta County Sheriff reiterated in a news release that the meeting room had been cleared “for safety,” and announced that “this incident remains under investigation and other individuals who failed to obey lawful orders to exit the chambers may also face charges.”

The board also issued its own news release, alleging that press had been removed under “a protocol that has been in place for more than a year.” Shasta Scout reported that in response to a request for documentation of the protocol, Larmour acknowledged it had “not been memorialized in writing.”

It was the second time reporters were ordered to leave the room during a protest at a supervisor’s meeting. The first was in July, when the same woman protested. That time, journalists remained to report on her arrest.

After that arrest, the board announced a new media policy under which media must stay sequestered in a separate room, watching the meetings through glass windows and only hearing audio spoken through a microphone, Shasta Scout reported. If press chose to stay in the main room, they would be ordered to leave during any “disruptions.”

The policy was rescinded days later, after criticism from the public and advocacy group First Amendment Coalition, which called it a violation of California’s open meetings law and the First Amendment.

Reporter Chamberlain told the Tracker she saw Nov. 7’s events as a reaction to press coverage of the earlier protest.

“I believe Chair Kevin Crye and Sheriff Mike Johnson were angry and embarrassed by our reporting about (the protester),” Chamberlain told the Tracker. “I believe they decided they would not allow press access to report what happened again.”

In a Nov. 12 letter to the board and sheriff’s office, the First Amendment Coalition criticized the media’s removal from the Nov. 7 meeting as another violation of open meetings law and the Constitution, noting that there was little justification for clearing the room at all, let alone ordering the press to leave.

Pierce told the Tracker that she was surprised that the deputies would engage in such “a clear violation of First Amendment rights,” but that “there have been ongoing indication of threats to press freedom under our new board majority,” a reference to the media policy enacted in July.

Chamberlain mentioned that several militia group members showed up at the Nov. 7 meeting and stood along the back wall, “which made for an intimidating sight.”

“Shasta County law enforcement has a history of colluding with the militia,” Pierce added. “For this reason, I found the arrival of individuals, some known to be militia members, particularly concerning.”

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

Examples from last month – Cambodian journalist Mech Dara and overseas activist Hay Vanna – were just the latest additions to a long list of activists and critics forced by threats or legal action to recant and pledge their loyalty to the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP.

In the months before the July 2023 general election, close to a dozen top opposition party officials switched their allegiance to the ruling party.

One of the more notable defections from that time period was that of prominent and outspoken opposition youth activist Yim Sinorn, who stood next to then-Prime Minister Hun Sen with a tight smile on his face for a photo posted to Facebook.

“It is my duty to be committed to protect peace and prevent any attempts to destroy the country,” Yim Sinorn wrote on his wife’s Facebook page. “I have little education and experience but I want to serve the country and her people.”

“If Samdech gives me a chance I would like to join the CPP to be able to serve the people and the country,” he wrote, using an honorific title for Hun Sen.

Yim Sinorn had been a close ally of Kem Sokha, the leader of the now-banned Cambodian National Rescue Party who was sentenced to 27 years for treason last year in a decision widely condemned as politically motivated.

Yim Sinorn was arrested after posting a comment on Facebook that seemed to highlight the political powerlessness of King Norodom Sihamoni, who is required by Cambodia’s 1993 Constitution to reign as a national figurehead.

A week later, wearing an orange jumpsuit, he apologized from prison for the Facebook comment in a video that was uploaded to the social media site. He met with Hun Sen soon after his release.

Mech Dara’s case

Last month, Mech Dara – a reporter known for his hard-hitting reporting on cyber-scam compounds and human trafficking – posted a similar video while also wearing an orange jumpsuit.

Incitement charges against Dara were based on several social media posts. The charges drew significant criticism from human rights groups and foreign governments.

Meanwhile, Hay Vanna’s two-minute video was posted on Facebook from Japan, where he has organized protests among overseas Cambodian workers, after the arrest of his brother.

The demonstrations “caused chaos” and were “provoked by extremists,” such as exiled opposition leader Sam Rainsy, Hay Vanna said in the video.

“I declare that I am parting from Sam Rainsy,” he said. “I want to use my knowledge that I have to serve the country and I ask Samdech [Hun Sen] to forgive me so I can join the CPP.”

After Hay Vanna’s video was posted Phnom Penh Municipal Court Judge Yi Sokvouch signed a warrant ordering the release of the brother from Phnom Penh’s Prey Sar prison, pending his upcoming trial.

Those are some of the most high-profile instances. Several other opposition activists told Radio Free Asia that they were forced to pledge allegiance to the ruling party to maintain the safety of their family or to avoid politically motivated criminal charges.

Since Hun Sen’s son, Hun Manet, became prime minister in August 2023, more than 10 officials from the opposition Candlelight Party have received written threats that urged them to switch to the CPP, according to Kong Chi, the party’s former deputy chairman for Sihanoukville.

“All the defections have been by coercion,” he said from Japan. “I received all kinds of intimidation against me.”

Personal safety and freedom

Opposition activist Kong Raiya switched to the CPP after meeting with Hun Sen in 2023. He was given a job at the Ministry of Education that came with a government salary big enough that he could buy a car.

But eventually he resigned from the ruling party and crossed over the border to Thailand.

“I cannot force myself to do work that I do not enjoy,” he said. “The most important goal for me was to maintain my own safety. I joined the CPP, but not to serve the interests of the CPP.”

Former opposition party activist Voeun Veasna said that his apology to Hun Sen was also only motivated by personal safety and to maintain his freedom.

“To my experience, those political, land and forest activists who apologized and defected to the ruling party in the past, they didn’t sincerely apologize,” he said. “They were forced and threatened.”

Voeung Samnang, an activist for the now-banned Cambodia National Rescue Party, refused to apologize or renounce his ties to the opposition. He has been held in Prey Sar prison in Phnom Penh for three years, his wife, Teang Chenda, told RFA.

“My husband loves democracy and wants freedom without apology or submission,” she said.

CPP spokesman Sok Eysan told RFA that the ruling party has accepted new members from the opposition in the past out of mutual understanding.

He warned that “those who confessed and joined the ruling party and then turned their backs against the government are dishonest,” and could face further legal action.

In mid-2023, Hun Sen issued a similar warning to opposition party officials who surrendered to the ruling party. If they dared to betray the CPP, their previous convictions would be reinstated, he said.

Translated by Yun Samean. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

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

The boy, who like other Rohingya in this report are not identified because of concerns for their safety, said he was one of about 80 Rohingya who were abducted from their camp and forced to cross the nearby border into Myanmar.

“We were blindfolded and led to a boat. I don’t know where exactly they (the kidnappers) delivered us in Myanmar, but it was a military base,” he told BenarNews.

“They (the junta) posted pictures of us with firearms online. They didn’t give us ammunition but put us on the front lines” he said, adding that he and other Rohingya were not trained to fight.

In September and October, BenarNews spoke to several Rohingya who had returned from Myanmar, where the Arakan Army and other insurgents have been fighting Burmese junta-aligned forces to gain control of Rakhine state.

About 740,000 Rohingya fled Rakhine and settled in Bangladesh refugee camps in the months that followed a brutal military crackdown in 2017. Both the insurgents and the junta have kidnapped and forced Rohingya into battle.

“(The Arakan Army) said you will be trained and receive 10,000 taka (U.S. $83) monthly. All you have to do is kill the army,” a 25-year-old Rohingya returnee told BenarNews.

“The firearms didn’t work. If you pull the trigger five times, it will fire twice. We discarded guns jammed with bullets. But it was risky to dispose of these firearms – even if you appear unarmed, the attacker will kill you,” he said.

The man said he saw about a dozen Rohingya die in battle.

“After four months, I wanted to return. Then they didn’t let me go. When I tried to escape, they locked me up,” he said.

Recounting his time in Myanmar, the 25-year-old said members of the Arakan Army forced him and others to burn down a Rohingya neighborhood.

“There, they seized all of our guns. Then, when army drones attacked, we had a chance to run,” he said.

The man said he and seven others stayed at a house overnight where they were fed before paying 12,000 taka ($100) each to charter a boat to return to Bangladesh.

Some fought for six months

BenarNews interviewed Rohingya who fought in Myanmar and returned to the Kutupalong-Balukhali Mega Camp in Ukhia, the world’s largest refugee camp. Some said they were able to escape after a month while others said they were trapped for six months.

The Rohingya said they had been kidnapped from refugee camps by men who claimed they were members of the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO), an armed group. After they returned, the Rohingya said they were beaten by RSO members who threatened to kill them.

Md. Zahirul Haque Bhuiyan, an assistant superintendent of police near the camps, said sources were providing information about Rohingya leaving Bangladesh and returning after fighting in Myanmar.

“We have this information. However, there is no particular complaint. If we receive any complaints, we will address them legally and take proper action,” Zahirul said.“ Every few days, we carry out joint operations,” he said.

When militants with the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) and RSO are operating within the camps, “we execute raids, arrest them, prosecute them and acquire their weapons,” he said.

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A human rights activist, meanwhile, called on fellow Bangladeshis to treat the Rohingya fairly.

Activist Nur Khan Liton, a lawyer, said people should remember that Rohingya fled to the camps in and around Cox’s Bazar because they feared for their lives in Myanmar.

“And those who attempt to use these individuals against their will are committing a serious moral crime,” he said.

People returning from the conflict are being hunted down by RSO and ARSA, Liton said, referring to the RSO and ARSA.

“They are committing increasingly severe crimes and putting our country’s security in jeopardy.”

He also called on the Bangladesh government to take positive action regarding the Rohingya.

“The government and many people in our country know that Rohingya are being forcibly taken – this news has been in the media several times. Regretfully, the government hasn’t taken sufficient steps in this field,” Liton said.

Some were willing to fight

While most Rohingya who spoke to BenarNews told of being forced to fight, not all who went to Myanmar were abducted.

“We weren’t forced to go. We willingly went to battle for the nation,” a 42-year-old Rohingya told BenarNews. “We went after hearing such a request from the Myanmar government.”

He said some volunteers were in their 50s while others were in their 30s or 40s.

“Those firearms are vintage Myanmar-made G3 guns. All are old scraps, utterly useless due to abandonment,” he said.

“The Myanmar government didn’t take us to fight. They used us as (human) shields – they have misled the world and fooled the Rohingya.”

Mohammed Jubair, leader of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights (ARSPH), said both sides were trying to get rid of the Rohingya.

“Let the Rohingya be wiped out anyway. What will the world hear? They fought, they died fighting on both sides,” Jubair told BenarNews.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Abdur Rahman, Sharif Khiam for BenarNews.

Several accounts of new recruits fleeing from military training sites in central Magway and Bago regions show that the junta’s blanket conscription order continues to be hugely unpopular among Myanmar’s young people, several told Radio Free Asia.

In April, the junta began implementing a conscription law as a way of shoring up its dwindling ranks amid mounting losses to rebel groups.

Under the mandatory military service law, men aged 18 to 35 and women aged 18 to 27 must serve a minimum of two years in the military. Young people have been looking for ways to leave the country ever since.

Many new recruits have been sent for training after being detained at gunpoint by junta troops. Recruits face torture or execution if they are caught trying to escape.

A total of 11 new recruits in Magway region have run off from their training in recent weeks, according to escapees and those who helped them.

A young man from Magway’s Yenangyaung township told RFA that he was arrested at gunpoint by junta soldiers after he left his house on the morning of July 9. About 30 people were also detained in the township for military recruitment on the same day, he said, requesting anonymity for security purposes.

He said he was eventually sent to the No. 7 military training school in Taungdwingyi town, where he finally got the chance to escape in late August.

“On a day when it was raining heavily, we got an opportunity to run away as soon as we found a small exit that evening,” he said.

‘Training photos went viral’

Another escapee said recruits weren’t fed properly during the training course and were told by military officers that China has been supporting the anti-junta People’s Defense Forces, or PDFs.

“PDFs are receiving bribes from China for killing, they said. So, PDFs are doing such an anarchy. Actually, the junta is persuading the newly recruits to hate the PDFs,” the escapee said.

(Pyi Thu Sitt via Telegram)

In the neighboring Bago region, a young man who recently fled from military training told RFA that living under the junta had become unbearable.

“We made the decision with our own sense whether they are good or bad, who is good or bad,” he said. “We can’t die for them. So, we made the decision to run away.”

RFA was unable to contact Social Affairs Minister Myo Myint, the junta’s spokesman for Magway region, for comment on the recent escapes.

A young man from Bago’s Paungte township said he fled military service after he was sent to Shan state following a brief and insufficient training period. There were some 600 young people from the Bago region in his training cohort, he said.

“We were given just one day of training on how to set up the MA-1 gun,” he said. “We could fire only five shots in the training.”

Junta-backed media outlets frequently publish photos of new recruits and documentary videos from training courses.

“Our training photos went viral online,” the young man said.

Sent to the frontlines

No one from the Bago region has deserted from military training, according to Tin Oo, the junta’s economic affairs minister and spokesman for the region.

“Some people are dividing the government (junta regime) and the public by spreading rumors that young people are forcibly recruited,” he told RFA.

“There was also some news that the recruits have fled from the training,” he said. “Actually, these rumors are not true. We are managing the training course very flexibly and the recruits are also happy at the training.”

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There are at least 21,000 recruits in 23 military training schools across Myanmar, according to an Oct. 19 report from the Burmese Affairs and Conflict Studies Group, an independent research group,

The report included evidence that those who recently completed training courses were sent to frontlines in Shan and Rakhine states, where fighting has been fierce.

Some new recruits were killed during fighting for Lashio, which was captured by insurgents in August and has recently been the focus of a junta counteroffensive, the report said.

Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Matt Reed.

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

“You’re so lucky you live there,” they told her. Powell thought so, too. The Northeast tends to have big summer thunderstorms and frigid winters, but it’s rarely beset by hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, or tornadoes — the cataclysmic natural disasters other parts of the country have to navigate regularly. And, unlike nearby New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut — states where acreage is a hot commodity — Vermont, the most rural state in the U.S., has ample open space. 

After renting for a few years, Powell and her husband bought an old farmhouse just outside of the state capital Montpelier in 2019. Their town is known for its dirt roads, spring-fed wells, and old-school New England appeal. When she moved there, Powell remembers thinking that it was the closest thing she’d be able to find to a place safe from the effects of climate change. 

Soon, Powell would be dealing with a set of issues reminiscent of the state she had left behind.

In early 2020, as COVID-19 was spreading across the country and many people began working from home, middle- and upper-class Americans started trading dense urban areas for rural ones. Vermont towns whose populations hadn’t changed in a hundred years, towns that the state was desperate to fill before 2020, were startled by an influx of new residents. Abandoned houses were quickly sold, renovated, and resold. The state’s housing stock was thoroughly gleaned, and the cost of housing increased close to 40 percent between 2019 and 2023. 

As affordable housing became nearly impossible to come by, the homeless population grew. There were rumors of traveling nurses forced to sleep in tents near the hospitals they were treating COVID patients in. Some companies hiring out-of-state applicants gave their new employees 12 months to move to the state, to account for the difficult housing market. 

And then, last July, heavy rain started to fall on central Vermont — and kept falling. Flash floods swept across the state. Trickling rivers roared to life, swelled, and burst into the towns and cities clustered by their banks. More than 12 inches of rain fell on Montpelier that month, breaking a rainfall record set in 1989. The Winooski River, the artery that runs through the capital, crested to its highest point in close to a century. 

At 7 p.m. on the night of July 10, as rain poured, Powell and her husband checked their basement and saw that it was dry. Twenty minutes later, there was three feet of water in it. They didn’t know it yet, but the road drainage culvert above their house had failed, sending a wave of water onto their property. They were soon plunged into darkness, as thousands of customers in their area lost power. When the sun came up and the flooding had receded, 6 inches of mud lined the floors of their basement. Even with help from their coworkers, friends, and neighbors, it took the couple weeks to clean it out. The flooding ruined their HVAC system and required $25,000 in repairs. Powell’s house wasn’t in a flood plain, so she hadn’t bought flood insurance. But after months of filling out paperwork, she got reimbursement from federal disaster relief programs. 

On July 10 this year, a year later to the day, another bout of heavy rain flooded Powell’s house again. The damage was just as bad the second time. The couple considered moving, but quickly realized that the real estate market had changed drastically since they’d purchased their house in 2019. The cost of buying a new home aside, Powell, like many of her fellow climate-conscious Vermonters, doesn’t know where she would go. “We thought we were in this climate change haven,” she said. “Then you realize that that doesn’t really exist.”

Listen to former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris stump on the campaign trail, and they’ll tell you that America has a housing crisis of epic proportions. It’s one of the only issues Republicans and Democrats in Congress agree needs to be fixed, and fast. 

The problem dates back to 2008, when the Great Recession caused real estate developers to cut back dramatically on the number of new homes they were building. The rate of new homes coming online has lagged ever since, adding up to a deficit of 3.8 million housing units across the country as of 2020. 

What’s more, many of the cities where Americans want to live have strict zoning laws on the books that restrict new developments and stifle the constriction of multi-family homes in particular. Even as states have tried to make it easier for developers to build new homes, local governments and residents have conspired to stop the flow of new housing. Meanwhile, as everything has become more expensive over the past half-decade, the cost of building new homes has skyrocketed.  

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Now, extreme weather events are squeezing already-limited housing options. Climate change-driven disasters have been hitting the U.S. with more intensity over the past quarter-century, creating tens of billions of dollars worth of damage every year, as global average temperatures climb. Last year, 2.5 million Americans were displaced, either temporarily or permanently, by extreme weather. And much of America’s existing housing stock is not built to withstand the consequences of climate change, which means that tens of millions of renters and homeowners are vulnerable. 

Climate change isn’t the root cause of America’s housing crisis, but it is an erratic compounding factor that officials from the smallest towns in New England to the biggest cities in California are being forced to reckon with. This summer alone, Hurricanes Helene and Milton temporarily displaced millions of people across the South and caused hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage to infrastructure, businesses, and properties. 

A year out from the devastating flood of 2023, which killed two people and damaged 4,800 homes and businesses, Vermonters are confronting the difficult reality that extreme weather is shoving the state deeper into a housing deficit. Vermont’s historic downtowns, clustered along the rivers that once served as vital transportation corridors and provided power for mills and factories, are being drowned by the very arteries that once gave them life. “People want to stay in the community, but there’s a close to 0 percent vacancy rate,” said Lauren Hierl, a nonpartisan member of the Montpelier City Council. “When you have an event like the flood come in that takes offline even 50 units, there’s just nowhere for people to go.” 

A recent report conducted by Vermont housing officials found that Vermont needs to build between 24,000 and 36,000 new homes by 2029 to accommodate its growing population. The cost of building a small home or apartment rose from $370,000 in 2022 to $500,000 a year later. Half of renters in the state spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing — widely considered the threshold between affordable and unaffordable. 

Seth Bongartz, a Democratic member of the Vermont House of Representatives, sees the housing shortage in his state as a “little microcosm” of larger national housing and climate trends. Bongartz recently introduced a bill that makes it easier for Vermont municipalities to approve new housing developments in the state’s most populated areas, the idea being that building denser housing where amenities like gas, water, and sewage already exist simultaneously expands housing stock and prevents sprawl into the state’s revered wilderness. The state’s Republican governor vetoed the bill, but Democratic majorities in the state legislature overrode him, and the law was enacted in June. The loosened restrictions will help jumpstart more development, Bongartz said: “It’s coming.” But so are more floods. 

In Vermont’s capital, city leaders, nonprofits, business associations, and tourism boards are trying to take on the city’s twin housing and climate crises. And they’re doing it with community input. A series of public meetings held in the months after the 2023 floods, attended by hundreds of concerned residents, spurred the development of a new commission dedicated to figuring out how to protect the city from the effects of climate change. Working alongside the city council, the coalition is racing against the clock to make Montpelier more resilient before the next heavy rainstorm. 

To the passing leaf peeper, hiker, or skier, Montpelier, the smallest state capital in the U.S., is the picture of Vermont charm. Brick houses line the Winooski River, which runs parallel to Main Street. Small businesses sling lattes, pizzas, and secondhand flannels. The gold-domed capitol building, on State Street, stands sentinel over a city that’s home to just 8,000 residents. 

But things have changed since the event the National Weather Service dubbed the Great Vermont Flood of 2023. Close to 100 buildings in the capital, many of them businesses, were damaged. Some shops never reopened, and the ones that did are struggling to recoup losses from closures forced by the disaster. The only federal post office in Montpelier has been shuttered for more than a year, meaning that residents of Vermont’s capital city have to go to a nearby town to mail their packages. On the far side of State Street, a mother is still camping out with her two teenage sons in the shell of their former house. A small number of houses have been abandoned permanently — their owners are in the process of getting buyouts from the Federal Emergency Management Administration, or FEMA, the federal government’s disaster relief arm. 

To those in the know, it’s obvious that the floods sparked the beginning of a precarious new era in Montpelier, one that has not yet come into full focus.

Melissa Whittaker and her husband, Carlo, own a pizza restaurant called Positive Pie in downtown Montpelier. On the morning of July 10, 2023, water started rushing into their basement faster than they had ever seen — and soon, into the first floor, too. Keeping the water out was futile; they had to close the restaurant and speed home before the roads washed out. When they came back the next morning, Positive Pie was utterly wrecked. Prosciutto and mozzarella were scattered on the floor in indistinguishable black piles. In the basement, the wall separating their building from the neighboring building had been blown into bits by the force of the water. Gobs of pizza dough hung like stalactites from the rafters. 

The federal flood insurance they had only covered the first floor of the restaurant — the national flood insurance program doesn’t cover basements in flood zones. In order to reopen the restaurant, they needed new floors, walls, plumbing, electric wiring, and a mezzanine steel loft to store the goods they had previously kept downstairs. The upgrades and repairs cost them $800,000 over the course of more than 12 months. Melissa and Carlo got a little over $100,000 from their insurance company and $200,000 from a Vermont state business assistance program. 

They applied for a small business loan from the federal government to cover the remaining $500,000. The money came with an unthinkable price: their house as collateral. “If we go bankrupt, we lose everything,” Melissa said. 

Melissa and Carlo aren’t the only homeowners in central Vermont who are one disaster away from homelessness. After more floods hit the region this summer, city and state leaders are desperately trying to find answers to a question thousands of other American communities, from Florida to North Carolina to California, are also struggling to address: How do you help affected citizens in the short term and prepare for next year at the same time? Two projects underway in Montpelier hint at the magnitude of the challenge ahead.

Ben Doyle is president of the Preservation Trust of Vermont, a nonprofit organization that works to safeguard old buildings and other heirlooms of Vermont’s long history. In his spare time, he volunteers on the Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience — an agency that was created after the flooding last year at the urging of Montpelier residents. Since he began volunteering, the commission has taken up just about every spare minute he has. “I can’t coach basketball,” he told me on a drive around Montpelier in September. “But I can do this.” 

The Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience was born of a series of well-attended public meetings, organized by three local organizations, that took place in the months following the 2023 flood. Paul Costello, a local with an uncanny knack for mediating tough conversations, led the discussions. The conversations were focused on climate resilience, Costello told me: how to build better communications and early warning systems ahead of disastrous floods; whether the city’s water treatment facility, which almost flooded, needs to be hardened; and, crucially, how to direct water away from houses and businesses downtown. 

Many of the roughly 1,000 people who attended the meetings had just lived through their first climate-driven disaster and were struggling to navigate the slow, bureaucratic, and confusing federal disaster relief process. Less than 2 percent of Vermonters had flood insurance before the floods hit.  

The effect of the flooding on the state’s housing stock was a hot topic at the public meetings. People who had never considered moving before started looking around for new places to live and were startled, like Brittany Powell was, to discover that there was virtually no affordable real estate to be found in the entire state. Addressing the multifaceted problems driving the housing shortage in Montpelier, Costello said, wasn’t something the meetings were aimed at fixing, but the issue was inescapable. “It weaves through everything in our community,” he said.  

At the last of the meetings, more than 300 people crowded into the auditorium of the local High School. Its basement had been steeped in four feet of water just months prior. Attendees were given six blue stickers, which they could put on more than a dozen resilience projects they had come up with over the course of the previous two meetings. The most popular initiatives fell into three buckets: establishing an emergency response system, restoring the floodplain, and creating a more resilient downtown. Soon after, the city, in collaboration with two local nonprofits, officially established the Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience, a group of 14 volunteers and one paid executive director, which would be tasked with working in parallel with the city to accomplish the goals the community put forth.

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For the past year, Doyle has been trying to make one of the most important of those directives — establish areas that can serve as giant sponges for flood water around Montpelier — happen. The project that’s closest to coming to fruition is called 5 Home Farm Way, an 18-acre parcel and the site of a historic home owned by the founding family of Montpelier. Doyle took me to the site, which the Preservation Trust, in collaboration with the resilience commission and the city, aims to turn into a natural containment area that can hold water that would otherwise flow from the Winooski River into Montpelier during a flood event. If the Great Vermont Flood hadn’t happened, the decrepit house on the property might have been turned into a museum or the headquarters for a nonprofit. But after the rain fell last summer, Doyle — who had dedicated his career to historical preservation — knew the house had to go. “The idea of more public investment going into a building that is no longer sustainable because of climate change is a bad idea,” he said. 

Removing the house and creating a channel connecting the property to the Winooski river will take roughly two years, Doyle said, and the engineering studies haven’t been completed yet, which means that no one knows exactly how much flooding in Montpelier will be averted by the project. But once it’s done, 5 Home Farm Way will serve as natural flood protection for the town, hopefully preventing more homes from being destroyed in future years. “The idea behind it is that maybe it drops the floodwater in Montpelier down by six inches,” he said. 

Still, Doyle knows the scale of the flooding to come can’t be stopped by a single, 18-acre parcel. “There’s a bunch of other parcels in this region that if you could coordinate them all and have it all be floodplain restoration you’re starting to actually do something,” he said. “But it’s going to take like 20 of these projects to make a difference. That’s tens of millions of dollars and decades of work.” 

Right across the street from 5 Home Farm Way, the city is embarking on a project that tackles Montpelier’s climate and housing predicament from the other direction. There, the local government is building a new affordable housing development on the site of an old golf course formerly owned by a fraternal social club called The Elks. For years, the Montpelier City Council hoped developers would buy the vacant property and turn it into an affordable apartment complex — something Montpelier desperately needed even before the floods hit. But there was little appetite among developers for such a project in Montpelier, said Hierl, the city council member. Developers were more interested in building more lucrative single-family condos in Stowe and other areas of Vermont where wealthy people tend to buy expensive second homes. 

So in 2022, the city took matters into its own hands, purchasing the 138-acre property with a $2 million bond with plans to turn it into a recreational site and a housing development. “We felt like we needed to take a more active stance, as our local government, because housing is such a crisis,” Hierl said. “We need to be proactive.” After the floods hit Montpelier and dozens of houses by the river were inundated, Hierl and other members of the council realized just how important their investment was. 

The former Elks Club is located just a few miles from downtown, but it’s a world away in elevation, located at the top of a hill that’s never been touched by flooding. The aim is to eventually build approximately 300 units of housing on the site, which would significantly alleviate the housing shortage in Montpelier. But there are a lot of hurdles to overcome before the city can break ground. The property still needs sewage, water, and electricity lines put in. It needs a road with two exit points, per Vermont state law. It also needs a developer on board to cover most of the upfront costs of building. The city has $500,000 in FEMA funds to use, left over from 2023, but that’s a drop in the bucket. Hierl estimates it’ll be three years before the city breaks ground on the project, and a couple years after that before the new housing comes on the market. Still, she said, the simple reality is that there is no one else in Montpelier committed to providing affordable housing opportunities for residents. 

“In some of the towns in Vermont that are successful in the development of new housing units, it’s often taken an intervention from the municipality to make it happen,” said Doyle, standing in front of the old Elks Club and looking out over the acres of sloping lawn that surround it. “Some people don’t believe that’s the role of government, helping facilitate the development of affordable housing. And yet, if the city didn’t step in, that’s not what would’ve happened here.”

It’s one thing for a city like Montpelier to take steps toward building a single affordable housing development, but it’s quite another to build enough affordable, climate-resilient housing to meet the need across Vermont — and across the country. Alex Farrell, Vermont’s top housing official and a Republican, said that, while Vermont has made strides in becoming more climate resilient, he doesn’t know how his state will address the toll extreme weather is taking on housing across Vermont without outside help. “To ask states to take this on alone, it’s just not doable,” he said. 

This year, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, and Senator Tina Smith, of Minnesota, both Democrats, introduced a bill that would create a $30 billion social housing authority within the federal government aimed at financing affordable units across the U.S. The bill pulls from green housing legislation that AOC and Bernie Sanders, the left-wing senator from Vermont, introduced in 2019 that would have directed billions toward making existing public housing stock climate resilient, had it passed. 

The new legislation is a long shot — congressional Republicans want less social safety net spending, not more. And record-high inflation has led to a situation in which new federal spending, in general, is increasingly frowned upon by voters who will be casting ballots this fall. But in Vermont, where extreme weather events are just starting to affect communities, local and state officials — both Democratic and Republican — say out-of-the-box thinking is exactly what’s needed. 

“It’s not like this kind of disaster is a one-off thing that’s really unusual or that we might not see again,” said Hierl. “Our federal, our state, and our local government all need to be better equipped to help people through these challenging climate disasters that we know are just going to continue growing. We need to do better.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The flood that forced a housing reckoning in Vermont on Oct 22, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

The report by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, or C4ADS, says that even two U.S. government agencies — the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Agency for International Development via its contractor Chemonics International — have not cut ties with Xinjiang-linked drug suppliers.

This is happening despite U.S. laws that require American companies to ensure there is no forced labor in their supply chains.

“Our findings indicate that international governments remain tied to the Uyghur region, especially in the pharmaceutical sector,” Mishel Kondi, author of the report, told Radio Free Asia.

The use of Uyghur forced labor is one of the repressive measures the Chinese Communist Party has taken in Xinjiang, where about 12 million Uyghurs live, and it is deeply entrenched in the region’s economy, the report says.

The Chinese companies mentioned in the report contribute to the oppression of the mostly Muslim ethnic group by benefiting from land that’s seized from Uyghurs and made available for corporate use, and from relying on forced labor by Uyghurs and Kazakhs  laborers.

Also, Uyghurs detained in internment camps have been forced into drug testing and medical procedures, the report says.

Human guinea pigs

This is borne out by accounts from Uyghurs who have left China. 

Qelbinur Sidik, who was forced to teach Chinese in separate detention facilities for Uyghur men and women, and former camp detainee Mihrigul Tursun both told RFA about authorities forcing girls and women to take pills that caused them to stop menstruating and nursing mothers’ breast milk to dry up.

“Nearly 90% of women in this camp were aged 18 to 40 years old. All of these women's menstruation ended after taking these pills and injections,” Sidik said. “Even the milk of the nursing mothers was depleted.”

Uyghur men had to take tablets or were given injections and later had blood drawn, Sidik added.

“I am confident that the Chinese government used the detained Uyghurs for experiments to test their medicines,” she said.

Tursun said the small white tablets she had to take gave her severe stomach pains and chills, and made her feel weak and drowsy. They also made her period stop for six months.

“I was given medicines once a week. I don't know what medicines they were,” she said. “They called your number from a book. When they called your number, you opened your mouth. They gave me small white tablets. They checked our mouths to make sure we swallowed them.”

Tursun said she then developed a bad stomach ache. “My whole body became weakened and drowsy, my head spun, and my legs shivered. It lasted 2-3 days.” 

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Acetaminophen granules, estrogen cream

Though Xinjiang is a minor player in the pharma production industry in China — the world’s largest active pharmaceutical ingredient producer and the second-largest drug market in the world — there are 43 licensed pharma companies in the region.

Among the 661 products they manufacture are acetaminophen granules, estrogen tablets and cream, and traditional Chinese and Uyghur medicine. Seventy-six pharma products exported from China are manufactured only in Xinjiang, exposing global supply chains to forced labor, the report says.

Eleven of the manufacturers are Chinese state-owned enterprises, 21 are owned by private individuals, nine are owned by companies with a known record of forced labor in other industries, and two are tied to Chinese defense contractors. 

None of the manufacturers appear on the Entity List under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, or UFLPA, the report says.

And foreign companies — including Citigroup and BlackRock — continue to hold shares in some of them, it says.

But implementation of the UFLPA remains weak, the report says.

“Supply chains and corporate structures are often opaque; enforcement agencies lack sufficient resources to track, monitor, and enforce regulations, and the diverse agencies responsible for implementing them are still in the process of translating how to most effectively do so,” it says.

Despite the UFLPA's rebuttable presumption — which assumes goods made in Xinjiang are produced with forced labor and thus banned under the U.S. 1930 Tariff Act — only one pharma producer from Xinjiang — Chenguang Biotech Group Co., Ltd. — has been added to the Entity List, the report notes.

Chemonics International

As recently as 2019, USAID contractor Chemonics International, based in Washington, purchased products from the Xinjiang Tianneng Chemical Ltd. Co., the report says, citing data from the 2023 Global Health Supply Chain Program Procurement and Supply Management Project. 

Tianneng Chemical is owned by a subsidiary of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, or XPCC, a state-owned enterprise and paramilitary organization operating in Xinjiang that has been added to the Entity List for perpetrating human rights abuses. 

“Through this procurement, Chemonics International appears to have unknowingly financially supported (through trade) a company owned by a subsidiary of a paramilitary entity and perpetrator of human rights abuses,” the report says.

In response to C4ADS’ information, Chemonics said it had not ordered any other products directly or indirectly from Tianneng Chemical and did not plan to do so.

A USAID spokesperson told RFA that the agency prioritizes preventing the use of U.S. government funds for contract awards to companies that may use forced labor, and its partners are required to comply with legal requirements prohibiting the use of forced labor under federal acquisition regulations.

Chemonics confirmed to USAID that it has not purchased any products from Tianneng Chemical outside of one transaction in 2019, prior to the date the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed sanctions, and said it has taken steps to avoid procurements from the manufacturer in the future, according to the spokesperson.  

The report also says that the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, has registered at least two Xinjiang-linked pharmaceutical producers, authorizing them to import to the United States, though the companies should be on the UFLPA Entity List. 

A FDA spokesperson said the agency would be in touch when it had information to share. 

The report said Japan’s Pharmaceutical and Medical Devices Agency registered four Xinjiang-based entities involved in biotech and pharma that conflicted with efforts to address human rights abuses in the region.

Specifically, Japan issued guidelines in 2022 urging businesses established there to monitor for human rights in their supply chains. The following year, the country’s parliament passed a resolution expressing concern about the treatment of Uyghurs and other human rights abuses in China.

Mexico and Canada have forced labor legislation in place, while the European Union this year passed a forced labor ban that will take effect in 2027.

Case studies

The 44-page report issued on Oct. 8 includes four case studies of companies that C4ADS says should be excluded from supply chains because of their ties to human rights abuses that have been overlooked by enforcement.

Sinopharm National Pharmaceutical Group Co., Ltd., a partially state-owned company, participated in Chinese Communist Party-led “work teams” believed to be main components of poverty alleviation programs that subject rural Uyghurs to forced assimilation and forced labor, the report says.

Xinjiang Deyuan Bioengineering Co. Ltd., a top manufacturer of drugs derived from human plasma operating exclusively in Xinjiang, appears to have directly benefited from forced displacement and government subsidies, it says.

“Unfortunately, we were unable to find smoking-gun evidence that the blood collected by Xinjiang Deyuan Bioengineering comes from people detained in camps,” Kondi said. 

“While the company claims that blood donations are voluntary, we could not confirm or refute this. However, given the human rights abuses in the region, this remains a serious red flag for businesses involved with these entities.”

Another company, Xinjiang Nuziline Bio-Pharmaceutical Co., which manufactures conjugated estrogen, also relies on Uyghur laborers, while Xinjiang Huashidan Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., a maker of Western and traditional Chinese and Uyghur herbal medicine, appears to have benefited from the displacement of the local population, the report says. 

The report is based on production license data, corporate records, and trade data — all publicly available information — and local media reports.

Recommendations

C4ADS recommends that all U.S. federal agencies conduct assessments of their procurement practices’ compliance with anti-forced labor sanctions regimes.

The U.S. government, meanwhile, should increase resources for — and improve interagency cooperation — for better monitoring and enforcement of sanctions, the report says.

It further recommends that the U.S. government strengthen its existing trade agreements by improving multilateral coordination on monitoring Chinese imports and bilateral and multilateral monitoring by sharing intelligence with other countries that import pharmaceuticals from China.

“Governments should turn the ongoing conversations about combating Uyghur forced labor into actionable legal precedents,” Kondi said.

C4ADS has produced other reports on human rights abuses in Xinjiang. In August 2021, it published the findings of an investigation into how the global economy supports oppression in Xinjiang. In 2022, it issued reports on Xinjiang goods entering global supply chains and the Chinese government’s industrial transfer into the region.

Additional reporting by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Roseanne Gerin for RFA English.

The global pharmaceutical industry relies on ingredients made in China’s far-western Xinjiang region using Uyghur forced labor despite efforts to eliminate this risk from supply chains, according to a new report.

The report by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, or C4ADS, says that even two U.S. government agencies — the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Agency for International Development via its contractor Chemonics International — have not cut ties with Xinjiang-linked drug suppliers.

This is happening despite U.S. laws that require American companies to ensure there is no forced labor in their supply chains.

“Our findings indicate that international governments remain tied to the Uyghur region, especially in the pharmaceutical sector,” Mishel Kondi, author of the report, told Radio Free Asia.

The use of Uyghur forced labor is one of the repressive measures the Chinese Communist Party has taken in Xinjiang, where about 12 million Uyghurs live, and it is deeply entrenched in the region’s economy, the report says.

The U.S. government and the parliaments of some Western countries have declared China's treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, including forced labor, mass detentions and other serious human rights violations as genocide and crimes against humanity.

The Chinese companies mentioned in the report contribute to the oppression of the mostly Muslim ethnic group by benefiting from land that’s seized from Uyghurs and made available for corporate use, and from using Uyghur and Kazakh forced labor.

Also, Uyghurs detained in internment camps have been forced into drug testing and medical procedures, the report says.

Human guinea pigs

This is borne out by accounts from Uyghurs who have left China.

Qelbinur Sidik, who was forced to teach Chinese in separate detention facilities for Uyghur men and women in Xinjiang, and former “re-education” camp detainee Mihrigul Tursun both told RFA about authorities forcing girls and women to take pills that caused them to stop menstruating and nursing mothers’ breast milk to dry up.

“Nearly 90% of women in this camp were aged 18 to 40 years old. All of these women's menstruation ended after taking these pills and injections,” Sidik said. “Even the milk of the nursing mothers was depleted.”

Uyghur men had to take tablets or were given injections and later had blood drawn, she added.

“I am confident that the Chinese government used the detained Uyghurs for experiments to test their medicines,” she said.

Tursun said the small white tablets she had to take gave hersevere stomach pains and made her feel weak and drowsy. They also made her period stop for six months.

“I was given medicines once a week. I don't know what medicines they were,” she said. “They called your number from a book. When they called your number, you opened your mouth. They gave me small white tablets. They checked our mouths to make sure we swallowed them.”

Tursun said she then developed a bad stomach ache. “My whole body became weakened and drowsy, my head spun, and my legs shivered. It lasted 2-3 days.”

Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said the accusation of forced labor in Xinjiang is “a lie of the century fabricated by anti-China forces” and “a tool used by American politicians to undermine Xinjiang's stability and contain China's development.”

The United States created and implemented the 2021 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which bans imports from Xinjiang unless they are certified as not made with forced labor, based on lies, and imposed sanctions on relevant entities and individuals in Xinjiang, he told RFA in an email.

“This is an escalation of the United States' suppression of China under the guise of human rights,” Liu said. “It is also a proof that the United States willfully undermines international economic and trade rules and undermines the stability of the international industrial chain and supply chain."

“The United States should immediately stop slandering China and stop interfering in China's internal affairs and undermining China's interests under the guise of human rights,” he said.

Acetaminophen granules, estrogen cream

Though Xinjiang is a minor player in the pharma production industry in China — the world’s largest active pharmaceutical ingredient producer and the second-largest drug market in the world — there are 43 licensed pharma companies in the region.

Among the 661 products they manufacture are acetaminophen granules, estrogen tablets and cream, and traditional Chinese and Uyghur medicine. Seventy-six pharma products exported from China are manufactured only in Xinjiang, exposing global supply chains to forced labor, the report says.

Eleven of the manufacturers are Chinese state-owned enterprises, 21 are owned by private individuals, nine are owned by companies with a known record of forced labor in other industries, and two are tied to Chinese defense contractors.

None of the manufacturers appear on the Entity List under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, or UFLPA, the report says.

And foreign companies — including Citigroup and BlackRock — continue to hold shares in some of them, it says.

But implementation of the UFLPA remains weak, the report says.

“Supply chains and corporate structures are often opaque; enforcement agencies lack sufficient resources to track, monitor, and enforce regulations, and the diverse agencies responsible for implementing them are still in the process of translating how to most effectively do so,” it says.

Despite the UFLPA's rebuttable presumption — which assumes goods made in Xinjiang are produced with forced labor and thus banned under the U.S. 1930 Tariff Act — only one pharma producer from Xinjiang — Chenguang Biotech Group Co., Ltd. — has been added to the Entity List, the report notes.

Chemonics International

As recently as 2019, USAID contractor Chemonics International, based in Washington, purchased products from the Xinjiang Tianneng Chemical Ltd. Co., the report says, citing data from the 2023 Global Health Supply Chain Program Procurement and Supply Management Project.

Tianneng Chemical is owned by a subsidiary of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, or XPCC, a state-owned enterprise and paramilitary organization operating in Xinjiang that has been added to the Entity List for perpetrating human rights abuses.

“Through this procurement, Chemonics International appears to have unknowingly financially supported (through trade) a company owned by a subsidiary of a paramilitary entity and perpetrator of human rights abuses,” the report says.

In response to C4ADS’ information, Chemonics said it had not ordered any other products directly or indirectly from Tianneng Chemical and did not plan to do so.

A USAID spokesperson told RFA that the agency prioritizes preventing the use of U.S. government funds for contract awards to companies that may use forced labor, and its partners are required to comply with legal requirements prohibiting the use of forced labor under federal acquisition regulations.

Chemonics confirmed to USAID that it has not purchased any products from Tianneng Chemical outside of one transaction in 2019, prior to the date the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed sanctions, and said it has taken steps to avoid procurements from the manufacturer in the future, according to the spokesperson.

The report also says that the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, has registered at least two Xinjiang-linked pharmaceutical producers, authorizing them to import to the United States, though the companies should be on the UFLPA Entity List.

A FDA spokesperson said the agency would be in touch when it had information to share.

The report said Japan’s Pharmaceutical and Medical Devices Agency registered four Xinjiang-based entities involved in biotech and pharma that conflicted with efforts to address human rights abuses in the region.

Specifically, Japan issued guidelines in 2022 urging businesses established there to monitor for human rights in their supply chains. The following year, the country’s parliament passed a resolution expressing concern about the treatment of Uyghurs and other human rights abuses in China.

Mexico and Canada have forced labor legislation in place, while the European Union this year passed a forced labor ban that will take effect in 2027.

Case studies

The 44-page report issued on Oct. 8 includes four case studies of companies that C4ADS says should be excluded from supply chains because of their ties to human rights abuses that have been overlooked by enforcement.

Sinopharm National Pharmaceutical Group Co., Ltd., a partially state-owned company, participated in Chinese Communist Party-led “work teams” believed to be main components of poverty alleviation programs that subject rural Uyghurs to forced assimilation and forced labor, the report says.

Xinjiang Deyuan Bioengineering Co. Ltd., a top manufacturer of drugs derived from human plasma operating exclusively in Xinjiang, appears to have directly benefited from forced displacement and government subsidies, it says.

“Unfortunately, we were unable to find smoking-gun evidence that the blood collected by Xinjiang Deyuan Bioengineering comes from people detained in camps,” Kondi said.

“While the company claims that blood donations are voluntary, we could not confirm or refute this. However, given the human rights abuses in the region, this remains a serious red flag for businesses involved with these entities.”

Another company, Xinjiang Nuziline Bio-Pharmaceutical Co., which manufactures conjugated estrogen, also relies on Uyghur laborers, while Xinjiang Huashidan Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., a maker of Western and traditional Chinese and Uyghur herbal medicine, appears to have benefited from the displacement of the local population, the report says.

The report is based on production license data, corporate records, and trade data — all publicly available information — and local media reports.

Recommendations

C4ADS recommends that all U.S. federal agencies conduct assessments of their procurement practices’ compliance with anti-forced labor sanctions regimes.

The U.S. government, meanwhile, should increase resources for — and improve interagency cooperation — for better monitoring and enforcement of sanctions, the report says.

C4ADS further recommends that the U.S. government strengthen its existing trade agreements by improving multilateral coordination on monitoring Chinese imports and bilateral and multilateral monitoring by sharing intelligence with other countries that import pharmaceuticals from China.

“Governments should turn the ongoing conversations about combating Uyghur forced labor into actionable legal precedents,” Kondi said.

C4ADS has produced other reports on human rights abuses in Xinjiang. In August 2021, it published the findings of an investigation into how the global economy supports oppression in Xinjiang. In 2022, it issued reports on Xinjiang goods entering global supply chains and the Chinese government's industrial transfer into the region.

Additional reporting by Nuriman Abdureshid for RFA Uyghur. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

The story was updated to add comments by the spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Roseanne Gerin for RFA English.

Recently released after nearly 16 years in prison, Vietnamese human rights activist Tran Huynh Duy Thuc walks up the stairs of his family’s home, holding the hand of a toddler.

Once inside the apartment in Ho Chi Minh City, Thuc sits in front of his elderly father and the two men tenderly embrace. His father has waited years for this moment and was awake for much of the previous night in anticipation of Thuc’s arrival.

“I’m his father,” the elderly man proudly states in a video recorded last week.

Thuc, 57, is the co-founder of human rights group Vietnam Path. He was arrested in 2009 and sentenced the following year in connection with his online articles criticizing Vietnam’s one-party state.

His release – eight months ahead of the end of his sentence – came as a surprise.

The government made no announcement as to why Thuc was freed on Saturday, along with climate campaigner Hoang Thi Minh Hong, who had served 12 months of a three-year sentence for tax evasion.

But the two activists’ freedom came just one day before Vietnamese Communist Party General Secretary To Lam boarded a flight from Hanoi to New York, where he addressed the 79th session of the U.N. General Assembly.

‘Forced pardon’

Despite the happy reunion with his family, Thuc referred to his release as a “forced pardon” or forced return in a Facebook post after he got home, saying he had been “carried out of the prison despite the objections of [my] fellow political prisoners.”

“More than 20 staff members of Prison No. 6 rushed into my cell and read a notice stating that the State President had signed Amnesty Decision No. 940 ... granting me a pardon," he wrote. "As a result, I became free and was no longer allowed to stay in prison. 

“I immediately protested, saying that I was not guilty and had no reason to accept the pardon, and that I would not go anywhere."

Thuc said he was taken to the airport and "forced to board a late flight [home] to Saigon [Ho Chi Minh City],” adding that he "did not want to gain my freedom through that [kind of] amnesty.”

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Since 2018, Thuc and his family had repeatedly applied for a review of his sentence, but their petitions were either rejected or ignored. He also staged multiple hunger strikes to protest unfair treatment in prison and refused several offers to leave Vietnam in exchange for his freedom, saying that he would rather die than abandon his campaign and his homeland.

In January 2023, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, a bipartisan group of U.S. Congress members, called on Vietnam to release Thuc “immediately and without condition.”

In his Facebook post, Thuc suggested his coercive release was “an important contribution to supporting the State President’s visit to the U.S.,” which he hoped would bring “a drastic transformation in [Vietnam’s] future.”

He also maintained his innocence, saying he had never intended to overthrow his country’s government.

“I only spoke out against tyrants and will continue to do so as long as they remain in power,” he wrote.

Defamation sentence

Despite the move to release Thuc, the Vietnamese government continues to clamp down on people who dare to criticize the government.

On Tuesday, the Lam Dong Provincial People’s Court sentenced Hoang Viet Khanh, 41, to eight years in prison and three years of probation on charges of “creating, storing, disseminating or propagandizing information, materials, items, and publications against the State.”

According to state media, Khanh regularly used the internet to “access websites and social media accounts of anti-government elements both inside and outside the country.”

Based on his indictment, Khanh used Facebook to post 126 articles and one video clip “criticizing the communist party and the state’s guidelines and policies in political and socio-economic areas, distorting history, defaming and insulting national leaders, or smearing senior Party leaders while spreading false information.”

The Lam Dong Provincial Police Department’s Security Investigation Agency arrested Khanh on Feb. 19, state media reports said, noting that his Facebook account had more than 45,000 followers prior to his detention.

State media described Khanh’s actions as “very serious and dangerous to society” and “in violation of national security,” adding that his case “should be handled strictly for the purposes of education, deterrence, and prevention.”

Khanh was charged under Article 117 of Vietnam’s Penal Code, which the government regularly uses to sentence those critical of the communist party and authorities. International human rights organizations have repeatedly condemned the article as too vague and called on Vietnam to repeal it.

Since the beginning of this year, at least nine individuals have been convicted under Article 117.

According to Human Rights Watch, Vietnam currently holds more than 160 political prisoners, which Hanoi denies.

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

We get an update from Gaza, where at least 68 Palestinians have been killed in the last 24 hours as Israel continues its relentless assault on the territory. After nearly 11 months of war, the official Gaza death toll now stands at over 40,600, although the true figure is estimated to be much higher. The World Food Programme announced it is pausing the movement of all staff in Gaza until further notice after Israeli forces shot at one of its clearly marked vehicles despite receiving multiple clearances by Israeli authorities. This comes just two days after U.N. humanitarian efforts in Gaza virtually ground to a halt due to new Israeli evacuation orders that disrupted operations again. Israel has issued several evacuation orders across Gaza over the past week, displacing a quarter of a million people in Deir al-Balah alone, including from the Al-Aqsa Hospital, where tens of thousands of residents and wounded were seeking shelter. Journalist Akram al-Satarri, speaking from just outside the hospital, describes “continuous military operations, continuous devastation, continuous targeting and [an] increased number of Palestinians affected by those ongoing operations either by being killed or being injured or by becoming displaced because of the new evacuation orders.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Honolulu Civil Beat. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

A year ago, after a deadly wildfire displaced thousands of residents of Lahaina, Hawaii’s governor and lieutenant governor invoked a state law blocking most evictions and prohibiting price gouging. The emergency order soon became a tool to prevent widespread displacement of all Maui residents, including people struggling to pay rent because they had lost work due to the fire.

Despite that order, some Maui property owners have capitalized on the crisis by pushing out tenants and housing wildfire survivors for more money. Among those displaced: a couple and their two young children who, according to court records, were evicted so their landlord’s son could move in while renting his own home to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s housing program for $8,000 a month.

Some property owners have brought in more than twice the going rate for a long-term rental by signing up with FEMA or another aid program. They have received lucrative property tax breaks for housing wildfire survivors, in some cases worth more than $10,000 a year.

Other landlords have forced out tenants and sought people who will pay more. Over the course of several months, one landlord tried to evict his tenants for different reasons, even claiming that Maui’s mayor needed to use the house as a “command center to rebuild Lahaina.” (A spokesperson for the mayor said that claim was false.) After the tenants moved out, two of them saw their ocean-view apartment listed online for $6,800 a month rather than the $4,200 they had paid. Asked about the higher price, the landlord told Civil Beat and ProPublica that the apartment has been cleaned up and is now furnished.

Complaints about evictions and rent increases have circulated for months. Housing advocates say Gov. Josh Green’s administration hasn’t moved aggressively enough to tighten the rules and that the Hawaii attorney general has overlooked abuses.

Even before the fires swept across Maui, rental housing on the island was among the most expensive in the country. The loss of so many homes was bound to increase prices. But tenants, housing advocates, government officials and even landlords say high prices offered by FEMA, the state and private aid organizations have encouraged property owners to chase the money. State Sen. Angus McKelvey, who lost his own home in Lahaina, called it “FEMA fever.”

Jo Wessel, a Colorado landlord, said she tried to sign up with FEMA after her tenants fell behind on their rent and electricity bills. She said a property management company working for FEMA offered her $6,500 a month, which according to court records was more than twice what she charged for the two-bedroom condominium in Kahului. Although the governor’s order bars evictions for nonpayment of rent or utilities, Wessel told Lea and David Vitello and their two children on Jan. 6 that they had five days to pay up or leave, according to documents reviewed by Civil Beat and ProPublica. Two weeks later, FEMA inspectors knocked on the Vitellos’ door to see if their home was suitable for wildfire survivors. “We didn’t see it coming,” Lea Vitello said.

The Vitellos refused to leave when their lease expired at the end of January, and Wessel eventually took them to court. It took until April for the Vitellos to find a new place and move out. Wessel said the delay caused her to miss out on the FEMA contract, but she was able to sign up with a nonprofit housing program willing to pay about $400 more per month than what she was charging the Vitellos. Wessel said she thought the Vitellos had taken advantage of the governor’s order and that they still owe her money. Although the Vitellos left a few months ago, Wessel’s court case against them continued until this week, when a judge dismissed it.

Those who have been forced out are contending with a housing market where the median rent has jumped 44% since before the fires, according to an Argonne National Laboratory study released last week. Some people who’ve been pushed out since the fires told Civil Beat and ProPublica that they haven’t yet found a permanent home.

Peter Sunday, whose family was evicted so their landlord’s son could move in, said he paid just $1,900 a month for their three-bedroom cottage and that the cheapest place he has found since is twice as much. He, his wife and their two young children have moved from place to place while they search for something stable.

Malcolm Vincent, the landlord’s son, said in a court filing that he lived in a garage on family property after he rented his home to FEMA and while he was waiting for the Sundays to leave. When called by Civil Beat and ProPublica, Vincent said he was busy and hung up. In response to a text message, he wrote, “Stop.” Ann Siciak, the Sundays’ former landlord, did not respond to interview requests.

State and federal officials said they didn’t intend for their housing programs to encourage landlords to kick people out to make room for wildfire survivors, but they had to offer lucrative rates in order to secure housing quickly. “We’re not incentivizing,” FEMA Region 9 Administrator Bob Fenton said in an interview. “What we’re doing is being competitive.”

The Green administration acknowledged that “some bad actors have not complied” with the governor’s order. Officials urged tenants to report unscrupulous landlords to the state attorney general.

Green said in an interview that he, too, has heard about landlords who have kicked out tenants to make more money, but he said they “represent the extreme minority.” Much more common, he said, are stories of people who did the right thing and provided shelter to thousands of people.

“I was very clear that we didn’t want to displace anybody, but there are a million different forces at play here,” Green said. “Every moment, every week, you just had to try to prevent predatory behavior. There’s a lot of that. That’s one of the lessons I learned from this crisis.”

State officials pointed to a sharp drop in eviction cases filed in court since the fire as evidence that the governor’s order is “doing what it was designed to do: stop unlawful evictions and keep families and survivors housed.”

But tenants’ rights groups and lawyers said court cases, the only public paper trail of evictions, don’t show the complete picture. It’s time-consuming and risky for a tenant to fight an eviction in court; if they lose, they’ll have a record that could make it harder to rent another place. Many tenants simply move out after getting a notice to vacate the property, even when they think their landlord is breaking the law.

“We know this is happening,” said Jade Moreno, a researcher and policy analyst for the Maui Housing Hui, a tenants’ rights organization. “We hear the stories all the time.”

Although most people refer to FEMA when they complain that emergency housing programs have skewed the market, the state of Hawaii pays similar rates for its own program. And in November, in an effort to entice property owners, the governor revealed just how much money could be made housing people who were homeless after the fire.

Thousands of wildfire survivors were living in hotel rooms at the time, costing the state at least $1 million a day; meanwhile, vacation rental homes that would have been cheaper sat vacant. So Green announced that the state would pay a premium to anyone who housed survivors.

For landlords who typically rented to locals, the numbers offered by the state were stunning: $5,000 a month for a studio or one-bedroom home; $7,000 for a two-bedroom; $9,000 for a three-bedroom; and $11,000 for a four-bedroom.

Early on, FEMA also concluded that it would have to pay vacation rental rates. FEMA won’t publicize what it pays, saying it varies by property. But contracts reviewed by Civil Beat and ProPublica show the agency has paid $5,000 to $9,050 for a one- or two-bedroom unit. For three- and four-bedroom homes, it has paid $9,000 to $11,400, according to two landlords who spoke to Civil Beat and ProPublica.

Once people knew what they could get, Maui-based property manager Claudia Garcia started getting calls. Property owners, many of whom lived on the mainland, asked if Garcia could help them lease to FEMA or raise their rents to keep pace. She said she refused because she didn't want to help them take advantage of the crisis. “The greed is sickening,” said Garcia, whose firm manages more than 100 rentals on the island. “It’s just not right what they’re doing.”

The Legal Aid Society of Hawaii got calls, too, but from tenants. In the first seven months after the fire, the number of Maui residents who sought help with evictions grew by 50% compared with the seven months before the fire, according to the organization.

The high prices offered by the state and FEMA forced at least one nonprofit that was sheltering victims of the fire to bump up its offers to property owners. “Short-term rental owners did shop us,” said Skye Kolealani Razon-Olds, who oversees the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement’s emergency housing and recovery programs. “They provided us with FEMA rental rates and asked if we could match it.”

Razon-Olds said the nonprofit has received 19 complaints from tenants who said they were being forced out of their homes so their landlords could rent to FEMA. She said her organization convinced FEMA to stop dealing with those owners.

In February, six months after the fire, FEMA announced that it would reject properties if it learned tenants had been illegally forced out “so landlords could gain higher rents from the FEMA program.” Officials told Civil Beat and ProPublica that FEMA has found fewer than 10 cases in which a landlord wrongfully ended a lease in order to participate in the housing program. In all those cases, FEMA removed the properties from the program.

State and federal officials characterized their rates as a compromise between vacation rental and long-term rates. The rates publicized by the state are maximums, state officials said; in practice, Hawaii is paying significantly less — about $228 per night rather than $267. That works out to about $6,800 per month rather than $8,000.

After state and local officials raised concerns, FEMA asked the Argonne National Laboratory to study whether housing programs had caused property owners to increase rents or displace residents.

Researchers concluded that the loss of housing in the fires was the biggest factor in the rapid increase in rental prices and that there wasn’t enough data to know how much housing programs had contributed. However, they noted that the Hawaii Office of Consumer Protection received about 700 housing-related complaints from August 2023 to April, most related to lease terminations or rent increases. Those complaints and subsequent investigations, researchers wrote, indicate that the “behavior of some landlords may have changed leading to secondary displacement or increased costs for some renter households outside of the burn area.”

One landlord, however, said it wasn’t until she was approached by a property management company working for FEMA that she decided to house wildfire survivors. The company offered Mara Lockwood $7,000 a month — about $2,300 more than what she had collected for her two-bedroom condo overlooking Maalaea Bay.

Lockwood took the deal, not just for the extra income, but because she would be exempt from property taxes for at least a year, which she said will save her about $12,000 annually. But she was conflicted. As the owner of a Maui real estate company, she saw the asking prices for rentals rise, and she kept hearing stories of people getting pushed out of their homes so that their landlords could earn more money.

“Kicking somebody out to rent to FEMA to make more money is a horrible thing to do to people,” Lockwood said. “But when you’re given an opportunity and money is involved — and you have to follow the money — then some people are going to do that.”

For every case in which it’s clear a tenant is being kicked out so their landlord can make more money, there are many more that aren’t as obvious, said Nick Severson, the lead housing attorney for the Legal Aid Society of Hawaii. “Sometimes we’ll have emails or texts or statements from the landlord that say, ‘I need you out of here so I can rent this for $8,000 a month to FEMA,’” he said. “But usually it’s not that lucky. It’s a little bit more covert, which makes it hard to push back on.”

That’s partly because the state law prohibiting price gouging during an emergency provides landlords with some wiggle room. Renters can be evicted if a landlord or family member is moving in or if the renter has violated the terms of their lease, as long as it’s not related to nonpayment of rent, utilities or similar charges. And landlords can push people out at the end of a fixed-term lease without providing any reason. In several cases reviewed by Civil Beat and ProPublica, landlords have cited those exceptions in evicting tenants and have gone on to rent their properties to wildfire survivors for more money.

Property owners acknowledge that they’re bringing in more money through housing programs than they did before the fire. According to the Hawaii attorney general, the governor’s emergency proclamation prevents landlords from raising their rent unless it was agreed to before Aug. 9 or the landlord can show their costs have increased.

And yet the attorney general has held property owners accountable in relatively few cases. The office has concluded that landlords violated the governor’s order in just 28 of the 200 complaints of illegal evictions and rent increases it had received as of June 3. (Another 30 were still under investigation.) Fenton, the FEMA administrator, said the attorney general’s office concluded that just one of the cases FEMA referred had violated the proclamation. The attorney general’s office can levy civil penalties of up to $10,000 a day, but it hasn’t.

“We have the emergency proclamation, but it doesn’t prevent anyone from evicting tenants and raising rent,” said Anne Barber, a Maui real estate broker who works with Garcia in her property management firm. “There is no accountability.”

The attorney general’s office said in a written statement that it “provides people with opportunities to do the right thing and correct their actions. If individuals continue to choose not to comply, then the Attorney General can and will seek legal remedies.”

The Green administration said it has revised the emergency proclamation to address the needs of the community; at one point, the governor added language barring unsolicited offers to buy property in areas affected by the fires. But, administration officials said, the governor’s power is limited. For example, they said he has no authority to force landlords to extend leases. Green’s staff said lawmakers must look at the price-gouging law and make needed changes.

In one case, Maui landlord Gregory Lussier filed an eviction case against six people living in a four-bedroom home in Kahului. He told Civil Beat and ProPublica that he wanted the tenants out because some of them had left and the remaining ones had stopped paying the full rent, which was about $4,000, but he knew the governor’s order prohibited him from evicting them for not paying. In his Jan. 5 notice to the tenants and the eviction case he filed in court against them a week and a half later, he cited several violations of the lease, including prohibitions on pets, smoking, illegal activity, expired vehicle registrations, and obscene or loud language. Before the case went to trial, the tenants moved out.

Although Lussier rented the property to FEMA’s housing program for $11,000 a month, he said that’s not why he filed eviction proceedings. “There was no premeditated scheme to force the tenant to leave so we could get a FEMA rental agency lease,” he said in an email. However, court records call into question his version of events. Lussier said the lease with FEMA’s outside property manager started Feb. 1 and he believes he signed the rental agreement the day before. He said he didn’t explore renting to the housing program until after the property was vacant and that the process of signing up took “several weeks.” But video of a hearing shows that Lussier and three of his tenants appeared in court on Jan. 29, where the tenants denied his allegations that they had violated the lease. Lussier declined to explain the discrepancy to Civil Beat and ProPublica.

Maui attorney Jack Naiditch said he’s gotten several phone calls from property owners who want to exploit loopholes in the emergency proclamation so they can take advantage of FEMA’s prices. He said he’s turned them away: “I’m not going to put my name on the line for somebody who’s fibbing.”

But he has represented a number of property owners in court, including Sunday’s landlord; some of them have later rented their homes to house wildfire survivors. He declined to discuss specifics of their cases.

When Sunday appeared in court in April, he pleaded with the judge to let his family stay in their home. “Frankly, this is cold, your honor,” Sunday said. “A single man wants to evict a family of four to move into a home which he has admitted is for his own financial benefit and gain.”

“There’s nothing I can do about that,” the judge said. “That is what the law allows. So that needs to be taken on with the governor, our mayor or Legislature, because there are people who very likely take advantage of that.”

Four days after the Sundays received their eviction order, Green responded to residents’ complaints and made it harder to claim the exception that Sunday’s landlord had cited. Now, a landlord or family member who claims they need to move into a property must provide a sworn statement saying they’re not accepting money from an aid program to house survivors.

That same day, Sunday said, his family packed the last of their belongings as a process server threatened to call the sheriff if they lingered too long. They put most of their belongings in a storage unit and gave away all of their pets and backyard farm animals — 18 chickens, nine ducks, two dogs and a pair of cats. They have to relocate again this week.

Sunday doesn’t know what to tell his kids about the constant shuffling and when they’ll see their pets again. “I can’t give them any kind of peace,” he said, “without lying to them.”

Struggling to Keep or Find Housing After Maui’s Wildfires? Tell Us Your Story.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Nick Grube, Honolulu Civil Beat.

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook in Middle East Eye

There should be nothing surprising about the revelation that troops at Sde Teiman, a detention camp set up by Israel in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel, are routinely using rape as a weapon of torture against Palestinian inmates.

Last month, nine soldiers from a prison unit, Force 100, were arrested for gang-raping a Palestinian inmate with a sharp object. He had to be hospitalised with his injuries.

At least 53 prisoners are known to have died in Israeli detention, presumed in most cases to be either through torture or following the denial of access to medical care. No investigations have been carried out by Israel and no arrests have been made.

• READ MORE: Other Jonathan Cook articles
• Other Gaza genocide reports

Why should it be of any surprise that Israel’s self-proclaimed “most moral army in the world” uses torture and rape against Palestinians? It would be truly surprising if this was not happening.

After all, this is the same military that for 10 months has used starvation as a weapon of war against the 2.3 million people of Gaza, half of them children.

It is the same military that since October has laid waste to all of Gaza’s hospitals, as well as destroying almost all of its schools and 70 percent of its homes. It is the same military that is known to have killed over that period at least 40,000 Palestinians, with a further 21,000 children missing.

It is the same military currently on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest court in the world.

No red lines
If there are no red lines for Israel when it comes to brutalising Palestinian civilians trapped inside Gaza, why would there be any red lines for those kidnapped off its streets and dragged into its dungeons?

I documented some of the horrors unfolding in Sde Teiman in these pages back in May.

Months ago, the Israeli media began publishing testimonies from whistleblowing guards and doctors detailing the depraved conditions there.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has been denied access to the detention camp, leaving it entirely unmonitored.

The United Nations published a report on July 31 into the conditions in which some 9400 captive Palestinians have been held since last October. Most have been cut off from the outside world, and the reason for their seizure and imprisonment was never provided.

The report concludes that “appalling acts” of torture and abuse are taking place at all of Israel’s detention centres, including sexual violence, waterboarding and attacks with dogs.

The authors note “forced nudity of both men and women; beatings while naked, including on the genitals; electrocution of the genitals and anus; being forced to undergo repeated humiliating strip searches; widespread sexual slurs and threats of rape; and the inappropriate touching of women by both male and female soldiers”.

There are, according to the investigation, “consistent reports” of Israeli security forces “inserting objects into detainees’ anuses”.

Children sexually abused
Last month, Save the Children found that many hundreds of Palestinian children had been imprisoned in Israel, where they faced starvation and sexual abuse.

And this week B’Tselem, Israel’s main human rights group monitoring the occupation, produced a report — titled “Welcome to Hell” — which included the testimonies of dozens of Palestinians who had emerged from what it called “inhuman conditions”. Most had never been charged with an offence.

It concluded that the abuses at Sde Teiman were “just the tip of the iceberg”. All of Israel’s detention centres formed “a network of torture camps for Palestinians” in which “every inmate is intentionally condemned to severe, relentless pain and suffering”. It added that this was “an organised, declared policy of the Israeli prison authorities”.

Tal Steiner, head of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, which has long campaigned against the systematic torture of Palestinian detainees, wrote last week that Sde Teiman “was a place where the most horrible torture we had ever seen was occurring”.

In short, it has been an open secret in Israel that torture and sexual assault are routine at Sde Teiman.

The abuse is so horrifying that last month Israel’s High Court ordered officials to explain why they were operating outside Israel’s own laws governing the internment of “unlawful combatants”.

The surprise is not that sexual violence is being inflicted on Palestinian captives. It is that Israel’s top brass ever imagined the arrest of Israeli soldiers for raping a Palestinian would pass muster with the public.

Toxic can of worms
Instead, by making the arrests, the army opened a toxic can of worms.

The arrests provoked a massive backlash from soldiers, politicians, Israeli media, and large sections of the Israeli public.

Rioters, led by members of the Israeli Parliament, broke into Sde Teiman. An even larger group, including members of Force 100, tried to invade a military base, Beit Lid, where the soldiers were being held in an attempt to free them.

The police, under the control of Itamar Ben Gvir, a settler leader with openly fascist leanings, delayed arriving to break up the protests. Ben Gvir has called for Palestinian prisoners to be summarily executed — or killed with “a shot to the head” — to save on the costs of holding them.

No one was arrested over what amounted to a mutiny as well as a major breach of security.

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, helped whip up popular indignation, denouncing the arrests and describing the Force 100 soldiers as “heroic warriors”.

Other prominent cabinet ministers echoed him.

Three soldiers freed
Already, three of the soldiers have been freed, and more will likely follow.

The consensus in Israel is that any abuse, including rape, is permitted against the thousands of Palestinians who have been seized by Israel in recent months — including women, children and many hundreds of medical personnel.

That consensus is the same one that thinks it fine to bomb Palestinian women and children in Gaza, destroy their homes and starve them.

Such depraved attitudes are not new. They draw on ideological convictions and legal precedents that developed through decades of Israel’s illegal occupation. Israeli society has completely normalised the idea that Palestinians are less than human and that any and every abuse of them is allowed.

Hamas’s attack on October 7 simply brought the long-standing moral corruption at the core of Israeli society more obviously out into the open.

In 2016, for example, the Israeli military appointed Colonel Eyal Karim as its chief rabbi, even after he had declared Palestinians to be “animals” and had approved the rape of Palestinian women in the interest of boosting soldiers’ morale.

Religious extremists, let us note, increasingly predominate among combat troops.

Compensation suit dismissed
In 2015, Israel’s Supreme Court dismissed a compensation suit from a Lebanese prisoner that his lawyers submitted after he was released in a prisoner swap. Mustafa Dirani had been raped with a baton 15 years earlier in a secret jail known as Facility 1391.

Despite Dirani’s claim being supported by a medical assessment from the time made by an Israeli military doctor, the court ruled that anyone engaged in an armed conflict with Israel could not make a claim against the Israeli state.

Meanwhile, human and legal rights groups have regularly reported cases of Israeli soldiers and police raping and sexually assaulting Palestinians, including children.

A clear message was sent to Israeli soldiers over many decades that, just as the genocidal murder of Palestinians is considered warranted and “lawful”, the torture and rape of Palestinians held in captivity is considered warranted and “lawful” too.

Understandably, there was indignation that the long-established “rules” — that any and every atrocity is permitted — appeared suddenly and arbitrarily to have been changed.

The biggest question is this: why did the Israeli military’s top legal adviser approve opening an investigation into the Force 100 soldiers — and why now?

The answer is obvious. Israel’s commanders are in panic after a spate of setbacks in the international legal arena.

‘Plausible’ Gaza genocide
The ICJ, sometimes referred to as the World Court, has put Israel on trial for committing what it considers a “plausible” genocide in Gaza.

Separately, it concluded last month that Israel’s 57-year occupation is illegal and a form of aggression against the Palestinian people. Gaza never stopped being under occupation, the judges ruled, despite claims from its apologists, including Western governments, to the contrary.

Significantly, that means Palestinians have a legal right to resist their occupation. Or, to put it another way, they have an immutable right to self-defence against their Israeli occupiers, while Israel has no such right against the Palestinians it illegally occupies.

Israel is not in “armed conflict” with the Palestinian people. It is brutally occupying and oppressing them.

Israel must immediately end the occupation to regain such a right of self-defence — something it demonstrably has no intention to do.

Meanwhile, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the ICJ’s sister court, is actively seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes.

The various cases reinforce each other. The World Court’s decisions are making it ever harder for the ICC to drag its feet in issuing and expanding the circle of arrest warrants.

Countervailing pressures
Both courts are now under enormous, countervailing pressures.

On the one side, massive external pressure is being exerted on the ICJ and ICC from states such as the US, Britain and Germany that are prepared to see the genocide in Gaza continue.

And on the other, the judges themselves are fully aware of what is at stake if they fail to act.

The longer they delay, the more they discredit international law and their own role as arbiters of that law. That will give even more leeway for other states to claim that inaction by the courts has set a precedent for their own right to commit war crimes.

International law, the entire rationale for the ICJ and ICC’s existence, stands on a precipice. Israel’s genocide threatens to bring it all crashing down.

Israel’s top brass stand in the middle of that fight.

They are confident that Washington will block at the UN Security Council any effort to enforce the ICJ rulings against them — either a future one on genocide in Gaza or the existing one on their illegal occupation.

No US veto at ICC
But arrest warrants from the ICC are a different matter. Washington has no such veto. All states signed up to the ICC’s Rome Statute – that is, most of the West, minus the US — will be obligated to arrest Israeli officials who step on their soil and to hand them over to The Hague.

Israel and the US had been hoping to use technicalities to delay the issuing of the arrest warrants for as long as possible. Most significantly, they recruited the UK, which has signed the Rome Statute, to do their dirty work.

It looked like the new UK government under Keir Starmer would continue where its predecessor left off by tying up the court in lengthy and obscure legal debates about the continuing applicability of the long-dead, 30-year-old Oslo Accords.

A former human rights lawyer, Starmer has repeatedly backed Israel’s “plausible” genocide, even arguing that the starvation of Gaza’s population, including its children, could be justified as “self-defence” — an idea entirely alien to international law, which treats it as collective punishment and a war crime.

But now with a secure parliamentary majority, even Starmer appears to be baulking at being seen as helping Netanyahu personally avoid arrest for war crimes.

The UK government announced late last month that it would drop Britain’s legal objections at the ICC.

That has suddenly left both Netanyahu and the Israeli military command starkly exposed — which is the reason they felt compelled to approve the arrest of the Force 100 soldiers.

Top prass pretexts
Under a rule known as “complementarity”, Israeli officials might be able to avoid war crimes trials at The Hague if they can demonstrate that Israel is able and willing to prosecute war crimes itself. That would avert the need for the ICC to step in and fulfil its mandate.

The Israeli top brass hoped they could feed a few lowly soldiers to the Israeli courts and drag out the trials for years. In the meantime, Washington would have the pretext it needed to bully the ICC into dropping the case for arrests on the grounds that Israel was already doing the job of prosecuting war crimes.

The patent problem with this strategy is that the ICC isn’t primarily interested in a few grunts being prosecuted in Israel as war criminals, even assuming the trials ever take place.

At issue is the military strategy that has allowed Israel to bomb Gaza into the Stone Age. At issue is a political culture that has made starving 2.3 million people seem normal.

At issue is a religious and nationalistic fervour long cultivated in the army that now encourages soldiers to execute Palestinian children by shooting them in the head and chest, as a US doctor who volunteered in Gaza has testified.

At issue is a military hierarchy that turns a blind eye to soldiers raping and sexually abusing Palestinian captives, including children.

The buck stops not with a handful of soldiers in Force 100. It stops with the Israeli government and military leaders. They are at the top of a command chain that has authorised war crimes in Gaza for the past 10 months – and before that, for decades across the occupied territories.

What is at stake
This is why observers have totally underestimated what is at stake with the rulings of the ICC and ICJ.

These judgments against Israel are forcing out into the light of day for proper scrutiny a state of affairs that has been quietly accepted by the West for decades. Should Israel have the right to operate as an apartheid regime that systematically engages in ethnic cleansing and the murder of Palestinians?

A direct answer is needed from each Western capital. There is nowhere left to hide. Western states are being presented with a stark choice: either openly back Israeli apartheid and genocide, or for the first time withdraw support.

The Israeli far-right, which now dominates both politically and in the army’s combat ranks, cares about none of this. It is immune to pressure. It is willing to go it alone.

As the Israeli media has been warning for some time, sections of the army are effectively now turning into militias that follow their own rules.

Israel’s military commanders, on the other hand, are starting to understand the trap they have set for themselves. They have long cultivated fascistic zealotry among ground troops needed to dehumanise and better oppress Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. But the war crimes proudly being live-streamed by their units now leave them exposed to the legal consequences.

Israel’s international isolation means a place one day for them in the dock at The Hague.

Israeli society’s demons exposed
The ICC and ICJ rulings are not just bringing Israeli society’s demons out into the open, or those of a complicit Western political and media class.

The international legal order is gradually cornering Israel’s war machine, forcing it to turn in on itself. The interests of the Israeli military command are now fundamentally opposed to those of the rank and file and the political leadership.

The result, as military expert Yagil Levy has long warned, will be an increasing breakdown of discipline, as the attempts to arrest Force 100 soldiers demonstrated all too clearly.

The Israeli military juggernaut cannot be easily or quickly turned around.

The military command is reported to be furiously trying to push Netanyahu into agreeing on a hostage deal to bring about a ceasefire — not because it cares about the welfare of Palestinian civilians, or the hostages, but because the longer this “plausible” genocide continues, the bigger chance the generals will end up at The Hague.

Israel’s zealots are ignoring the pleas of the top brass. They want not only to continue the drive to eliminate the Palestinian people but to widen the circle of war, whatever the consequences.

That included the reckless, incendiary move last month to assassinate Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran — a provocation with one aim only: to undermine the moderates in Hamas and Tehran.

If, as seems certain, Israel’s commanders are unwilling or incapable of reining in these excesses, then the World Court will find it impossible to ignore the charge of genocide against Israel and the ICC will be compelled to issue arrest warrants against more of the military leadership.

A logic has been created in which evil feeds on evil in a death spiral. The question is how much more carnage and misery can Israel spread on the way down.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Republished from the author’s blog with permission.

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

Authorities also are prohibiting Tibetans in Sichuan province and elsewhere from organizing and participating in prayer sessions online, said the sources who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal. 

The measures come as Beijing intensifies efforts to assimilate Tibetans and adapt Tibetan Buddhism so that its tenets and practices conform with the ideology of China’s Communist Party.

While authorities have demolished religious objects and structures at times at Buddhist monasteries in Tibet, this is the first instance of religious symbols at ordinary people’s homes being destroyed.

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Since the beginning of July, Chinese authorities have conducted searches of all homes in at least four villages in Ngaba county, said the sources, one of whom lives in exile and the other who is inside Tibet.

They are forcing Tibetans to remove prayer flags hoisted on rooftops and to destroy religious objects, said the source from inside Tibet.

Among the objects being dismantled are concrete structures resembling chimneys outside homes where Tibetans perform Sang-sol, or incense offerings, to mark important religious and personal events in their lives, he said.

While authorities have not publicly disclosed the reason for their actions, Tibetans expect similar inspections in neighboring Tibetan areas, both sources said. 

No online prayer sessions

Tibetans in Sichuan province and elsewhere are also prohibited from organizing any religious prayer sessions online in their social media messaging groups or chat groups, one of the sources said.

“Individuals who have initiated these prayer sessions have been summoned for interrogations by Chinese authorities,” he said.

China has continued to restrict and control Tibetan religious practices and shown no willingness to resume formal negotiations about greater autonomy for the region with representatives of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, according to the most recent annual report by the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

Beijing also bans Tibetans from observing significant cultural, religious and historical events such as Tibetan National Uprising Day and the Dalai Lama’s birthday. 

But Tibetans have defied these prohibitions, despite possible severe consequences.

During the Dalai Lama’s birthday on July 6, monks from monasteries in the Ngaba area were confined to their compounds under police presence to enforce such restrictions, said the first source from inside Tibet. 

With the birthday of Kirti Rinpoche, the head of Ngaba’s Kirti Monastery, approaching in August, Chinese authorities have already implemented online restrictions and threatened Tibetans against posting any photos or well wishes, said the second source.

In March, Chinese police arrested Pema, a Tibetan monk from Kirti Monastery for staging a solo protest while holding a portrait of the Dalai Lama on the streets of Ngaba county.

Pema, who was working as a teacher for the preliminary Buddhist study section at the monastery, also shouted slogans against Chinese policies in Tibet during his protest and was immediately arrested. 

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi and edited by Tenzin Pema for RFA Tibetan. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Pelbar for RFA Tibetan.

Hernán González, a producer for the South American broadcaster Torneos, was forced to the ground and handcuffed by multiple law enforcement officers at a stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida, while reporting live before a soccer match on July 14, 2024.

The New York Times reported that mayhem broke out at the Copa América final between Argentina and Colombia, when throngs of unticketed fans attempted to enter Hard Rock Stadium in the Miami suburb, delaying kickoff for more than an hour.

In footage captured by Mail Sport reporter Jake Fenner, officers from multiple law enforcement agencies can be seen grabbing a man who appears to be holding press credentials and who entered through the media entrance, according to Fenner.

The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker was able to confirm the man was González, who is the content and production director for Torneos, which produced and was a host broadcaster of the event.

In the video, González is quickly surrounded by at least six officers, who lift him sideways and place him prone on the ground, with an officer appearing to hold his head against the pavement while others place him in handcuffs. Both of the journalist’s shoes came off and his shirt ripped open in the course of the detention.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

The country has maintained an “extensive and multilayered” system of forced labor as a means of controlling and monitoring its people and there is “the widespread use of violence and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” by officials to discipline workers who fail to meet work quotas, said the United Nations Human Rights Office in a report Tuesday on North Korea’s use of forced labor

The report was based on 183 interviews conducted between 2015 and 2023 with victims and witnesses of such labor exploitation, looking at six distinct types of forced labor, including labor in detention, compulsory state-assigned jobs, military conscription, and work performed by people sent abroad by Pyongyang to earn currency for the country.

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The U.N. cited various testimonies from victims of the country’s forced labor system, including individuals forbidden to leave their worksites and a female worker who was sexually abused by a political guidance officer.

One woman interviewed for the report, who had been subjected to forced labor in a pretrial holding center, described how, if she failed to meet her daily quota, she and the seven others in her cell were punished.

“The testimonies in this report give a shocking and distressing insight into the suffering inflicted through forced labor upon people, both in its scale, and in the levels of violence and inhuman treatment,” U.N. Human Rights spokesperson Liz Throssell said at the biweekly a press briefing in Geneva.

“People are forced to work in intolerable conditions – often in dangerous sectors with the absence of pay, free choice, ability to leave, protection, medical care, time off, food and shelter. They are placed under constant surveillance, regularly beaten, while women are exposed to continuing risks of sexual violence.” 

The report added forced labor not only provides a source of free labor for the state but also acts as a means for the state to control, monitor and indoctrinate the population, calling on Pyongyang to abolish its use and end any forms of slavery.

“Economic prosperity should serve people, not be the reason for their enslavement,” said Throssell. “Decent work, free choice, freedom from violence, and just and favorable conditions of work are all crucial components of the right to work. They must be respected and fulfilled, in all parts of society.” 

The office also urged the international community to investigate and prosecute those suspected of committing international crimes, calling on the U.N. Security Council to refer the situation to the International Criminal Court.

South Korea welcomed the report, urging the North to follow its recommendations.

“We hope that this report will raise international awareness of the severe human rights situation in North Korea and strengthen international efforts to improve human rights conditions in North Korea,” the South’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a press release.

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew, which submerged the town under more than 10 feet of water eight years ago, Princeville’s residents debated three distinct options: staying put on the town’s historic land, taking government buyouts to relocate individual families elsewhere, or moving the town itself to higher ground. But internal disagreements and a lack of funding made it difficult for the town to move forward with any of those choices in a comprehensive way. As a result, the damaged town hollowed out as residents and businesses left one by one, becoming yet another example of how slow and painful disaster recovery can be for rural and low-income communities.

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Now, almost a decade after Hurricane Matthew’s devastation, Princeville’s fate is becoming clear — for better and for worse. The town has just received millions of dollars in new funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to build a new site on higher ground, offering hope for a large-scale relocation. At the same time, a long-awaited levee project that promised to protect the town’s historic footprint has stalled out, making relocation harder to avoid as another climate-fueled hurricane season begins.

The idea to relocate the town first emerged after Hurricane Matthew, when the state of North Carolina helped Princeville buy 53 acres of nearby vacant land. The state also kicked in money to help town leaders plan a mixed-use neighborhood with new apartments and businesses, and it later bought another larger parcel adjacent to the 53-acre tract. Earlier this month, FEMA officials announced that they will send almost $11 million to Princeville to build out the stormwater infrastructure for the new town. Construction could begin before the end of the year.

When the development is done, it will contain the seeds of a new town center for Princeville. There will be a fire station and a town government building, as well as 50 new subsidized apartments to replace a public housing complex that was destroyed during Hurricane Matthew. Town officials are hoping that private developers will build dozens of single-family homes and businesses on the tract. This would make the 53-acre development almost as large and well-appointed as the old Princeville, with as many stores and almost as many homes.

When he announced the new funding, FEMA administrator Robert Samaan praised “Princeville’s commitment to build outside of the floodplain and protect their community,” saying the decision to move to higher ground “is a testament to their resilience.” But this was somewhat misleading: Many residents and town leaders, including the mayor, have sought for years to stay put on the town’s original flood-prone site. In 2016, Jones even tried to turn down a federal program to buy out flooded homeowners in the old town. 

“We’re open to expansion, but we are not going to leave,” said the town’s mayor, Bobbie Jones, in an interview with Grist. 

But that option looks less viable than ever. Those who wanted to protect historic Princeville have long held out hope that the federal Army Corps of Engineers would repair and expand the old levee that defends the town from the caprices of the Tar River, whose overflowing banks have long been responsible for Princeville’s woes. The Corps’s original levee contained critical flaws that caused it to fail during floods in 1999 and again in 2016, but it took the agency until 2020 to secure funding from Congress to build a new and larger levee.

Jones touted this new levee project as proof that historic Princeville could survive, but earlier this year the Corps told residents that it was going back to the drawing board to review the project. The agency had discovered that building the planned levee would inadvertently cause flooding in the larger nearby town of Tarboro, on the other side of the Tar River. Officials said they couldn’t reduce flood risk in one place only to increase it in another. This is a cruel historical irony: The founders of Princeville only got access to the low-lying land in the 19th century because the white residents of Tarboro deemed it too flood-prone to use.

“Here we are in the midst of hurricane season again, and we’re just praying,” said Jones. 

In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson for the Corps said the agency is committed to flood protection in Princeville and is seeking funds that would allow it to commission a report looking at other options beyond the levee.

The setbacks on the levee project, combined with the sudden burst of progress on the new 53-acre development, seems to provide a bittersweet answer to the murky question of how Princeville will adapt to climate change. When it is complete, the new development will give Princeville a path toward long-term resilience, one that doesn’t require keeping most residents on land that’s destined to flood. But even this progress has come at great cost: Almost eight years after Matthew, many displaced residents have moved on for good, and even the promise of a new Princeville on higher ground may not be enough to draw them back.

“I understand the government moves slow,” said Calvin Adkins, a former resident of Princeville who took a government buyout and now lives across the river in Tarboro. “But when you’re talking about such a historic town, I just — in my heart of hearts, I was hoping that these things could have been done earlier.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change has forced America’s oldest Black town to higher ground on Jul 10, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

Advertisements for the companies appear in arenas and in material related to the tournament, which is being hosted by Germany from June 14 to July 14.

“Unfortunately, the lure of Chinese money has been too strong for many of those who could possibly receive that money. It's been too strong for them to resist, regardless of the fact that many of those companies are embroiled in forced labor and have major issues in their supply chains,” Executive Director of Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, or IPAC, Luke de Pulford said.

“So I think it's greed, unfortunately, over fundamental rights,” he said. “That is the basis of the problem here.”

A March 2020 report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI, found evidence that 82 well-known global brands, including Hisense, China’s largest television manufacturer, and electric car manufacturer BYD, used parts produced by Uyghurs living and working in conditions that strongly suggested forced labor. 

Alibaba, whose unit Alipay is a sponsor, offers facial recognition services to its cloud customers that enables them to detect Uyghurs, according to IPVM, which tracks video surveillance around the world.

RFA contacted Hisense, BYD and Alibaba for comment on Tuesday by had not received any response by midday Wednesday.

Since 2017, China has rounded up an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang and transferred them to concentration camps, where they have been forced to work on nearby farms and factories.

China denies the human rights abuses and says the camps were vocational training centers and have since been closed.

‘Take this seriously’

When contacted for comment about the selection of corporate sponsors, the UEFA media department said it “takes this topic very seriously.”

Organizers “have been adamant that UEFA EURO 2024 shall be a sporting event that commits to human rights as a contributing factor to the success of the tournament,” it said in a statement.

“Together with all relevant stakeholders, a framework and processes designed to uphold and protect human rights at the tournament have been created and will be implemented for everyone involved in the tournament,” it said.

But there was no UEFA comment specifically about the Chinese corporations.

De Pulford said unless pressure is placed on them, Chinese companies will continue to exploit Uyghur forced labor.

“I hope that something changes, but it's not going to change without noise and a lot of campaign,” he told Radio Free Asia. “So let's hope that human rights, due diligence regulations, when they really come in, manage to affect something of a sea change. And it's not going to happen without a concerted cross-party international campaign.”

Governments need to pressure companies in this regard, said Ghaiyur Qurban, the Berlin director for the World Uyghur Congress.

“We condemn this action of the UEFA committee. We believe that the mixed attitude of Western governments on human rights issues has led to a decrease in the awareness of such international companies and money driven institutions to act according to human values,” he said. 

“We still believe that the responsibility of the governments is serious in the occurrence of such situations.”

Translated by Martin Shawn. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Adile for RFA Uyghur.

The settlement, announced last Thursday, requires the department to develop a plan and zero out greenhouse gas emissions from all transportation sectors by 2045. The agency is also required to create a new unit tasked with climate change mitigation, align budgetary investments with its clean energy goals, and plant at least 1,000 trees a year to increase carbon absorption from the atmosphere. 

“It’s historic that the state government has come to the table and negotiated such a detailed set of commitments,” said Leinā‘ala L. Ley, a senior associate attorney at Earthjustice, one of the environmental law firms representing the youth plaintiffs. “The fact that the state has … put its own creativity, energy, and commitment behind the settlement means that we’re going to be able to move that much quicker in making real-time changes that are going to actually have an impact.”

According to a press release from the office of Hawaiʻi Governor Josh Green, the settlement represents the state’s “commitment … to plan and implement transformative changes,” as well as an opportunity to work collaboratively, instead of combatively, with youth plaintiffs, “to address concerns regarding constitutional issues arising from climate change.”

“This settlement informs how we as a state can best move forward to achieve life-sustaining goals and further, we can surely expect to see these and other youth in Hawaiʻi continue to step up to build the type of future they desire,” Green said in a statement.

The 13 teenagers who brought the suit, Navahine v. Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation, have cultural practices tied to the land. They are divers, swimmers, beachgoers, competitive paddlers, and caretakers of farms and fishponds. Many are Native Hawaiian. In the lawsuit filed in 2022, they alleged that the state’s inadequate response to climate change diminished their ability to enjoy the natural resources of the state. Since they filed, at least two plaintiffs were affected by the Lāhainā wildfire, the deadliest natural disaster in the state’s history.

Hawaiʻi has been a leader in recognizing the effects of climate change. The archipelago is battling rising sea levels, extreme drought, and wildfires among other climate calamities. In 2021, it became the first state in the nation to declare a “climate emergency” and committed to a “mobilization effort to reverse the climate crisis.” But the non-binding resolution did not translate directly into statewide transportation policies that reduced greenhouse gas emissions, according to the youth plaintiffs. 

Between 1990 and 2020, carbon dioxide emissions from the transportation sector increased despite advances in fuel efficiency, and now make up roughly half of all greenhouse gas emissions in the state. The plaintiffs argued that the Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation is largely to blame. Instead of coordinating with other agencies to meet the state’s net-zero targets, it has prioritized highway construction and expansion. The agency operates and maintains the state’s transportation network in such a way that it violates its duty to “conserve and protect Hawai‘i’s natural beauty and all natural resources,” the plaintiffs noted. 

Other similar constitutional climate cases are pending across the country. Our Children’s Trust, a public interest law firm that represented the Hawaiian youth with Earthjustice, has also brought cases against Montana, Alaska, Utah, and Virginia on behalf of young people. Ley said Hawaiʻi is a “great model” for other states to follow. “This settlement shows that these legal obligations have real effects,” she said. 

The settlement requires the state transportation department to meet a number of interim deadlines and to set up a decarbonization unit. The agency has already hired Laura Kaakua, who was previously with the Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources, to lead the unit. Ley said that they plan to monitor every report the agency publishes, submit comments, and educate their young clients on how they can stay involved. 

“Often in the climate field, young people feel betrayed by their government,” Ley said. “But this settlement affirms for these young people that working with the government can be effective and that this is a way that they can make a difference in their lives and in the world.”

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A group of young people just forced Hawaiʻi to take major climate action on Jun 24, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.

Among other provisions, Senate Bill 831 would create an enforcement structure for carbon capture within the state, set a low bar for gaining consent from landowners near sites where carbon is injected into the ground and, in some cases, spare the fossil fuel industry from seismic monitoring — that is, watching for earthquakes, a known risk.

The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Gene Yaw, a Republican representing north central Pennsylvania who has personal ties to the fossil fuel industry, cleared the Republican-controlled Senate on a 30-20 vote in April. It now moves to the House of Representatives, which is controlled by Democrats.

But a coalition of environmental groups said the bill is riddled with problems. Landowners could be left in the dark when the collected carbon is pumped into the ground near their properties, they said. Additionally, carbon dioxide could eventually leak into the atmosphere, posing a risk to both the environment and public health: In Satartia, Mississippi, a pipeline carrying carbon dioxide ruptured, sending 49 people to the hospital complaining of labored breathing, stomach disorders and mental confusion. 

“Our concerns with this were pretty significant,” said Jen Quinn, legislative and political director at the Pennsylvania chapter of the Sierra Club.

In introducing the legislation, Yaw pitched the bill as a proposal to direct state regulators to take over responsibility for the permitting process for carbon dioxide injection wells from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

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In reality, the bill, as written, would go much further than that. It would allow operators to inject carbon dioxide into underground geologic formations with permission from just 60 percent of the nearby landowners. It would allow operators to apply for a waiver ceding liability for these wells to the state after 10 years of a well’s completion. And it would allow operators to forgo seismic monitoring of the storage fields into which the carbon dioxide pumped into the earth, if they can prove that the field does not “pose significant risk.” 

Several of these provisions, Quinn said, are “setting the bar very low.” 

A report by the Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit environmental think tank, showed that no state sets the landowner consent bar at less than 60 percent. 

The report also argued that waiving operators’ liability over their carbon storage fields will lead to negligence: Operators that know they won’t be held responsible for any mess in the long run won’t be incentivized to run a clean operation, the report said. 

Capital & Main reached out to Sen. Yaw, author of SB 831, and did not hear back by publication time. However, he said in a press release that the bill is a “proactive step” to building out the state’s carbon capture industry. 

Environmentalists have long splintered over carbon capture and sequestration, known as CCS. The practice of collecting carbon dioxide from power plants and storing it underground has been criticized as costly, dangerous and largely unproven. While some say it is a useful tool among many for addressing the climate crisis, others call CCS a boondoggle that could offer a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry, which has rallied around the technology.

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Environmentalists worry that in Pennsylvania, which has centuries of oil and gas drilling under its belt, the state’s geology could prove treacherous. “This idea that they’re going to go all in on carbon capture and try to inject this stuff in the same places where it’s like Swiss cheese … is just plain stupid,” said Karen Feridun, co-founder of the grassroots Better Path Coalition, a staunch opponent of burying carbon in the earth.

The state is dotted with orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells, including many that likely have yet to be located. The wells create pathways underground through which gases can travel and potentially seep into waterways or leak into the atmosphere, undoing the progress of capturing the carbon in the first place. A 2009 report by the state’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources said that the state’s legacy oil and gas fields could “constitute a leakage pathway for reservoir gases, including injected CO2.”

“The safest course of action would be to avoid the oldest of these oil fields,” the report added. 

Feridun said she also anticipates that an influx of carbon dioxide injection wells will come with a maze of pipelines to transport the carbon.

Because the bill would permit operators to get consent from only 60 percent of property owners atop an injection site, some landowners would be left without a voice in the process, the southwestern Pennsylvania-based Center for Coalfield Justice warned in an online petition opposing the bill. The petition urges signatories to send a message to their representatives with language such as: “If 40 percent of people within a carbon storage field don’t want carbon injected beneath their feet — the project can move forward anyway.” 

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Ethan Story, advocacy director at the Center for Coalfield Justice, believes few Pennsylvanians are aware of the bill and what it could mean to them. “Landowners, in addition to elected officials in some communities, are very unaware and uneducated on this proposal,” he said. “The immediate reaction from a majority of the community members that we have talked to and presented this information to has been met with great pause.” 

SB 831 has been met with a different reaction in the state Legislature, where it’s earned — and sometimes lost — votes from Democrats and Republicans alike. 

Affirmative votes in the Senate came from a handful of Democrats, including state Sens. Jay Costa from Pittsburgh and Christine Tartaglione from Philadelphia. Those who opposed the bill included Sen. Doug Mastriano, a far-right Republican from south central Pennsylvania who made headlines in 2022 with a failed gubernatorial run and his full embrace of various hard-line policies, including a firm pro-fossil fuel stance.

Carbon capture “is, to a degree, cutting across what we would probably classify as traditional ideological divisions,” said Sean O’Leary, senior researcher, energy and petrochemicals, at the Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit think tank.

One of carbon capture’s most crucial endorsements in the state came from Gov. Josh Shapiro. Shapiro, a Democrat, ran on an all-of-the-above strategy for tackling the climate crisis. He has now thrown his weight behind the technology as the state has pursued federal funding for hydrogen hubs. Carbon capture was also recently included in two of the governor’s climate proposals.

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“Carbon capture is crucial to Pennsylvania’s energy future,” Shapiro spokesperson Manuel Bonder told Capital & Main. “We are glad to see a bipartisan group of senators agree with the governor that we need to invest in carbon capture and sequestration.

“The Administration looks forward to continuing to work with leaders in both parties to ensure bipartisan legislation contains appropriate environmental, public health, and safety protections as it moves through the legislative process,” Bonder added. 

Shapiro’s support for carbon capture could be key to getting SB 831 over the goal line in the Democratically controlled state House, despite warnings from environmentalists. It also has the backing of the Pennsylvania State Building & Construction Trades Council, which makes campaign contributions to members on both sides of the aisle and which has supported fossil fuel and renewable projects alike.

The bill currently sits in the House Consumer Protection, Technology, and Utilities Committee, where a handful of more straightforward climate bills — including one that would improve school district access to solar energy and another that would legalize community solar projects across the commonwealth — have advanced with unanimous support before winning votes on both sides of the aisle on the full floor.

Capital & Main reached out to Democratic Rep. Rob Matzie, chair of the House Consumer Protection, Technology and Utilities Committee, for comment on the bill. Matzie did not respond by publication time. In the past, he has championed bills that proved to be a boon for fossil fuels, including one subsidizing a Shell Chemical Appalachia LLC plastics plant in southwestern Pennsylvania. When Shapiro released his carbon capture-infused energy plan, Matzie signaled his support: “These proposals will create good energy jobs, promote opportunities for technologies that will deliver power while reducing their carbon footprint, and — most importantly — maintain our status as a net exporter of energy,” he said in a news release in March.

It’s an open question whether some of the provisions of SB 831 that are stoking environmentalists’ concern will make it through the House. But Democratic Rep. Emily Kinkead has offered an alternative proposal to the bill that incorporates provisions to protect environmental justice communities that have long been scarred with the detritus of the oil and gas industry. It would also offer heightened protections for landowners situated near carbon sequestration projects. Kinkead, from Pittsburgh, circulated a memo describing the bill on March 25 but has yet to introduce formal legislation. 

Kinkead told Capital & Main she’s not certain such legislation will pass, but she hopes it will at least offer a starting point for negotiations to amend SB 831. 

“I think the goal of my bill is, at the very least, to demonstrate that we don’t have to do it exactly the way that it’s outlined,” she said. “We can incorporate some better practices.” 

If SB 831 passes the House without amendments, O’Leary, the Ohio River Valley Institute senior researcher, fears immediate repercussions for residents. At least one company — Omaha, Nebraska-based Tenaska — is already planning carbon dioxide injection in the fracking-heavy southwestern part of Pennsylvania. The company envisions using 80,000 acres stretching across Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia for up to 20 injection wells that would extend as far as 10,000 feet horizontally underground. This will require a yet unknown number of pipelines. Those who oppose burying carbon under their land, but fall into the 40 percent minority, will be out of luck. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Pennsylvania landowners could be forced to accept carbon dioxide burial on their land on Jun 16, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Audrey Carleton, Capital and Main.

They were among 82 containers of agricultural products from China’s state-owned Xinjiang Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Investment (Group) Co., Ltd. shipped by rail and sea from Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, to southern Italy in late April, according to the plaintiffs. 

The shipment also sparked outrage among Italian farmers who protested against the arrival of the cheaper processed tomato products from China in what they said were unfair imports.

Xinjiang, a major producer of tomato products, accounted for at least 80 percent of the total tomato products produced in China in 2023, according to Chinese figures.

Uyghurs and other Turkic groups in Xinjiang have been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party for decades, including being forced to perform labor that benefits state-owned companies.

Amid much fanfare, the containers transported by rail as part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative arrived in Salerno, Italy, at the end of May, according to Italy’s StraLi, a nonprofit group based in Turin that promotes the protection of rights through the judicial system.

On May 30, StraLi filed a criminal complaint demanding that the goods be seized as evidence and that a criminal investigation take place on behalf of the World Uyghur Congress and the U.K.-based Lawyers for Uyghur Rights.   

It also filed a submission to the U.N. Working Group on Business and Human Rights on June 3, requesting a communication to the Italian government to seize the goods and investigate the companies involved in the importation.

New EU law

The move comes less than two months after the European Parliament approved a new regulation banning products made with force labor from entering the European Union. Uyghur advocates have praised the law, saying it will help clamp down on China’s use of forced labor in far-western Xinjiang.

The EU’s 27 member countries must approve the Forced Labour Regulation for it to enter into force and will have three years to implement it. 

“This legal challenge addresses both violations of fundamental principles of human dignity and international law instruments, as well as calling for the seizure of these recently imported goods under national law,” said a statement issued by these groups on June 3. 

The groups have presented evidence from Adrian Zenz, senior fellow and director in China studies at the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, highlighting the prevalence of forced labor products from Xinjiang, the statement said.

StraLi lawyer Loide Cambisano, who’s in charge of the case, said this was not the first time that goods produced with Uyghur forced labor have been exported to Italy. 

“Agricultural products and tomatoes in particular have arrived in Italy from the same region in China,” she told Radio Free Asia on June 4. “It’s most likely that slavery and labor exploitation is occurring.”

StraLi is seeking an immediate halt of the unloading of the tomato paste at the port of Salerno and a ban on its distribution in Italy, she said. 

“We’re also asking for the end of the importation of any goods in the future which are made and transported from Xinjiang,” she said.

‘Conspiracy to support slavery’

Michael Polak, a London-based barrister who chairs Lawyers for Uyghur Rights, said the domestic criminal complaint argues that the goods violated Italian law and would hold accountable those responsible for slave labor in Xinjiang’s agricultural sector. 

“On the national level, we say this importation is in breach of Italian domestic law in relation to the encouragement or conspiracy to support slavery.”

As for the complaint filed with the U.N. Working Group, it alleges that China has violated international laws, specifically Articles 23 and 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Polak said. 

The transportation route combining rail and sea transportation services is a flagship project of the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature debt and infrastructure program, according to Chinese media. 

The shipment occurred despite Italy’s pullout from the BRI in 2023.

Human rights advocates and members of the Italian agricultural NGO Coldiretti — Europe’s largest agricultural organization — protested the arrival of the shipment at the port of Salerno on May 29 to show their opposition to what they consider unfair imports and the exploitation of Uyghurs and other Turkic people in Xinjiang. 

A Coldiretti official told RFA on June 4 that it is very important that products imported to Italy be produced under the same working conditions as those in Italy. 

Coldiretti’s President Ettore Prandini previously testified in the Italian Senate against the exportation of Chinese workers or what he called unfair imports that did not comply with European standards.

Coldiretti and Filiera Italia indicated that the World Tomato Processing Council, an international nonprofit organization representing the tomato processing industry, estimated that China would produce 7.3 billion kilograms, or over 8 million tons, of processed tomato products in 2023, surpassing Italy’s production. 

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jilil Kashgary for RFA Uyghur.

…all those McCarthy-Loving Feds and Politicians have tapped the nerds and software billionaires to watch our every fucking move!!!!!!!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

They had made a living raising yaks and other livestock and engaging in sustainable farming in Damxung county, located two hours away by road from Lhasa, until they and others were forced to move to Lhasa’s Kuro Bridge area, promised “improved living conditions” by Chinese authorities.

But in reality, they have faced joblessness, economic hardship and social exclusion ever since.

“All our farmlands in Damxung were confiscated by the government under the guise of development projects,” said Tashi, whose name has been changed for safety reasons. “Having grown up in the village without any education, it is extremely difficult for us to find jobs and make a living in the city.”

Their story exemplifies the forced relocation of more than 700,000 Tibetans since 2016 in the Tibetan Autonomous Region under supposed poverty-reduction measures, according to a 71-page report released Tuesday by Human Rights Watch.

Of that total number uprooted, 567,000 people lived scattered across the region and another 140,000 people lived in 500 villages.

The report,“‘Educate the Masses to Change their Minds’: China’s Coercive Relocation of Rural Tibetans,” is based on information from over 1,000 official Chinese media articles between 2016 and 2023, government publications and academic field studies.

Threats and harassment

According to official press reports, local officials used coercion and other extreme forms of persuasion to pressure villagers and nomads to agree to relocation. They claimed the moves were voluntary and would improve livelihoods and protect the environment.

Their tactics included repeated home visits, disparaging the villagers’ intellectual capacity to make decisions, implicit threats of punishment and the cutoff of essential services such as electricity and water. 

The officials also provided misleading information that said the moves would offer employment opportunities and higher incomes, the report said.

“The Chinese government says that the relocation of Tibetan villages is voluntary, but official media reports contradict this claim,” Maya Wang, HRW’s acting China director, said in a statement.

“Those reports make clear that when a whole village is targeted for relocation, it is practically impossible for the residents to refuse to move without facing serious repercussions.”

The human rights group urged Beijing to suspend relocations in Tibet and conform with Chinese laws and standards and international law concerning relocations and forced evictions.

Senior authorities put pressure on local officials to carry out the relocations as non-negotiable policies, threatening disciplinary action against local officials who failed to meet targets, the report said.

Labeled separatists

Tashi, who was forcibly moved to Lhasa, said he told Chinese officials they didn’t want to move. “But Chinese authorities accused us of disobeying national orders and labeled us as separatists,” he said.

Many like Tashi were forced to sell their herd in a hurry after the Chinese government ordered the relocations.

“The order to relocate came so suddenly and we couldn’t disobey, [so] we had to sell our herds in a rush, leaving us with nothing,” a Tibetan nomad told Radio Free Asia. “Ever since we moved to Lhasa, we have never been happy.”

He said that the houses provided by the Chinese government are very small and crowded, with large families of 10 or so members living in only two to three rooms, forcing some to sleep in tents on verandas, he said. 

When the relocated Tibetans sought jobs in restaurants, they were told they were not hygienic enough, he said. 

“Self-employment is out of reach, and we can’t even get cleaning jobs in restaurants,” he added.

Rooted to the land

Elaine Pearson, director of HRW’s Asia Division, told RFA that relocations have occurred both across the Tibetan Autonomous Region and in Tibetan-populated areas in Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. 

“It’s important to note that forced relocations do happen across China, and they aren’t unique to Tibet,” she said. 

“Tibetans have a particular connection with the land and their livelihoods, and they lose that connection if they are forced to move,” she added.

The Chinese government says relocations are poverty alleviation measures and that the new locations are ecologically sound, so that affected Tibetans can improve their livelihoods by relocating, Pearson said.

“But in reality, that hasn’t been the case because many of the people are pastoralists, and they live off the land, but when they move to more urban-like areas, the work options are different [and] they would need to speak Chinese rather than Tibetan,” she added. 

Pearson also said the United Nations should be pushing for unfettered access to Tibetan regions, which has not occurred for many years.

The rights group wants the U.N. Human Rights Council to set up an independent investigation into human rights violations across China, including these violations in Tibet, she said. 

“China’s coercive mass displacement of Tibetans destroys the Tibetan way of life and culture under the misleading policy labels of ‘poverty alleviation’ and ‘ecology protection,’” said Tencho Gyatso, president of Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet.

Tibetans have lived on the Tibetan Plateau for thousands of years and have adapted genetically and socially to how best to live and protect the high-altitude environment. 

“China’s reckless relocation policy and programs are pulling apart Tibetan society, its ancient culture and its environmental best practices,” Gyatso said.

Additional reporting by Tashi Wangchuk, Tenzin Pema and Dolma Lhamo for RFA Tibetan. Edited by Tenzin Pema of RFA Tibetan and by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Tenzin Dickyi, Lobsang, Dorjee Damdul and Pelbar for RFA Tibetan.

Wu was approached by the film crew after wrapping up filming of the online drama "Hey! Come a bit closer" in China last year, and told to sign the agreement or the show would never be aired, her agent Chen Hsiao-chih told several Taiwanese media outlets in recent days.

According to Wu's agent, the practice is now commonplace when Taiwanese artists work in China, and plenty of other stars have been forced to sign agreements pledging that Taiwan is "a part of China," and that there can be no independence for the island, according to reports in the island’s Central News Agency, Liberty Times and TVBS.

Taiwan has never been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, nor formed part of the 74-year-old People’s Republic of China, and most of its 23 million people have no wish to give up their sovereignty or democratic way of life to be ruled by China, according to multiple public opinion polls in recent years.

The news about the agreements has highlighted concerns over China's "soft power" influence over Taiwan, as Beijing vows to achieve "peaceful unification" with the island through propaganda and economic pressures.

Signing agreements

A former film and television industry worker who gave only the surname Chen for fear of reprisals said such requests are common, and don't typically come from Chinese officials, but from the production team of the show that Taiwanese artists are working on.

"The Chinese producers have put a lot of money into filming these shows, and they're afraid that if the artist gets into trouble after filming is done, the whole drama will be thrown out [by ruling Chinese Communist Party censors]," Chen told RFA Mandarin in an interview on May 9. "So they ask the artists to make a commitment in that regard."

He said all artists, including Chinese nationals, are asked to sign commitments to refrain from drugs or pornography or anything else that could endanger the reputation of the show.

The version of the agreements handed to Taiwanese artists also includes a commitment to support Beijing's claim on China, or to refrain from supporting independence for Taiwan, Chen said, adding that anyone who doesn't comply will likely be added to a Chinese government blacklist, which means the huge and lucrative Chinese market is closed to them.

"Artists need to be very clear about this — it's unreasonable to criticize them and to still want to make money from them," Chen said, adding that most artists "aren't very political," and are willing to comply.

"The Chinese market is so big, that they don't see the need to offend people just to make a fuss about something," Chen said. 

He said the deals have become more ubiquitous with the rise in tensions across the Taiwan Strait that followed the landslide victory of ruling Democratic Progressive Party President Tsai Ing-wen in 2016.

'Forced to take sides'

While it has refused to rule out invading Taiwan by military force, Beijing vowed in January to step up its efforts to achieve "peaceful unification" with the island after Taiwanese voters in January elected Beijing's least favorite candidate Lai Ching-te — Tsai's right-hand man — as their next president.

"Peaceful unification" refers to the Chinese Communist Party's attempts to bring the island under its control through propaganda, threats and infiltration rather than armed invasion, analysts have told RFA in recent interviews.

"They wouldn't be asking artists to sign such deals if the leaders on both sides of the Taiwan Strait were in a state of harmony," Chen said. "When there are high-level political tensions, then people further down are unlucky enough to be forced to take sides."

An employee of Taiwan's terrestrial broadcaster TTV who asked to be identified only by the surname Wang said she, too, would steer clear of hiring people with known political views to make entertainment shows.

"We're a purely commercial TV station with no political affiliation, so we would definitely consider when filming TV shows and movies whether someone we hire has a specific political orientation," Wang said. "We would avoid hiring politicians."

"While professional criteria are given priority, we would still be concerned if the political overtones were too strong," she said.

She said some shows that do showcase political themes simply won't sell in the heavily restricted Chinese market.

"There are a lot of people in the film and TV industry who are unable to sell their shows or movies due to political leanings," Wang said. 

"But it's a choice — some see the Chinese market as very important, so won't go anywhere near politics, while others give politics top priority," she said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jenny Tang for RFA Mandarin.

Columbia Journalism School student Iryna Humenyuk was among a group of student reporters that New York City police forced into a campus building and prevented from leaving for several hours on April 30, 2024, as officers retook another building occupied by pro-Palestinian protesters.

Due to restrictions on outside press access to the campus, Humenyuk and other student reporters were the only media allowed there that day, when New York Police Department officers cleared Hamilton Hall, a building being occupied by protesters.

Humenyuk and other student reporters were told by police to move away from Hamilton toward John Jay Hall, a nearby residence hall, at around 9 p.m., according to an account published in Curbed by Samaa Khullar, a reporting fellow at the journalism school.

“They used their batons to push us inside,” Humenyuk was quoted as saying in the article, whose details she confirmed in an email to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.

Humenyuk was crowded with about 50 others into a small entryway behind the doors of John Jay, Khullar wrote. NYPD officers locked the doors after the vestibule filled and then stood outside, guarding the entrance and blocking the view of Hamilton. Because the student journalists did not live in the building, they remained confined in the vestibule area.

“People were yelling at the police and they just wouldn’t acknowledge anyone or answer any questions,” Humenyuk was quoted as saying.

At midnight, Humenyuk was told that those inside could leave in groups of two, with escorts, Khullar wrote.

The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

On April 18, Cambodia’s Ministry of Labor confirmed that 78 Cambodian migrant workers had been tricked into working in Saudi Arabia, but have now been rescued and placed in hotel rooms under the care of the Cambodian Embassy. 

The ministry said 51 of the women are in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah, 15 in the capital Riyadh, and 12 in Dammam, on the coast of the Persian Gulf.

The Ministries of Labor and Foreign Affairs, along with the Cambodian Embassy, claimed to be purchasing flights for the victims to return to Cambodia, promising to return 29 on April 19, 27 on April 20, and the final 22 on April 21.

However, on April 27, RFA Khmer received videos from several of the victims in which they claimed to remain stranded in Saudi Arabia.

In the videos, the women call for help from former Prime Minister Hun Sen, his wife Bun Rany, and their son Prime Minister Hun Manet. 

They said the companies that brought them to Saudi Arabia had “violated their contracts,” leaving them mired in legal issues surrounding their salaries and basic rights. They claim several of them were subjected to physical abuse by the households where they worked, including being denied food and sleep.

They singled out Saudi firm BAB, which places workers from Cambodia-based company Fatina Manpower, for allegedly threatening them and accusing them of working illegally in the country. Some of the victims said they were unable to leave the country because BAB had refused to terminate their contracts.

The women told RFA that since their rescue, some of them had been “confined” to their hotel rooms “without proper access to food,” and said they were appealing for help because they could “no longer wait for the government” to send them home.

According to Cambodia’s Ministry of Labor, nearly 1.4 million people were provided with employment opportunities to work abroad in 2023, more than 93% of which are in Thailand, while the remainder are in South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia.

Stranded in Saudi Arabia

RFA contacted one of the women, Thaing Sokyee, who said she had been forced to work as a maid in multiple homes each day without being provided enough food to eat before she was rescued, and is now suffering from health issues.

“I’ve called on the [labor] ministry and the embassy to find prompt solutions for us so that we may return to Cambodia,” she said. “We’ve faced mounting difficulties; our bodies have deteriorated as we were forced to work without food.”

Doeun Pheap, another victim who said she is sick as a result of her working conditions, told RFA that she has been confined to her room since her rescue and has not been permitted by embassy staff to go outside to purchase medicine.

She said the staff told her to wait for the government to send her home and that she was advised to record a video clip “saying that my health condition is getting better and that I have been provided with enough food to eat.”

“I still hurt all over my body – I’m able to stand up, but my waist and my back still hurt,” she said, adding that embassy staff had provided her with “rice, but not food.”

“I didn’t do it [record the video] because I was too hungry and exhausted; I couldn’t bear doing anything.”

Other victims claimed that Uk Sarun, Cambodia’s Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, had “threatened to abandon us if we continue to publicly call for help.”

Trafficking designation

On Monday, Ambassador Uk Sarun confirmed to RFA Khmer that only 16 of the 78 women had been returned home so far. He said that some of the women had faced a shortage of food due to the ongoing holy month of Ramadan, during which Muslims fast during the day and only eat at night.

He did not address claims by victims that he had threatened to withhold assistance if they continued to speak out about their situation.

The Khmer Times reported last week that 29 of the 78 had been safely repatriated as of April 19, while the rest were awaiting documentation to leave, but provided no attribution for the numbers.

The report said that the embassy was providing the victims with food and accommodation and cited Cambodian Ministry of Labor spokesman Katta Orn as saying that the ministry was conducting an investigation into the employment scam.

RFA spoke with Bun Chenda, a Cambodia-based anti-human trafficking officer for labor rights group CENTRAL, who said the women had been “exploited” when they were sent to Saudi Arabia without proper compliance with labor contracts.

“We are not sure if the government is treating their cases as human trafficking,” he said. “If they are being rescued as human trafficking victims, intervention would likely be easier and they wouldn’t be subject to legal action by a Saudi Arabian company.”

Translated by Yun, Samean. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

The Forced Labour Regulation, which places the burden of proof on the EU rather than on companies, was approved in a 555-6 vote, with 45 abstentions.

The law will allow authorities in EU member states and the European Commission to investigate suspicious goods, supply chains and manufacturers. Products they determine to be made with forced labor cannot be sold in the EU, including online, and will be confiscated at the border.

Manufacturers of banned goods must withdraw their products from the EU single market and donate, recycle or destroy them. Companies that fail to comply can be fined. 

Uyghur activists welcomed the measure, although it does not specifically ban products made by Uyghur forced labor, and some pointed out shortcomings.

“The passage of this legislation also sends a powerful message to the Chinese companies doing business in Europe that have continuously benefited from the Uyghur forced labor despite repeated warnings,” said Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress, or WUC.

The EU’s 27 countries must now approve the regulation for it to enter into force, a measure that is largely a formality. After ratification, they will have three years to implement the law.

Missed opportunity

Zumretay Arkin, WUC's director of global advocacy, called the parliament’s vote positive, but said the EU “missed a crucial opportunity to agree on an instrument that could meaningfully address forced labor when the government is the perpetrator, like in the Uyghur region in China.”

“We welcome this milestone but stress that all related guidance, guidelines and considerations of when to investigate cases be created in a way that ensures the regulation can effectively ban products made with state-imposed forced labor,” she said in a statement from the London-based Anti-Slavery International. 

Absent from the law are key provisions that would have heightened its effectiveness, including a method of redress for forced labor victims, said the rights group which works to end modern slavery.

A similar law took effect in the United States in 2021 banning the import of goods made using forced labor in Xinjiang, where the U.S. government has said China is committing genocide against the 11 million mostly Muslim Uyghurs. 

Beijing has denied accusations of human rights violations in Xinjiang, despite substantial evidence that it has detained an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in “re-education” camps, where they received training in various skills and were forced to work in factories making everything from chemicals and clothing to car parts.

The European Parliament passed a resolution in June 2022 saying China's treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim groups in Xinjiang amounted to crimes against humanity and held a “serious risk of genocide.”

‘Less teeth’

The EU law has “significantly less teeth” than the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, but the crux will be the way it's implemented by investigating authorities, said Adrian Zenz, senior fellow and director in China studies at the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

The EU regulation contains a provision that the EU must align itself according to the forced labor definitions and standards of the International Labour Organization, or ILO, which has published updated guidelines containing provisions capable of targeting Uyghur forced labor in Xinjiang, Zenz said. 

One of the new provisions is that state-imposed forced labor is best assessed as a risk rather than a specific instance. This points to the fact that state-imposed forced labor creates a pervasive risk in an entire targeted region that is difficult, if not impossible, to assess in particular situations such as in places where there is no freedom to speak out, he said.

“There’s the possibility that the [European] Commission in its investigation … could make a finding of forced labor without having to prove every connection to every supply chain, by determining that this region is not cooperating, is not providing accurate information, and in line with what the ILO guidelines say about state-imposed forced labor, that it's best assessed as a systemic risk,” he said. 

“That increases the scope of being more effective in its implementation.” 

The approval of the Forced Labour Regulation comes ahead of a European Parliament vote expected this week on the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, which creates a legal liability for companies relating to environmental and human rights violations within their supply chains.  

“Together, these laws will send a strong message to workers around the world that the EU will not stand for forced labor,” said Anti-Slavery International.

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alim Seytoff for RFA Uyghur and Roseanne Gerin for RFA.

The post Forced Labor Traps Adopted Children in Paraguay appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

The death toll from the Baren uprising – put down by Chinese troops – ranges from a couple dozen to as many as 3,000, according to the World Uyghur Congress. 

Chinese authorities never held a public investigation, and Human Rights Watch said that a reliable tally of the casualties may never be known.

The rebellion started on the evening of April 4, 1990, when over 200 Uyghurs tried to break into a local government office in Baren, a town of 19,000 in Akto county on the western edge of the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang’s Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture.

In response, the Chinese government dispatched over 18,000 troops to quell protests, killing an unknown number of people on April 5 and subsequent days.

Seminal moment

The uprising was a seminal moment because it began a period of increased Chinese repression of the mostly Muslim Uyghurs, who today number about 11 million. Those policies have led to what the United States and other Western nations have labeled a genocide and crimes against humanity.

“The Baren Uprising was one of the earliest expressions of growing resentment within Uyghur society in the 1990s against the oppressive measures of the Chinese authorities,” said Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress, or WUC, in a statement.

“The Chinese government’s violent crackdown on the protestors signaled a broader escalation in the violence against the Uyghur people, which over the last decades has evolved into genocide.”

China views the April 4 incident as a “counter-revolutionary armed riot” between Uyghur militants and Chinese government forces, incited by the East Turkistan Islamic Party. People linked to the party attacked the government building, kidnapping 10 people, killing six armed police officers, and blowing up two vehicles.

Protests

Hundreds of people demonstrated in front of the Chinese Embassy in Berlin and the Chinese Consulate in Munich, Germany. Dozens of people protested outside the Chinese Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, and at a commemorative event in Ankara attended by members of two of Turkey’s political parties. 

Uyghurs held another commemorative event in Sweden. Others gathered in the Netherlands, Britain and in Central Asian nations. 

In Washington, about a dozen protesters gathered outside Chinese Embassy on Friday and shouted, “China, stop the Uyghur genocide” and “We want freedom.” 

The rally also featured an iftar —  an evening meal eaten by Muslim families after the daylong fasts during Ramadan — with Uyghur cuisine to highlight the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of Uyghur Muslims during the Islamic holy month, which runs from March 10 to April 9 this year.

WUC Vice President Zubeyra Shamseden urged the international community to hold the perpetrators of human rights violations against the Uyghurs accountable for their crimes.

Rushan Abbas, executive director of the Campaign for Uyghurs, called the Baren Uprising a vicious example of the Chinese Communist Party's ruthless tactics attacking the legitimate demands of its people for dignity and basic human rights.”

“It started in Baren when people protested the forced sterilization and forced abortions of Uyghur women,” she told RFA. “Today, they are still continuing with this full-fledged act of genocide.”

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shahrezad Ghayrat for RFA Uyghur.

The Iranian government "bears responsibility" for the physical violence that led to the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman who died in police custody in 2022, and for the brutal crackdown on largely peaceful street protests that followed, a report by a United Nations fact-finding mission says.

The report, issued on March 8 by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, said the mission “has established the existence of evidence of trauma to Ms. Amini’s body, inflicted while in the custody of the morality police."

It said the mission found the "physical violence in custody led to Ms. Amini’s unlawful death.... On that basis, the state bears responsibility for her unlawful death.”

Amini was arrested in Tehran on September 13, 2022, while visiting the Iranian capital with her family. She was detained by Iran's so-called "morality police" for allegedly improperly wearing her hijab, or hair-covering head scarf. Within hours of her detention, she was hospitalized in a coma and died on September 16.

Her family has denied that Amini suffered from a preexisting health condition that may have contributed to her death, as claimed by the Iranian authorities, and her father has cited eyewitnesses as saying she was beaten while en route to a detention facility.

The fact-finding report said the action “emphasizes the arbitrary character of Ms. Amini’s arrest and detention, which were based on laws and policies governing the mandatory hijab, which fundamentally discriminate against women and girls and are not permissible under international human rights law."

"Those laws and policies violate the rights to freedom of expression, freedom of religion or belief, and the autonomy of women and girls. Ms. Amini’s arrest and detention, preceding her death in custody, constituted a violation of her right to liberty of person,” it said.

The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran hailed the findings and said they represented clear signs of "crimes against humanity."

“The Islamic republic’s violent repression of peaceful dissent and severe discrimination against women and girls in Iran has been confirmed as constituting nothing short of crimes against humanity,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the center.

“The government’s brutal crackdown on the Women, Life, Freedom protests has seen a litany of atrocities that include extrajudicial killings, torture, and rape. These violations disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in society, women, children, and minority groups,” he added.

The report also said the Iranian government failed to “comply with its duty” to investigate the woman’s death promptly.

“Most notably, judicial harassment and intimidation were aimed at her family in order to silence them and preempt them from seeking legal redress. Some family members faced arbitrary arrest, while the family’s lawyer, Saleh Nikbaht, and three journalists, Niloofar Hamedi, Elahe Mohammadi, and Nazila Maroufian, who reported on Ms. Amini’s death were arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to imprisonment,” it added.

Amini's death sparked mass protests, beginning in her home town of Saghez, then spreading around the country, and ultimately posed one of the biggest threats to Iran's clerical establishment since the foundation of the Islamic republic in 1979. At least 500 people were reported killed in the government’s crackdown on demonstrators.

The UN report said "violations and crimes" under international law committed in the context of the Women, Life, Freedom protests include "extrajudicial and unlawful killings and murder, unnecessary and disproportionate use of force, arbitrary deprivation of liberty, torture, rape, enforced disappearances, and gender persecution.

“The violent repression of peaceful protests and pervasive institutional discrimination against women and girls has led to serious human rights violations by the government of Iran, many amounting to crimes against humanity," the report said.

The UN mission acknowledged that some state security forces were killed and injured during the demonstrations, but said it found that the majority of protests were peaceful.

The mission stems from the UN Human Rights Council's mandate to the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran on November 24, 2022, to investigate alleged human rights violations in Iran related to the protests that followed Amini's death.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Alaa Shatila and her family had been sheltering at a hospital in southern Gaza for 40 days when they made the decision. Their house and accessories shop in Gaza City had long been flattened by Israeli warplanes. They had survived an airstrike in Rafah in October and moved to Khan Younis. But even in their new refuge, the European Hospital, they could feel the bombings getting more and more intense. It was time to leave Gaza. They needed to find a way out. These days, that’s almost impossible. 

In most cases, it takes having a foreign passport to be evacuated from Gaza into neighboring Egypt, though some people with serious injuries are sometimes allowed to exit as well. As Israel threatens to invade Rafah, where more than 1 million people from across Gaza have been displaced, Palestinians are increasingly desperate to get out. With no other options, they are turning to unofficial channels instead: paying what is known as a “coordination” fee for a travel permit. These days, that can cost $5,000 to $7,500 per person — an exorbitant markup of the prewar cost of $250 to $600.

Shatila’s family estimates that they need £30,000, or about $38,000, to pay the travel fees for six people. Having lost everything during the war, they don’t have anything close to that kind of money. So like many others in Gaza, they are now reluctantly raising funds online to support their escape.

“Even affording the basics now is beyond our means here,” said Shatila, whose sister urgently needs medical care after being injured in an airstrike. They launched a crowdfunding campaign, with the help of another sister who lives outside of Gaza — out of hopes that they can someday soon “sleep without fear or anxiety and wake up without the sound of warplanes and missiles,” Shatila said.

Palestinians who are able to scrape together the money pay the fees to a travel agency, which takes a commission before sending the remainder to officials in Egypt with connections to the state intelligence agency, according to people in Gaza with knowledge of the process. Within 10 days, the traveler’s name appears on a “coordination register,” separate from the official Gaza government register — allowing the traveler swift processing at the border. Mada Masr, an independent Egyptian news outlet, reported in a detailed investigation last month that a well-connected businessman with close ties to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is running the show.

Officials in both Gaza and Egypt have denied the existence of a system to collect fees from would-be travelers. “We have nothing to do with imposing any fees on citizens for travel, and we listen to complaints, but we do not have any authority in this matter,” an official on the Hamas-controlled side of the crossing told Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. An Egyptian intelligence official, meanwhile, asked Palestinians to “notify the Egyptian security authorities at the crossing if they are blackmailed or under pressure from anyone profiting from their case.”

It’s an open secret in Gaza that travel agencies coordinate with Egyptian authorities to buy passage for people seeking to leave the Gaza Strip. The process dates back to at least 2015, according to an employee of a Gaza travel agency, who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity. By that point, Gaza had been under a punishing Israeli blockade that was reinforced by Egypt for nine years. The prolonged closure of the Rafah border crossing (which continues to this day) meant that people waited for months for government permission to leave the Gaza Strip, giving rise to coordinators who facilitated travel permissions for about $3,000, the travel agency source said.

The Hamas-run government has long officially opposed the practice, which is illegal, but it is commonplace nonetheless. “The government used to require some travel agencies that had worked in coordination, to sign an agreement stating that if they were caught breaking the rules again, their business would be shut down,” the employee said. “Then the government turned a blind eye.”

For Gazan youth who face travel restrictions to Egypt, paying the fee has long been one of the only ways out: a path to medical treatment, an education, or better economic opportunities abroad. The coordination fee has fluctuated over time, generally more expensive in the summer than during winter months. In the months preceding the current war, the fee was around $250 to $600, according to the worker and Palestinians who paid such fees last summer.

“The Egyptian side determines the coordination fees, but sometimes Gazan coordinators manipulate prices,” the worker said. He added that the local fixers send the money to Egyptian officials through a currency exchange office in Gaza or another cash transfer service.

For the Egyptian public and others sympathetic with the people of Gaza, the idea of Egyptian officials pocketing thousands of dollars in coordination fees is unforgivable.

As those prices have skyrocketed in recent months, and as fundraisers for Palestinians hoping to cross into Egypt have proliferated online, the Egyptian government has faced increased scrutiny for its management of the border crossing. Keeping the border closed and ceding to Israeli restrictions on humanitarian aid is controversial enough; for the Egyptian public and others across the Muslim-majority world who are strongly sympathetic with the people of Gaza, the idea of Egyptian officials pocketing thousands of dollars in coordination fees is unforgivable. The Egyptian government, for its part, has continually denied that such an arrangement exists.

Yet a retired security source who used to work with Egypt’s military intelligence in North Sinai, a province that is near the border with Gaza, confirmed to Middle East Eye that there is a network of mediators connected to different parts of the state’s security apparatus who were facilitating the entrance of foreigners from Egypt’s eastern borders.

In its recent investigation, Mada Masr reported that a travel agency called Hala Consulting and Tourism Services, owned by Ibrahim al-Argany, has usurped control of the coordination process, effectively becoming the only agency capable of ensuring travel permits. Human Rights Watch scrutinized Argany’s dealings back in 2022, reporting that Hala “has strong links with Egypt’s security establishment and is staffed largely by former Egyptian military officers.”

In a recent post, a Facebook page affiliated with the travel agency advertised prices of $5,000 for adults and $2,500 for those younger than 16.

“Hala agency’s offices in Cairo are overcrowded,” Asil, a Palestinian woman who recently paid $24,000 for her family’s travel, told The Intercept. “They are willing to pay any amount to get their families out of Gaza.”

Two-thirds of people in Gaza have been displaced since the start of the war. Most of them, some 1.3 million, are now caught in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza that Israel had declared a safe zone.

The Shatila family’s displacement journey began in the first week of the war. Residents of Gaza City, they had moved south to Rafah to shelter at a relative’s house. On October 17, they were sleeping when an Israeli air raid struck an adjoining house, wounding all of Shatila’s siblings and father.

“Suddenly, the house roof fell on us, and a large stone struck my head. I was bleeding from my head and nose, vomiting blood. We were screaming for rescue,” Shatila said. “I didn’t find my eyeglasses and couldn’t see anything to look for my family. I was screaming and calling my family, but I didn’t find them.”

Nearly three months after launching the fundraising campaign, the family is still stuck in Gaza, having raised just over half the money they need for the six of them to leave the country.

“I know we may not raise the whole amount as it’s very high, hoping it goes down soon,” she said.

Hana Khater, another Gaza resident whose family was displaced by Israeli bombings, fled to Egypt after paying $6,000 per person. Asking to be identified by a pseudonym for safety reasons, she said she and her family took shelter in Khan Younis when the war erupted. A week later, the city came under intense bombing.

“All of a sudden, a huge missile hit a neighboring building. Stones and windows fell on us,” she said. Everyone inside was injured, and her mom took a particularly hard hit to the back. Their faces were covered in dust, their clothes torn as they screamed for help. “The scary blaring sirens of ambulances added to the chaos.”

After the attack, they took shelter in an office where they had little access to food or clean drinking water.

“The polluted water and food made me sick, but we didn’t have any choice,” Khater recounted. “We used to eat one meal to save food. We couldn’t take a shower or wash our clothes daily. Then things got worse and worse.”

“It is unbelievable to pay $36,000 to travel.”

Since October 7, her family had debated whether to leave Gaza. Her father was opposed at first, fearing another Nakba, or catastrophe, an Arabic word that is commonly used to describe the events of 1948, when armed Zionist militias forcibly expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their lands and established the state of Israel.

By early December, they made up their minds. On December 5, they paid the fees, and five days later, the six of them exited the strip through the Rafah crossing.

“It is unbelievable to pay $36,000 to travel. One has to sell all his belongings to pay for coordination,” Khater said.

The Egyptian government is obligated to evacuate its citizens from Gaza, but some have been unable to get out through official channels and turned to coordination instead. The fees for them are considerably lower than those imposed on Palestinians: $1,200 per person, according to one Egyptian national who has gone this route.

Yasmine Khaled, a Palestinian from Gaza who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, tried to travel to Egypt on October 10 with her family, as her mother is Egyptian. As they waited in Rafah for a bus to cross into Egypt, travelers were instructed to seek shelter as Israel was preparing to bomb the crossing.

“They bombed the crossing with three missiles. There wasn’t any place to hide. You can’t imagine the crying and horrors. The situation was very difficult. Then we were told to stay until the next day to travel. We stayed awake in the crossings,” Khaled told The Intercept.

Her family, along with hundreds of other people, were prevented from crossing by Egypt and had to go back to Gaza. They moved from shelter to shelter four times before finding somewhere to settle, an overcrowded house in Khan Younis, where several U.N. employees were residing with their families.

“There were around 80 people, including infants and children, in the house. We didn’t have water for most of the time and we had to line up to use the bathroom,” she recalled.

Desperate to leave, and unable to afford exorbitant coordination fees, they reached out to officials in the West Bank and Egypt for help evacuating. Those efforts went nowhere, but they eventually learned that there was a separate coordination process for Egyptians and their families in Gaza. Ten days after applying, they traveled to Egypt. Khaled’s dad and her brother were denied entry at the time, she said, but paid $10,000 in mid-February and eventually made it to Egypt.

Both Khaled and Khater said that the traumas of the war have traveled with them to Egypt.

When Khater hears an airplane overhead, her instinct is to anticipate a bombing. “I doubt we can fully recover from our fears,” said Khater, who is now trying to learn German so she can travel to Germany for grad school. Khaled, for her part, said she is constantly thinking about those they left behind in Gaza, as well as the uncertainty of what will happen when their tourist visa expires.

“My nephews and nieces become frightened when they hear the sounds of planes,” she said. “We have no plans for the future. It’s completely vague. I don’t know what we’ll do after our 45-day stay here, or what I’ll do with my job. We have a lot to be concerned about.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Khalid Mohammed.

On Feb. 10, the junta enacted the People’s Military Service Law, prompting many civilians of fighting age to flee Myanmar’s cities, saying they would rather leave the country or join anti-junta forces in remote border areas than serve in the military, which seized power in a 2021 coup d’etat.

The junta has sought to downplay the announcement, claiming that conscription won’t go into effect until April, but RFA has received several reports indicating that forced recruitment is already under way across the country.

Residents of Ayeyarwady region’s Ingapu, Kyon Pyaw, Yae Kyi and A Thote townships said that junta authorities called a meeting of ward and village administrators in the third week of February and ordered them to gather lists of residents eligible for military service.

A resident of Kyhon Pyaw’s Inn Ma village, who like others interviewed for this report spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns, told RFA that authorities checked residency lists in the village and compiled a list of 35 people, both men and women, for conscription.

"There are 10 wards here and the heads of 10 households in each ward collected the lists, and handed them over to the respective ward administrators,” he said. “They didn’t need to collect the lists door to door, as they can find the information from the family lists. The disabled and ill were exempted from military services.”

Recruiting one from each village

In Ingapu, the junta’s township administration ordered ward and village administrations to recruit one person from each village-tract for military service, residents told RFA.

A resident of Ingapu’s Thet Kei Tan village said that the village administrator gave superiors the name of one young man in nearby Chin Kone village, who he said “seemed willing to join the military.”

"On the other side of our village, each household had to pay 10,000 kyats (US$5) if they did not want to serve,” he said.

In nearby Bogale township, junta authorities organized military training for teachers in front of the town hall around mid-February, residents said. On Feb. 20, leaflets were distributed in area markets persuading people to join the military.

Township authorities called a meeting with respective ward administrators and instructed them to “focus on youths who have no parents and few relatives” for recruitment, a resident told RFA.

“It wasn’t mandatory to recruit one person from each household,” he said. “Authorities recommended at the meeting that the recruitment focus on youths with no parents and those who are willing to join the military to earn a salary.”

In another Ayeyarwady township called Myan Aung, a resident told RFA that the recruitment process began around Feb. 15 in the wards and villages. 

He also said that the junta conducted military training for 30 people at the headquarters of Infantry Battalion 51 in the seat of Myan Aung township on Feb. 27. Residents of the township were made to pay for the cost of two sets of military uniforms and the daily wages of the trainees, he said.

A member of the Ayeyarwady parliament, who declined to be named, told RFA that the junta leadership has focused on his region to recruit soldiers as it is their “stronghold.”

“However, I don’t think they will get the numbers they had hoped for,” he said. 

Another Ayeyarwady lawmaker condemned the junta’s use of forced recruitment to implement the conscription law.

“Although they use the term ‘military service,’ people are actually being forced to work as porters or act as human shields on the battlefield,” he said. “It’s a grave violation of human rights.”

Hundreds held in Mandalay

RFA also received reports on Wednesday that hundreds of youths aged 20-30 who had been recruited for military training from around the country are being stationed in Mandalay region’s Yamethin township.

“Around 200 or 300 youths are being held at the No. 1 Police Training Depot for military training,” said a resident of the township. “They have to live in dormitories there and no one is allowed to leave.”

Another resident of Yamethin told RFA that, beginning on March 1, security had been strengthened at the facility.

“It’s not the regular training period for new police officers,” he said. “Authorities are inspecting all passers-by.”

The junta’s Information Ministry said in a social media post on Feb. 27 that there had been some “misinformation” circulating about the collection of personal data of men aged between 18 and 35. It also dismissed reports that junta security forces and administrative organizations are forcibly arresting people for military service.

Similarly, pro-junta newspapers said Wednesday that reports of youths being held for military training at the No. 1 Police Training Depot in Yamethin are false.

On Feb. 15, pro-junta media quoted spokesman Major General Zaw Min Tun as saying that around 50,000 people will be drafted into military service each year in accordance with the country’s conscription law. He added that 13 million people are currently eligible for service in Myanmar, based on a 2019 census. 

Missing for more than a month

Reports of the forced recruitment in Ayeyarwady came as a resident of the region told RFA that four people arrested by junta authorities in Dedaye township for alleged possession of weapons remain missing one month after their detention.

Hlaing Myo Kyaw, Naing Myo Shwe and his wife Su Mar, and Htet Myat Soe from Dedaye’s Kyeik Taw and Ka Wet Chaung villages were arrested on Feb. 4 with drones and weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs. 

Two others from the township – former political prisoner Wai Yan Oo and his mother – were also detained at the time.

Two weeks later, on Feb. 16, authorities shot Naing Myo Shwe dead after forcing him to lead them to a site in Kyeik Taw village where more weapons were found.

A person close to the families of those arrested told RFA that Naing Myo Shwe’s wife, Su Mar, was subsequently released, but the whereabouts of the other four remain unknown.

"They have been unable to contact Htet Myat Soe, Hlaing Myo Kyaw, Wai Yan Oo and his mother,” he said. It’s unclear where they are being held.”

Attempts by RFA to contact Khin Maung Kyi, the junta’s spokesperson and minister of social affairs for Ayeyarwady region, for comment on reports of forced recruitment and the case of the four missing residents of Dedaye township went unanswered.

According to Thailand’s Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, junta authorities have killed 4,646 civilians and arrested 26,222 others since the military’s Feb. 1, 2021, coup d’etat. 

Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

The comments mark the first instance of an explicit testimony on a practice that puts political prisoners at risk of radiation exposure.

Describing the working conditions at the nuclear facilities as “prison-like,” a 40-year-old defector who escaped the North in 2019 said North Korea requires forced labor from its political prisoners at such sites.

Few ordinary people wish to work there for fear of radiation exposure despite a number of perks offered to workers, said the defector, as cited by the Korea Institute for National Unification. 

For instance, the North Korean authorities reduced the mandatory military service from 10 years to five for those who work at the nuclear facilities, while offering benefits of college and the country’s sole ruling party membership, the defector told the institute. 

But she added she had heard that “those who serve [military service] there die in three years,” as a result of exposure to radioactive materials.

This is the first time a North Korean defector has come forward with concrete testimony that political prisoners are forced to work at a nuclear facility, according to the institute. 

In response to the defector’s claim, South Korea’s Ministry of Unification said it “needs to be further verified.”

“There is no information to date on the existence of political prison camps or forced labor at nuclear facilities,” said a ministry official.

The testimony came a week after the Korea Institute of Radiological Medical Sciences, or KIRAMS, released a report on its tests of 80 North Koren defectors who used to live near Punggye-ri where the North’s nuclear test site is located. 

The report found 15 out of 17 who were tested for chromosomal aberrations had been exposed to radiation back in the North before they escaped.

KIRAMS indicated that this exposure could be attributed to North Korea’s nuclear tests, although it also clarified that a direct causal relationship cannot be conclusively established.

“Significant additional research is needed to more scientifically assess the impact of North Korea’s nuclear tests on neighboring populations, including more testees and early testing,” said KIRAMS.

Edited by Mike Firn and Elaine Chan.

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

But an expert told Radio Free Asia the rules would be hard to enforce in Xinjiang – where thousands of Uyghurs are engaged in forced labor – because it places the burden of proof on the EU rather than on China or Chinese companies.

Since 2017, China has imprisoned an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs in “re-education camps,” where they receive training in various skills and are forced to work in factories making everything from chemicals and clothing to car parts. China says they are vocational training facilities, and that they have since been shut down.

Camp survivors and witnesses state the Uyghurs faced intense political indoctrination, abuse, rape, torture and even death in the camps.

Western companies have come under pressure to withdraw from their operations in Xinjiang. Last month, German chemical maker BASF said it was pulling out of its joint ventures in the region, and car company Volkswagen says it is reviewing its operations there.

The bill – which needs to be approved by the European Parliament – says that the national authorities or the EU Commission will “investigate suspected use of forced labor in companies’ supply chains,” an EU parliament press release said.

“If the investigation concludes that forced labor has been used, the authorities can demand that relevant goods be withdrawn from the EU market and online marketplaces, and confiscated at the borders,” it reads.

According to the EU agreement, goods found to have been produced by forced labor would be donated, recycled or destroyed. 

“This law is ground breaking in the field of human rights. It will prevent forced labor products from entering our market,” said Samira Rafaela, co-rapporteur from the Netherlands. “To combat forced and state-imposed labor, we must work with like-minded partners and become a strong ally in the global fight against forced labor.”

Forced labor has been a reality for too long, said co-rapporteur Maria-Manuel Leitão-Marques of Portugal.

There were an estimated 27.6 million people affected by it in 2021, mostly in the private sector, but also victims of state-sponsored forced labor, she said. 

“The deal we reached today will assure the EU has an instrument to ban products made with forced labor from the Union market as well as to tackle various forms of forced labor, including when it is imposed by a state.”

Questionable effectiveness

But the proposed law is weaker than the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, or UFLPA, said Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow and director in China Studies at the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Because it relies on the EU Commission to investigate forced labor, its effectiveness in banning Uyghur forced labor would be questionable, Zenz said.

“And that means that the European Commission would have to somehow investigate the presence of Uyghur forced labor, which is not possible,” said Zenz. ”Contrary to the American Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, [the EU] did not reverse the burden of proof because the European Council refused that.”

In September, three firms were blacklisted under the UFLPA, bringing total banned firms to 27.

Even in cases where the EU is able to determine that goods were made by slave labor, the EU agreement would be less effective than the UFLPA, Zenz said.

“The AmericanUFLPA can immediately seize goods, stop them from entering, whereas in the European case when an investigation is open, the goods can continue to flow into Europe,” he said. 

“I think it's disappointing that the law was not made stronger to counter Uyghur forced labor,” he said. “And this is due to, I think, a lack of understanding the nature of state imposed forced labor.”

Zenz said that the EU member states may also fear economic ramifications of strongly countering forced labor. “They're focused on other interests than on trying to systematically combat the situation in Xinjiang.”

Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

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

WASHINGTON -- U.S. semiconductor firms must strengthen oversight of their foreign partners and work more closely with the government and investigative groups, a group of experts told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, saying the outsourcing of production overseas has made tracking chip sales more difficult, enabling sanctions evasion by Russia and other adversaries.

U.S. semiconductor firms largely produce their chips in China and other Asian countries from where they are further distributed around the world, making it difficult to ascertain who exactly is buying their products, the experts told the committee at a hearing in Washington on February 27.

The United States and the European Union imposed sweeping technology sanctions on Russia to weaken its ability to wage war following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russia’s military industrial complex is heavily reliant on Western technology, including semiconductors, for the production of sophisticated weapons.

“Western companies design chips made by specialized plants in other countries, and they sell them by the millions, with little visibility over the supply chain of their products beyond one or two layers of distribution,” Damien Spleeters, deputy director of operations at Conflict Armament Research, told senators.

He added that, if manufacturers required point-of-sale data from distributors, it would vastly improve their ability to trace the path of semiconductors recovered from Russian weapons and thereby identify sanctions-busting supply networks.

The banned Western chips are said to be flowing to Russia via networks in China, Turkey, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.

Spleeters said he discovered a Chinese company diverting millions of dollars of components to sanctioned Russian companies by working with U.S. companies whose chips were found in Russian weapons.

That company was sanctioned earlier this month by the United States.

'It's Going To Be Whack-A-Mole'

The committee is scrutinizing several U.S. chip firms whose products have turned up in Russian weapons, Senator Richard Blumenthal (Democrat-Connecticut) said, adding “these companies know or should know where their components are going.”

Spleeters threw cold water on the idea that Russia is acquiring chips from household appliances such as washing machines or from major online retail websites.

“We have seen no evidence of chips being ripped off and then repurposed for this,” he said.

“It makes little sense that Russia would buy a $500 washing machine for a $1 part that they could obtain more easily,” Spleeters added.

In his opening statement, Senator Ron Johnson (Republican-Wisconsin) said he doubted whether any of the solutions proposed by the experts would work, noting that Russia was ramping up weapons production despite sweeping sanctions.

“You plug one hole, another hole is gonna be opening up, it's gonna be whack-a-mole. So it's a reality we have to face,” said Johnson.

Russia last year imported $1.7 billion worth of foreign-made microchips despite international sanctions, Bloomberg reported last month, citing classified Russian customs service data.

Johnson also expressed concern that sanctions would hurt Western nations and companies.

“My guess is they're just going to get more and more sophisticated evading the sanctions and finding components, or potentially finding other suppliers...like Huawei,” Johnson said.

Huawei is a leading Chinese technology company that produces chips among other products.

James Byrne, the founder and director of the open-source intelligence and analysis group at the Royal United Services Institute, said that officials and companies should not give up trying to track the chips just because it is difficult.

'Shocking' Dependency On Western Technology

He said that the West has leverage because Russia is so dependent on Western technology for its arms industry.

“Modern weapons platforms cannot work without these things. They are the brains of almost all modern weapons platforms,” Byrne said.

“These semiconductors vary in sophistication and importance, but it is fair to say that without them Russia … would not have been able to sustain their war effort,” he said.

Byrne said the depth of the dependency on Western technology -- which goes beyond semiconductors to include carbon fiber, polymers, lenses, and cameras -- was “really quite shocking” considering the Kremlin’s rhetoric about import substitution and independence.

Elina Ribakova, a Russia expert and economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said an analysis of 2,800 components taken from Russian weapons collected in Ukraine showed that 95 percent came from countries allied with Ukraine, with the vast majority coming from the United States. The sample, however, may not be representative of the actual distribution of component origin.

Ribakova warned that Russia has been accelerating imports of semiconductor machine components in case the United States imposes such export controls on China.

China can legally buy advanced Western components for semiconductor manufacturing equipment and use them to manufacture and sell advanced semiconductors to Russia, Senator Margaret Hassan (Democrat-New Hampshire) said.

Ribakova said the manufacturing components would potentially allow Russia to “insulate themselves for somewhat longer.”

Ribakova said technology companies are hesitant to beef up their compliance divisions because it can be costly. She recommended that the United States toughen punishment for noncompliance as the effects would be felt beyond helping Ukraine.

“It is also about the credibility of our whole system of economic statecraft. Malign actors worldwide are watching whether they will be credible or it's just words that were put on paper,” she said.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Under a program that Beijing says is aimed at poverty alleviation, high-level Chinese policy and state planning documents call for intensified employment requirements targeting Uyghurs, according to research conducted by German scholar Adrian Zenz published in a report by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.

But activists and experts say the program is thinly-disguised forced labor: Uprooting Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities from their homes and forcing them to work in factories producing everything from textiles and chemicals to car parts.

Longer-term, Beijing is using the program to achieve a larger goal, Zenz told Radio Free Asia -- controlling the Uyghur people, undermining their culture and ultimately assimilating them into Chinese society.

“Uyghur society is going to be changed in the long term through labor transfer,” he said. “It's a long-term strategy, and that’s why China is doubling down on it.”

“China is intensifying it because with labor transfer you can achieve cultural assimilation,” said Zenz, director of China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington. 

“You can achieve linguistic assimilation,” he told RFA. “You can break apart communities – traditional communities – and break apart families.”

Corporate scrutiny

The report comes out amid intensifying pressure on multinational companies with operations in the region to cut their ties.

Earlier this month, German chemical giant BASF said it is pulling out of its joint ventures in Xinjiang. That came after a German newspaper in November reported close ties between the labor transfer program and a regional partner of BASF.

Meanwhile, automaker Volkswagen also has told RFA that it is in talks with its joint venture partner, SAIC-Volkswagen, over the future of its Xinjiang operations. 

A report issued in early February by Human Rights Watch suggested that Volkswagen may be using aluminum made by Uyghur forced labor in China, and has failed to minimize this possibility.

The United States has called on China to end Uyghur forced labor practices and has enacted legislation to prevent the import of products made with forced labor. 

The European Union lacks strict regulations that target goods made with forced labor, but is working on the adoption of a law that would hold large companies to account for their human rights and environmental impacts across their global supply chains. 

Separately, Germany has a supply chain law that requires large companies to ensure that their suppliers and partners respect all human rights and subjects the companies to a comprehensive due diligence obligation covering the entire supply chain.

Two systems

Authorities in northwestern China’s vast Xinjiang region operate the world’s largest system of state-imposed forced labor under two systems targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples, Zenz’s report says. 

The first one is forced labor connected to “re-education” camps, where an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and others have been detained against their will beginning around 2017. There they received coercive skills training and were forced to work in on-site or off-site factories. 

Zenz’s report says that evidence indicates that since early 2020, this policy is no longer active, although authorities still arbitrarily detain Uyghurs and others.

The second separate system, the Poverty Alleviation Through Labor Transfer policy, coercively trains and transfers non-detained rural laborers from the agricultural sector into secondary sector work that transforms raw materials into goods for sale or consumption, and tertiary sector work that involves the sale or trade of services. 

The United States and other Western governments have expressed deep concern about the repression and arbitrary detentions of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang, with some declaring that China’s actions amount to genocide and crimes against humanity.

‘Groundless accusation’

On Feb. 17, at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was asked by an interviewer about the forced labor accusations in Xinjiang in light of the recent company news about BASF and Volkswagen. 

“The so-called forced labor is only a groundless accusation,” Wang said in response. 

“Isn’t there any right to work for minority ethnic groups such as the Uyghurs in Xinjiang?” he asked. “If you make them unemployed, unable to work, and unable to sell their products under the pretext of forced labor, is this humane?”

Wang said that the growth of Xinjiang’s Uyghur population from less than 2 million in 1955, when the autonomous region was established, to 12 million today was proof that the “so-called genocide is a sheer fabrication and a lie.” 

However, the actual Uyghur population in China was 3.64 million, according to official data from the country’s first census conducted in 1953, while Xinjiang’s population was less than 3.4 million. Also, the Han Chinese population in Xinjiang was only 6% in that census but now is more than half as many Han Chinese have migrated to the region.

Wang also said China has safeguarded human rights in Xinjiang as demonstrated by an increase in the average lifespan of Uyghurs from 30 years to 75.6 years, and that religious freedom and ethnic languages and cultures were well-protected by the Chinese government in the region.

Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress, said Wang’s dismissal of allegations of the Uyghur genocide and forced labor signaled “a concerning intent to persist with genocidal policies” in Xinjiang. 

“Merely a week prior, one of Germany’s largest chemical companies, BASF, issued international apologies and announced their withdrawal from the Uyghur region due to their association with Uyghur genocide implications,” he told RFA.

“Similarly, other major corporations like Volkswagen face mounting international pressure over their involvement in Uyghur forced labor, with discussions underway for their withdrawal from the Uyghur region,” Isa said. “Given the substantial evidence at hand, Wang Yi's denial of these allegations is untenable.”

Zenz said that there is still personal testimonies and documentary evidence that Uyghur forced labor exists.

“The Chinese think they can openly lie and propagate an alternative reality because they can control access to Xinjiang,” he said.

Additional reporting by Irade from RFA Uyghur. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Roseanne Gerin for RFA.

As the death toll in Gaza tops 29,000, we get an update on one of the largest hospitals in southern Gaza, Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, which is no longer functional amid a dayslong raid on the facility by Israeli forces. About 200 patients remain trapped there, with Israel preventing the WHO and the U.N. from delivering aid or evacuating the patients. The Gaza Health Ministry says at least eight people died in the hospital after Israel cut off electricity and oxygen supplies, and that soldiers also arrested many hospital staff. Dr. Ahmed Moghrabi, a surgeon who worked at Nasser, sent Democracy Now! a video on Sunday describing what happened when it was stormed by Israeli troops. “They arrested all the medical team who remained at Nasser Hospital. We don’t know the fate of my colleagues,” said Moghrabi, who had to walk for miles with his family in the night. “Nothing remains in Khan Younis. Nothing. It’s like horror movies. No streets, no buildings are there. Only dead bodies.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Most youths have no desire to fight – for the junta or the armed resistance, said a 22-year-old Mandalay resident who asked not to be identified. 

“We have no choice as the junta is cornering us to join the army,” he said. “Now we don’t dare to go out – day or night. There are a lot of abductions [for forced recruitment], so I’m worried. My friends say they will join the [resistance] but I don’t know what to do, since I can’t fight.”

With recent rapid advances by ethnic armies People’s Defense Force, or PDF, militias of civilians who have taken up arms against the junta, the military appears to be on the defensive as hundreds of soldiers have surrendered.

Junta leader Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing announced on Feb. 10 that the People’s Military Service Law, enacted in 2010 by a previous military regime, would go into effect immediately. On Tuesday night, the junta announced the formation of a committee to oversee the conscription process.

But reports suggest that the military and pro-junta militias are already rounding up as many able bodies as they can with the goal of forcing recruits to undergo simple training, putting weapons in their hands, and dumping them onto the battlefield.

Eligible citizens have told RFA Burmese that they would rather join the armed resistance or flee Myanmar than fight for the junta, which seized control of the country in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup d’etat.

One young resident of Yangon told RFA he would likely be killed if he is forced to join the military.

“I don’t want to join and my friends feel the same, but … we can’t resist because they have weapons,” he said. “So, we have to take the training they’ll give us and if I get a chance, I will go to the liberated areas [controlled by anti-junta forces].”

The ‘right’ to defend the country

Junta spokesman Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun told military-controlled media on Tuesday that the national conscription law provides every citizen “the right” to receive military training to defend the country, and urged people not to be concerned because they wouldn’t immediately be sent to fight.

“Just like us professional soldiers, you have to carry out national defense duties only after undertaking proper military training,” he said.

According to Myanmar’s compulsory military service law, men aged 18-35 and women aged 18-27 face up to five years in prison if they refuse to serve for two years.

Professionals – such as doctors, engineers and technicians – aged 18-45 for men and 18-35 for women must also serve, but up to five years, given the country’s current state of emergency, extended by the junta on Feb. 1 for another six months.

According to the 2019 census, there are 6.3 million men and 7.7 million women – totaling nearly 14 million people – who are eligible for military service in Myanmar, Zaw Min Tun said Tuesday. The number is equivalent to just over one-quarter of Myanmar’s population of 54 million.

He added that parents “don’t need to worry” because there are more than 3,000 wards and 60,000 villages across the country, “so only one or two persons per ward need to join the military.”

Zaw Min Tun’s comments did little to sooth the concerns of Yangon resident Wai Lwin Oo, whose 23-year-old son is eligible for the draft.

“Parents are extremely concerned,” he said. “There are only two options and as a parent, the last thing I want to do is tell my children which path to choose … There are no parents who are amenable [to the conscription law].”

Round-ups underway

Residents of Yangon and Mandalay told RFA that since the military service law was announced on Feb. 10, young people are nowhere to be seen in the city after 8 p.m.

Additionally, RFA received reports on Wednesday that at least 25 young people from Ngwe Than Win Ward in Yangon region’s Thanlyin township had been rounded up for conscription by joint forces of the junta and pro-junta militias conducting house-to-house inspections since Monday.

The following day, at least 10 others were taken into custody from Thanlyin’s Darga ward, according to Private Sanda, an official with the local People’s Defense Force.

RFA also received reports on Wednesday that the junta has been recruiting residents of five townships in Myanmar’s southwestern Ayeyarwady region for military training using a raffle drawing since January.

Residents said that whoever is selected in the raffle in Kyonpyaw, Myanaung, Kyangin, Kyaiklat and Mawlamyinegyun townships and refuses to join the military is being made to pay up to 1 million kyats (US$475).

A lawmaker, who declined to be named, said that the junta is targeting Ayeyarwady because the region is firmly under its control, adding that the military has a “very high demand for soldiers” because its troops are “surrendering, fleeing into other countries, and dying” on the frontlines.

Attempts by RFA to reach junta officials for comment on the reported round-ups went unanswered Wednesday.

‘Human shields’ on the battlefield

Zaw Min Tun, the junta spokesman, has been cited in media reports as saying that the conscription law will be put into practice after the traditional Thingyan New Year holidays in April, and 5,000 conscripts will be called up in each round. No further details have been provided.

Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government, or NUG, responded to the junta’s announcement of the formation of the Central Committee for Militia Recruitment on Tuesday with a statement urging people not to comply with the conscription law.

Nay Phone Latt, the spokesperson of the Prime Minister’s Office of the NUG, told RFA that the shadow government is making preparations to assist young people who do not want to join the military, if they flee to the liberated areas.

“The revolutionary forces and we, the NUG, have already liberated more than 44 townships, and there are also ethnic areas [outside of junta control],” he said. “If people come to these areas, we are already preparing plans on how to cooperate in helping and protecting them.”

Nay Phone Latt said that, in the face of a growing number of military defeats, the junta is applying the conscription law because it wants to “legalize its abduction of people to use as forced labor or human shields on the frontlines.”  

In addition to announcing the formation of the Central Committee for Militia Recruitment on Tuesday, the junta also said it had enacted the Reserve Force Act, which would allow it to recall retired and demobilized military personnel to serve for up to five years.

Those who refuse face a prison term of up to three years, the announcement said.

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw and Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

Panha has an idea of the horrors that take place within the Golden Fortune Science and Technology Park in Cambodia’s southeastern border town Chrey Thom. He has witnessed what happens to those who try to leave.

“When they recapture escaped workers they beat them until they’re barely alive. I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” Panha told RFA, declining to give his family name. His brother, he said, is head of security at the 15-acre (four-hectare) facility, and Panha has watched him hunt down escapees. “If you don’t beat them they will stop being afraid and more will try to escape.”

While the compound is ostensibly open to the public, and billed as an industrial park, it is surrounded by a 10-foot-high (three-meter) concrete wall topped with barbed wire. Its heavy, metal front gate is manned by uniformed security guards, who bar entry to ordinary visitors. 

Built by the powerful and well-connected Prince Group, the facility now counts cyberscam operations among its businesses, according to witnesses, staff and former employees. While the group denies any involvement in the park, it is run by a company headed by Prince executives and bears several other indicators of connections to the group.

Inside, locals allege, trafficked Vietnamese, Malaysian and Chinese nationals are forced to carry out cyberscams. They are part of an enslaved workforce that the U.N. estimates numbers approximately 100,000 people across Cambodia – a claim the government denies.

Fourteen local residents – among them current and former employees working at the Golden Fortune compound – separately told RFA they had witnessed security guards violently subduing escaped workers before returning them to the compound. For security reasons, witnesses requested their names not be used. At least two other Prince Group-linked properties have previously been connected with human trafficking and cyberscam operations, according to local and international media reports. 

Prince Group spokesperson Gabriel Tan told RFA that while the conglomerate built the Golden Fortune compound, it did so at the request of a client, whom he declined to identify. Asked about allegations of trafficking and cyberscam operations within the compound he added, “we are unaware of the incident you mentioned.” 

Cambodian corporate records suggest that the park’s parent company, Golden Fortune, is run by Ing Dara, a businessman with extensive ties to the Prince Group. He holds directorships in a number of Prince companies, including one cited by the Prince Group’s founder as the ultimate source of his wealth in disclosures to an offshore bank. Ing Dara and Golden Fortune could not be reached for comment. 

RFA has previously revealed that Chinese police have established a special task force to investigate the Prince Group’s alleged money laundering and illegal online gambling operations run from Cambodia. In part two of our series, RFA explored how illicit funds appear to be washed and funneled into legal Prince Group-affiliated businesses. 

This final installment in the three-part investigation into the company explores allegations that one of its facilities holds victims of Asia’s blossoming cyber-slavery industry. 

Dirty jobs

Chrey Thom is a one-road town abutting the Bassac river just a few hundred yards upstream from Vietnam. Like many border communities in Cambodia, the town is thick with casinos built to service foreigners who face restrictions on gambling in their own countries. 

A Cambodian government crackdown against online casinos in 2019 forced many to close. In some cases, the empty real estate has been taken over by criminal gangs that force trafficked workers to perform cyber fraud. Such frauds have exploded in recent years, in particular “pig butchering” in which victims are lured into putting large sums of money into phony investment schemes. However, those performing the scams are often also victims held against their will and forced to find people to dupe using various online platforms. 

As cyberscam operations have proliferated, they’ve also been found operating in office blocks, apartment complexes and what appear to be purpose-built compounds. 

Set on 15 acres of land and surrounded by concrete walls topped with barbed wire, the Golden Fortune facility hosts a soccer field, a basketball court and 18 large dormitory style buildings, all of which were constructed since mid-2019, according to satellite imagery reviewed by RFA. 

Metal bars cover the dormitory windows on each of the five floors, suggesting they are designed to keep people in.

Those allegedly imprisoned inside are mostly Vietnamese and Chinese, locals said. Cambodians work inside the compound, too, in security roles. Online Khmer-language advertisements for jobs within the compound seen by RFA called for Cambodians who speak Vietnamese, offering a salary of $600-800 a month on top of three meals a day and accommodation. 

Though relatively well-paid, such work is wholly unappealing to 60-year-old Moeun, who asked that her full name not be used. She spoke with RFA reporters while standing in the thigh-high oily water of a drainage canal, catching fish with her bare hands.

“If we don’t do good work and torture they will cut our salaries, so we prefer to come here and catch some fish to get some money,” said Moeun, whose children had worked inside the compound. “Besides working for them, what else can we do?” 

Her account was confirmed by a current Golden Fortune employee, who told RFA that disobedient or unproductive workers are detained on the first floor of a building named B1 and violently punished. Many female workers in the complex are forced into prostitution and pornography, the staffer added.

The employee compared the situation inside Golden Fortune to the Chinese thriller “No More Bets,” in which Chinese nationals are trafficked into a Southeast Asia scam compound, where they are abused and forced to help run illegal online gambling scams. 

“The problems in there are like what the Chinese movie has revealed,” the staffer said. “Scams and extortion exist in there.”

According to the employee, besides the scams, prostitution and pornography, extortion is another business model. Victims are released only if their families pull together adequate ransom – a common hallmark of scam compounds. 

“If ransom was not provided as demanded, mistreatment, beating and electrocution would be used and video clips [about the torture] are sent to the family to see,” the staffer said. 

Another local resident, who lives near the compound told RFA that he had seen security guards knock escapees to the ground with a car and tase them with electric cattle prods before driving them back to the compound. He claimed local police are employed as security guards at the compound. 

Local Sampav Poun commune police chief Khuth Bunthorn told RFA that he was unaware of any cases of detention or forced labor in his commune.

A former security guard at the Golden Fortune compound told RFA that trafficked scam employees worked 12 hours a day and would usually be sold on to another compound within six to 12 months. The former guard added that while they were no longer employed at Golden Fortune, they would still occasionally hunt down escaped workers from the compound. Local residents told RFA that Golden Fortune doles out $50 bounties for returned escapees.

Interior Ministry Secretary of State Chou Bun Eng, who is secretary general of the National Committee for Counter Trafficking, told RFA that she was unaware of any trafficking cases in Chrey Thom.

A bustling compound

RFA reporters were barred from entering the Golden Fortune compound when they visited Chrey Thom last year, with security guards declining to say why. 

Footage posted to social media in September showcases an array of restaurants, massage parlors and even a small hospital within its walled kingdom. Both the videos and satelite imagery indicate it is home to more and higher quality paved roads than the surrounding village. In one video, a billboard within the park can be glimpsed advertising 6,700-square-foot (622-square-meter) villas in Phnom Penh. 

The Golden Fortune compound is listed on the official website of Prince Huan Yu Real Estate – a subsidiary of the Prince Group – and its location is pinpointed on its “property distribution map.” 

The Prince Group bills itself as one of Cambodia’s hottest conglomerates, with interests in everything from real estate to film production. It was founded a little under a decade ago by Chen Zhi, a politically connected Chinese émigré who became a naturalized Cambodian in 2014. Chinese court documents have termed his conglomerate a “notorious transnational online gambling criminal group” and alleged at least 5 billion yuan ($700 million) of its revenue came from illegal online gambling. 

In 2022, a court in the Chinese county of Wancang announced that 45 individuals had been found guilty of establishing illegal online casinos in collaboration with the Prince Group. The announcement listed three locations in Cambodia where this had taken place, among them was “Caitong City,” the Chinese name for Chrey Thom.

The eyewitness testimony related to RFA would suggest that like so many online gambling operations in Cambodia, the Prince Group has pivoted to forced labor. 

In a 2022 documentary by Al Jazeera, a victim explained how he had been held captive and forced to scam poor Chinese farmers over messaging apps in a property held by Cambodian Heng Xin Real Estate. That company was founded by Chen; in leaked banking records shared by whistleblowing non-profit Distributed Denial of Secrets, the company is listed as the source of Chen’s wealth. Today, Cambodian Heng Xin Real Estate has two directors, both of whom have extensive links to the Prince Group. One of them, Ing Dara, is listed as the chairman of Golden Fortune Resorts World, whose name and address matches the Chrey Thom complex.

Months before it was shut down by the government, local news outlet Voice of Democracy reported on a human trafficking raid on another Prince Group-linked property.  

Such linkages between Prince Group property and cyberscam operations could prove awkward for Prince’s political patrons. These include recently retired Prime Minister Hun Sen, former Interior Minister Sar Kheng, former National Assembly President Heng Samrin, as well as the current Prime Minister Hun Manet – each of whom Chen serves as an officially appointed political adviser.   

China, Cambodia’s most forceful sponsor on the world stage, has made clear its intention to crack down on cybercrime overseas. In October, Cambodia’s newly appointed premier, Hun Manet, met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. Buried on the third page of a press release issued by Cambodia’s Foreign Ministry after the meeting was a commitment, “to further enhance cooperation in law enforcement, particularly in combating cross-border gambling, drug and human trafficking, cybercrime and fake news.”

For some in Chrey Thom, though, that cooperation could not come soon enough.

One resident of Chrey Thom said he and his neighbors would always try to help whenever they encountered an escapee. He remembered one time in particular, when cries of, “Thief, thief, thief,” preceded a bedraggled man crashing into his home.

“He put his hands together and begged for mercy,” he recalled, adding that he gave the man five dollars before sending him on his way, wishing he could have done more for him.

“We pity them and the injustice they suffer, but we cannot do anything,” he said.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jack Adamović Davies for RFA Investigative and RFA Khmer.

Nearly 10% of the world’s aluminum is produced in Xinjiang, in China’s northwest, where Uyghurs and other minorities are subjected to forced labor in detention centers or through Chinese government-backed labor transfer programs that Beijing says are to alleviate poverty, according to the 99-page report, “Asleep at the Wheel: Car Companies’ Complicity in Forced Labor in China.”

Engine blocks, vehicle frames, wheels, lithium-ion battery foils and other components may contain aluminum from these facilities or joint-ventures that these major carmakers have with Chinese companies, said New York-based Human Rights Watch, or HRW. 

The rights group acknowledged that the origins of aluminum from Xinjiang are difficult to trace because the metal is sent to other parts of China, where it is melted down and made into alloys that enter global supply chains undetected.

“Aluminum from Xinjiang ends up being mixed in larger quantities of aluminum, where then you can no longer trace the origin, and that makes traceability extremely difficult,” said Adrian Zenz, director of China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington. He was not involved in producing the HRW report.

“What the report indicates is that carmakers need to really consider divesting from China a lot of their production and sourcing because the Chinese supply chains are inevitably tainted,” he said. “The report indicates that carmakers are not taking not even close to taking the steps that are necessary to reduce the exposure to Uyghur forced labor.” 

Caved in

HRW said despite the risk of exposure to forced labor through Xinjiang’s aluminum, some car manufacturers in China have given in to government pressure “to apply weaker human rights and responsible sourcing standards at their Chinese joint ventures than in their global operations.” 

“Most companies have done too little to map their supply chains for aluminum parts and identify and address potential links to Xinjiang,” The rights group said. “Confronted with an opaque aluminum industry and the threat of Chinese government reprisals for investigating links to Xinjiang, carmakers in many cases remain unaware of the extent of their exposure to forced labor.”

Toyota said in an email to Radio Free Asia that its “core value of respect for people permeates all that we do, including deep regard for human rights and how we conduct business as a global enterprise.” It said it expects its suppliers to follow its lead to respect human rights, and that it would closely review the HRW report.

GAC Toyota Motor Co., Ltd., based in Guangzhou, and FAW Toyota Motor Co., Ltd., based in Tianjin, are Toyota’s auto manufacturing joint ventures in China.

General Motors, which produced 2.1 million vehicles in China in 2023, told RFA that it  recognizes the importance of responsible sourcing practices, as outlined in its Supplier Code of Conduct. 

“GM remains committed to conducting due diligence and working collaboratively with industry partners, stakeholders and organizations to continuously evaluate and address any potential violation in our supply chain,” the statement said.

The U.S. carmaker has 10 joint ventures, two wholly-owned foreign enterprises and more than 58,000 employees in China. The joint ventures sell passenger and commercial vehicles under the Cadillac, Buick, Chevrolet, Wuling and Baojun brands.

Genocide

The United States and other Western countries have determined that China is committing genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples who live there. As a result, the United States, the European Union and other countries have enacted or are considering laws banning the import of products linked to forced labor.   

Because of the size of China’s domestic auto market and the need to compete, the five named carmakers have “succumbed to Chinese government pressure to apply weaker human rights and responsible sourcing standards at their Chinese joint ventures than in their global operations, increasing the risk of exposure to forced labor in Xinjiang,” the report said.

HRW mined open-source, online materials, including company reports, Chinese government documents, state-run media reports and social media posts to find links between Xinjiang, aluminum producers and labor transfers.

China, the world’s largest car exporter in 2023 and a manufacturing and supplier base for domestic and global car brands, produced and exported more cars than any other country in 2023 as well as made and exported billions of dollars of parts used by international carmakers.

Volkswagen, which has a 50% stake in a joint venture with Chinese carmaker SAIC and operates a distribution center in Xinjiang's capital Urumqi, said in an email statement to RFA that it takes “its responsibility as a company in the area of human rights very seriously worldwide — including in China.”

“The Volkswagen Group adheres closely to the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights,” it said. “These are part of the company's Code of Conduct. Volkswagen takes a firm stand against forced labor in connection with its business activities worldwide.”

Seeks compliance

The automaker also said it works to ensure compliance with these values along the supply chain and has a careful global partner and supplier selection process and monitoring measures in place.

“Suppliers in the People's Republic of China that are commissioned directly by the Volkswagen Group are already in the scope of sustainable procurement measures and are committed to complying with our Code of Conduct for Business Partners,” the company said.

“Serious violations, such as forced labor, can lead to termination of the contract with the supplier if no remedial action is taken,” it said. “We are therefore actively reviewing and using our existing procedures and looking for new solutions to prevent forced labor in our supply chain.”

Tesla, whose factory in Shanghai produces vehicles for the Chinese market and for export, told the rights group that it had mapped its aluminum supply chain in several cases but had not found evidence of forced labor. However, the company did not specify how much of the aluminum in its cars remains of unknown origin.

Unlike other foreign carmakers that operate in China, Tesla wholly owns its Gigafactory in Shanghai—the first such arrangement allowed by the Chinese government. The company has land-use rights for an initial term of 50  years.

Neither Tesla nor China’s BYD, headquartered in Shenzhen, replied to RFA’s requests for comment.

Companies involved in joint ventures have a responsibility under the U.N. Guiding Principles to use their leverage to address the risk of forced labor in the joint venture’s supply chain, HRW said.

The responses by the car manufacturers are “very inadequate,” said Maya Wang, the associate director in HRW’s Asia division.

“Because of the environment of political intimidation and harassment and surveillance, it’s really difficult to conduct due diligence because [if] you talk with the workers [about whether or not they are subjected to forced labor, could they possibly respond without fear?” Wang asked. 

“What we want to see are laws and regulations from governments like the EU, which currently has due diligence legislation to exactly deal with state-sponsored or state-organized forced labor,” she said.

With reporting from Jilil Kashgary for RFA Uyghur. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Roseanne Gerin for RFA English.

The incident involving Tenzin Paldon, 28, a contestant at the Miss Global 2023 pageant, is the latest example where China has used pressure tactics to force international events to toe its political line.

“The organizers, under Chinese pressure, gave me two options: to participate with ‘China’ added to my sash or to not wear a sash at all, which I felt defeated the purpose of my participation which was to represent my country, Tibet,” Paldon told Radio Free Asia from her home in New York, after returning from Cambodia. 

“So, I chose to walk out of the event,” said Paldon, who had participated in the same competition in Cambodia in January 2018.

A Taiwanese contestant, Linda Huang, was also briefly banned from the pageant ahead of the next round of the event scheduled to take place in Vietnam on Jan. 13, but she was reinstated after she agreed to have her sash changed from “Taiwan ROC” – referring to Republic of China – to one that read “Taipei China,” organizers said.

In Sophin, the owner of Mahahang Production, representing the Cambodian side of the organizers, confirmed to RFA that government officials recommended removing two candidates, one from Tibet and one from Taiwan. 

“One of the organizers said the Cambodian prime minister had texted them saying the Taiwanese and Tibetan pageant candidates should be kicked out of the competition,” Paldon said.

The pageant, which runs through Jan. 18, is being jointly hosted by Vietnam and Cambodia, with stages of the competition held in both countries.

‘Victory to Tibet’

Paldon, who wore a sash that said “Miss Tibet” during the introductory round on Jan. 2, likely caught the attention of Chinese authorities after she shouted “Bhod Gyalo,” or “Victory to Tibet,” during the sash ceremony, which was broadcast live on social media platforms and Cambodian television, she said. 

Shortly thereafter, Paldon was stopped at the Vietnamese border as she was making her way to the venue of the next round of the competition.

There, pageant organizers told her the Chinese government had put pressure on Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet to have Paldon removed from the pageant after they saw the sash ceremony, and questioned the Cambodian government on why a candidate representing Tibet was allowed to wear a sash that read Miss Tibet and shout, “Bhod Gyalo.”

For years, Cambodia has sought to deepen ties with China. Hun Manet chose to go to Beijing for his maiden official trip abroad in September after taking over as prime minister from his father, Hun Sen. signaling a continued commitment to strengthening Cambodia’s relationship with China.

Sash politics

Paldon, who won the “Miss Tibet 2017” title at a beauty pageant held for Tibetan women of the diaspora, also expressed disappointment at the politicization of international beauty pageants.

“It is unfortunate that politics dictate events of young women and their aspirations, and it’s heartbreaking to note that these events are fixed,” Paldon said. “All I want to be is a role model for young Tibetan women out there, in particular to empower many women who are from displaced communities like me.” 

When Paldon arrived back at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Jan. 10 after waiting for nearly a week in Cambodia at her own expense, she was welcomed by Tibetan community members and supporters, who praised her for her stance.

“We are disheartened but also very proud of the firm stand [she has taken] as a Tibetan,” said Tashi Palmo, secretary of the Regional Tibetan Women's Organization of New York and New Jersey. 

This is not the first time Miss Tibet candidates have had to withdraw from global beauty contests for refusing to add “China” to their sash.

In 2005, Tashi Yangchen was forced to withdraw from a Miss Tourism Pageant held in Zimbabwe after she came under pressure to either wear a sash that said ‘Miss Tibet-China’ or to participate as a guest. She chose to walk out of the event. 

Two years later, Miss Tibet 2006 Tsering Chungdak also met with a similar fate at a contest in Malaysia. 

The Miss Tibet contest, started by Lobsang Wangyal Productions in 2002 with the mission of ‘Celebrating Tibetan Women,’ had 15 annual editions until 2017, after which it did not take place for various reasons, including a lack of enough applicants and the coronavirus pandemic. 

The pageant, however, is set to make a comeback in 2024 after a five-year-long hiatus, Lobsang Wangyal, Director of Miss Tibet beauty pageant, said in a statement.

Additional reporting by Singeri Sonam Lhamo and Lobsang Chophel for RFA Tibetan. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Tenzin Dickyi and Tenzin Pema for RFA Tibetan, and Yun Samean for RFA Khmer.

Officials used Mao’s birthday “to spread false information and distort facts about Tibet’s past history, in the hope of making the Tibetan people believe this disinformation,” a young Tibetan in Lhasa told Radio Free Asia, requesting anonymity for safety reasons.

The source said the public celebrations for Mao depicted an independent, pre-invasion Tibet as backwards and impoverished in order to justify the region’s invasion and annexation by China, which argues that Tibet was historically always a part of its territory.

“Chinese authorities use and disseminate pictures of poor, underprivileged Tibetan families from the 1940s and 1950s at these events to make it seem like the whole of Tibet at the time was poverty-stricken and in the same condition,” the person said.

“While it’s true that Tibet has witnessed development since the Chinese first invaded the country, the fact remains that many of the world’s free countries also underwent significant development over the same period, without the need for any ‘peaceful liberation,’” they said.

Mao’s government invaded Tibet in 1950 and subsequently took over the region completely in 1959 after a failed uprising by locals, which led Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and thousands of followers to flee into exile across the border in India and elsewhere in the world.

Chinese officials have exercised a tight grip on the region ever since, restricting Tibetans’ political activities and expression of cultural and religious identity. In October, Beijing changed Tibet’s romanized name to “Xizang” to further erode its independent identity.

17-point agreement

As part of its propaganda campaign on Mao’s birthday, the source inside Tibet told RFA, Chinese authorities were again promoting the idea that the Dalai Lama in 1951 signed the “17-Point Agreement” with Beijing and had promised Mao in a telegram he would abide by it.

Experts and rights groups, however, say the Tibetan side was forced to sign the document under duress by the occupying Chinese forces, who threatened all-out war if they declined. The Dalai Lama later repudiated the agreement after arriving in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, just across Tibet’s border.

The source said it was a tense time for Tibetans, with many forced to bite their tongues as the local Chinese authorities celebrated Mao.

“Any Tibetan who tries to share the real facts about Tibet’s past – in particular Tibet’s history as an independent country – is immediately apprehended by Chinese police and faces their wrath,” they said.

Tibet Policy Institute director Dawa Tsering said the forced celebrations for Mao seemed particularly twisted given many Tibetans know some of the worst atrocities against their forebears occurred under his rule.

“The ‘peaceful liberation of Tibet’ was in reality a forceful occupation of Tibet by Chinese authorities, who brutally tortured Tibetans for opposing the occupation and compelling the helpless Tibetans, under duress, to sign the 17-Point Agreement,” Tsering told RFA.

Nyima Woeser, a researcher at the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, which is based in Dharamsala, India, added that more than 1 million Tibetans are estimated to have been killed at the hands of Chinese “oppressive policies” in Tibet since Mao’s 1950 invasion.

“Every year, the human rights abuses inside Tibet continue to worsen … with no sign of a let-up,” Woeser said.

Translated by Tenzin Pema for RFA Tibetan.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lobsang Gelek for RFA Tibetan.

Gathered in front of the gates of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, many were friends and relatives of those who have been forcibly repatriated in years past, or who had experienced the ordeal themselves.

Those sent back on Oct. 9 would face almost certain punishment – torture, labor camp, sexual violence and even death, warned Human Rights Watch.

Heo Young-hak is an escapee who told RFA Korean that his wife was forcibly repatriated by China in December 2019. She is now a political prisoner, he said.

“Honestly, my wife was someone who didn’t know anything about violating the law in North Korea,” said Heo, visiting the United States as a member of the Emergency Committee on the Forced Repatriation of North Korean Escapees, a South Korea-based group that demonstrated at various locations in Washington and at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

“She was such a nice woman,” said Heo. “But she became a political prisoner…a political prisoner.” 

And he doesn’t know if she’s dead or alive.

His wife, Choi Sun Hwa, had fled North Korea to be reunited with him and their daughter, as they had escaped to China a month before her.

“You know what a political prisoner is, right? You become a political prisoner when you betray your country or engage in activities that are considered treasonous,” he said. “After a year of interrogation and torture, she was eventually sent to a political prison camp, and now there is no way to confirm whether she is alive or dead,” he said.

For Heo, China’s insistence on repatriating escaped North Koreans is “tantamount to genocide.”

“Once repatriated to North Korea, 80-90% of individuals do not survive,” he said. “There is no way to confirm the status of those repatriated, but the Chinese government's forced repatriation to North Korea continues. I can only wish that there are no more victims.”

‘Illegal displaced persons’

Critics of Beijing’s policy of returning North Koreans found to have entered the country without authorization say that China is not living up to its agreements to protect refugees.

Though the exact figure of North Koreans who have escaped to China are not known, estimates range from the tens of thousands to more than 100,000.

China continues to justify forced repatriation by claiming that North Korean escapees in China are  “illegal displaced persons” rather than refugees.

Beijing therefore claims it must return the North Koreans to their homeland because it is bound by two agreements with Pyongyang, the 1960 PRC-DPRK Escaped Criminals Reciprocal Extradition Treaty and the 1986 Mutual Cooperation Protocol for the Work of Maintaining National Security and Social Order and the Border Areas. 

Fleeing starvation

One of the other protesters that morning had herself been repatriated to North Korea twice.

“I cannot help but feel enraged as I stand in front of the Chinese Embassy,” said Ji Hanna, who first fled to China in 2010.

Her husband had died in 1996 in the thick of the so-called Arduous March, the famine that resulted from the collapse of the North Korean economy which had been over-reliant on Soviet aid. By some estimates, more than 2 million people, or about 10% of the population, died between 1994 and 1998.

In such dire times, Ji had been trying to provide for her two young sons by conducting illegal trading with contacts in China. She was caught and sentenced to disciplinary labor five times.

In November 2009, the North Korean government issued new currency and revalued the old one such that it made the savings of the common people worth about 1% what it had been.

This was the last straw for Ji, who made the decision to go to China to earn money, then return to North Korea to get her children out.

But she was caught by Chinese police and sent back in 2011. She attempted to escape again but the Chinese border force caught her and sent her back again.

While in a North Korean prison, she said she saw people dying from malnutrition every day, and her only food was the uneaten remnants from soldiers’ meals.

She escaped again and resettled in South Korea in 2016, where she lives with her two sons.

But she says she will never forget the torture and suffering during and after her repatriation. Her legs are scarred, from being whipped with a stiff leather belt daily, and she suffers from severe neck pain from injuries she suffered while incarcerated.

“We didn’t commit any major crimes in China. We just tried to find a way to survive and come to South Korea,” said Ji. “How unjust and heartbreaking it is.” 

“I managed to survive from the brink of death and succeeded in escaping from North Korea on my third attempt and came to South Korea. I don’t even know if the other people are dead or alive.”

Trafficking

Most of the North Koreans who escape to China are women, and they can become easy targets for human traffickers. Some end up being sold into marriages, sex work or other forms of servitude.

Shin Gum-sil was not at the embassy on Nov. 8, but her cousin Jang Se-yul was, and and he told RFA that Shin had been trafficked when she escaped North Korea in January 2020, right before the whole country was locked down at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While in China, Shin fell into the hands of traffickers who sold her to an elderly Chinese man to be his wife. She became pregnant, and in April 2020, and in shock she swallowed a handful of cold medicine pills. (Jang did not specify if this was an attempt by Shin to terminate the pregnancy or to end her life.)

From the overdose, Shin experienced abdominal pain, soon discharged blood, and was taken to the hospital emergency room.

“Because she was losing so much blood her husband’s parents insisted on going to a big hospital, saying, ‘Despite the risks, we have to save her life,’” said Jang. “When you go to a big hospital, you have to check in, but she didn’t have any identification. So, after waiting until the bleeding stopped, the Chinese police took her away.”

Shin was then interrogated for about three months and sent to a labor prison camp for more than six months. This all occurred in China as the border between North Korea and China remained closed for the duration of the pandemic.

“I haven’t heard from my cousin in three years, so I asked her Chinese husband and he said she was sick and in the hospital, so I thought she was still hospitalized,” said Jang. 

But this September, he got a call from Shin, who said was in the Baishan Detention Center in China.

Jang said his heart sank when he heard the news in October that Shin had been among the 500 escapees handed over to the North Korean Ministry of State Security. 

He was worried for her because his own status as an escapee who resettled in the South might result in her receiving harsher punishment.

“Because I settled in South Korea, the North Korean Ministry of State Security will investigate and conclude that my cousin’s final plan was to go to South Korea,” he said. “And there is a high possibility that she will be put in a political prison camp on charges of treason against the homeland.”

He called on the international community to address the issue.

“When North Korean escapees are forcibly repatriated to North Korea, they are sent to political prisons where they cannot escape alive,” said Jang. “Despite our relentless efforts, China continues to act recklessly. We earnestly hope that the United States and the international community will intervene to prevent this kind of tragedy.”

Peter Jung, the head of the South Korea-based rights group Justice for North Korea, said the group is trying to spread the word that China, a permanent member of the U.N., is committing crimes against humanity by forcibly repatriating North Koreans.

“China was clearly cited in the report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea 10 years ago for this horrendous crime against humanity,” he said. “The report urged that Chinese authorities contact and protect North Korean escapees in cooperation with the UN refugee agency and allow them to go to the country of their choice.” 

Legal status 

North Korean escapees in China face many difficulties due to their lack of legal status in China. 

One of the protesters on Nov. 8 explained how her sister-in-law could not receive legal services while incarcerated by Chinese authorities because she wasn’t legally married to the Chinese man she had been living with as his wife.

Woo Young-bok is relatively famous for her role as the protagonist of “Beyond Utopia,” an award-winning documentary about how North Koreans who escape to China eventually find their way to South Korea.

While Woo was able to get out of North Korea in 2020 and resettle in the South, her sister Choi Soon Ae was among the 500 North Koreans repatriated in October, she said.

Choi had left North Korea in 2013 with her family and lived in China for two years. Her husband and daughter were able to resettle in South Korea, but she was trafficked and sold to a Chinese man.

Eventually, the Chinese police received an anonymous tipoff about Choi’s situation, and she was arrested and sent to a prison for two years in Changchun, in China’s northeastern province of Jilin.

Choi’s daughter, who now lives in South Korea, can only anxiously wait for news about her mother's well-being, Woo said.

In fact, Soon Ae’s daughter called her mother to try to bring her to South Korea,” she said. “But Soon Ae said it’s impossible because she was under ‘repatriation standby.’”

According to Woo, the family pleaded with her Chinese husband to get her out of prison so that she would not be sent back.

“However, he said, ‘If she was on the family register, I would confidently claim to be her husband, but I can’t because she is not registered as a member of my family,’” said Woo.

Woo said women make up the majority of North Korean escapees in China and are living insecure lives. She repeatedly urged that the international community pay more attention to their plight.

“Even people who have not yet been sent back to North Korea are anxious and sobbing over the thought [of repatriation],” she said. “The reason we visited the U.S is because the world must now be aware of China’s crimes against humanity. [The situation] is truly heartbreaking.”

Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Seo Hye Jun for RFA Korean.

A leaked audio recording of the confidential training session obtained by RFA Cantonese reveals a narrative that claims to be the "truth" about the key factors driving the 2019 protest movement in the city. 

They began as a mass popular movement against plans to allow extradition of alleged criminal suspects to face trial in mainland China before broadening to include calls for greater accountability for police violence, the release of political prisoners and fully democratic elections.

While contemporary accounts of the movement described a largely leaderless operation spontaneously organized by mostly young people using whatever they had to hand, China started referring to protesters as "rioters" backed by "hostile foreign forces" long before a section of the movement starting fighting back against riot police, who were widely criticized for their violence towards protesters and escalating the standoff with the government.

A landslide victory for pro-democracy candidates in the 2019 District Council elections was widely seen as a massive show of public support for the protest movement. 

But the ensuing crackdown on dissent under the 2020 National Security Law ushered in a city-wide propaganda campaign to change people's minds in the guise of "national security education" requirements for all public institutions, including the city's more than 170,000-strong civil service.

Plans are already under way to rewrite the Civil Service Code to ban government employees from criticizing the authorities or leaking "secrets," while civil servants resigned in record numbers in 2021 after the government made it compulsory for them to swear oaths of allegiance to Beijing.

‘A conspiracy theory’

Now, according to the Hong Kong Economic Journal's political insider column, civil servants are required to attend "national security education" classes, which frame the protesters as "rioters" who "colluded with external forces to bring about regime change in Hong Kong."

The aim of the "external forces," according to the hour-long training session consisting of two videos narrated in Cantonese, was to foment a "Color Revolution," thereby subverting the Chinese government and its rule in Hong Kong.

A civil servant who gave only his surname Chan for fear of reprisals said he had seen the video, and that attendance at "national security" training sessions was once optional, and is now mandatory.

"In short, it's a conspiracy theory," Chan said. "It kept talking about how Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai wanted to disrupt Hong Kong."

Lai, who has been in prison for nearly three years, is currently awaiting trial under the national security law on charges of "collusion with a foreign power," a charge his lawyers say is "illegitimate," in a legal system that is heavily skewed against him by political and legal changes imposed by Beijing since 2020.

‘Protester thugs’

The training video goes on to credit Beijing and the National Security Law with the restoration of "stability and prosperity" to Hong Kong, describing Communist Party leader Xi Jinping as "wise and powerful."

"Protester thugs started using more lethal weapons and tools to sow black terror throughout Hong Kong," it says at one point, citing the storming of the Legislative Council on July 1, 2019 and the vandalization of China-linked businesses including the Bank of China.

"Public services were blocked, primary and secondary schools and kindergartens were shut down for a prolonged period, while shopping malls were unable to operate," the narration says.

"Hong Kong, once known as one of the safest cities in the world, had become a city of violence."

It blames "anti-China and disruptive Hong Kong elements" for a bid to "seize" seats in the Legislative Council through a democratic primary in July 2020 that aimed to maximize the number of pro-democracy seats in the legislature and through the establishment of trade unions with a vote in industry-based constituencies.

"The anti-China disruptors and external forces in Hong Kong claimed to be campaigning against the amendment [that would allow extradition to China], but their true goal was to seize control of Hong Kong and then subvert the People's Republic of China," the narration says.

Western influences blamed

It blames Western media for "cooperating" with them, and Western internet companies for helping them out with "security protection" for their online mobilization.

"The storm over the [extradition] amendment bill was, in essence, a color revolution," it concludes.

Chan said the language used in the training videos is very similar to that used by Chinese Communist Party-backed media like the Wen Wei Po and the Ta Kung Pao.

"It's all very biased ... talking from the perspective of the communist regime," he said. "It made me feel very uncomfortable."

"I joined this department because I wanted to use my expertise," Chan said. "I never thought I'd be brainwashed."

He said some of his colleagues at the back had shown their impatience with the process, while others leaped to their feet when it was done, looking very pleased it was over, and saying "Great! Time to go!"

"You could tell from their expressions that they were forced to attend the screening," he said.

The training doesn't look likely to let up any time soon, either.

The government set up a Civil Service College in 2021 to make sure incoming civil servants are well-versed in the new political regime.

But Chan said such training sessions are likely to affect morale.

"We should be allowed to just go back to our professional lives, now that things have gotten more stable, but they have to force so much political and national security content on us that actually has nothing to do with our work," he said.

"On the contrary, it takes up a lot of time and effort and gets in the way of our work," he said. "Civil servants were supposed to be politically neutral in the past – I think it's sad."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chun Hoi for RFA Cantonese.

The audit was carried out by German due diligence firm Loening Human Rights & Responsible Business GmbH came in response to a demand by investors after activists accused the German carmaker of using forced labor at its joint venture with China’s SAIC Motors in Urumqi, the regional capital.

In presenting the findings Wednesday, Loening’s Managing Director Markus Loening acknowledged that the audit, based on on-site interviews and inspection of employee contracts and salary payments for 197 employees, may have been hampered by what he described as “well-known … challenges in collecting data” due to “legislative changes” in the region. 

Chinese authorities in Xinjiang have clamped down on the flow of information in and out of the region amid concerns from the international community over the situation Uyghurs face there.

Reuters news agency cited analysts at Citi who said the audit’s conclusions could potentially bolster Volkswagen’s stock, which took a hit amid the allegations – in part because it would remove restrictions that prohibit investors in the European Union from buying into a company known to profit from forced labor.

But Adrian Zenz, director of China Studies at the U.S.-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, dismissed Loening’s findings, saying in a post to the social media platform X that he had found evidence showing “Uyghurs were sent from re-education camps directly to vocational institutions that organized job fairs with Volkswagen & advertise degrees with Volkswagen as a typical work destination.”

Xinjiang Police Files

Zenz, who has spent years documenting China’s human rights abuses against Uyghurs, said the evidence was discovered in the Xinjiang Police Files, a cache of millions of confidential documents hacked from Xinjiang police computers. 

The files date from 2017 to 2018, during the height of one of China’s mass detention campaigns, during which hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities were sent to the camps.

He cited the example of Adiljan Hashim, who police records show was detained in October 2017, then placed into the Xinjiang Light Industry Technical College in January 2018.

“This ‘release’ was highly controlled and based on pre-agreed conditions,” Zenz said, adding that Xinjiang Light Industry Technical College offers majors in fields such as automobile manufacturing and lists examples of cooperation with companies including Volkswagen Xinjiang on its website, and advertises Volkswagen as a graduate employer.

Zenz cited additional police files which he said showed the detention of tertiary students at other institutions such as the Xinjiang Vocational University, which also offers automobile-related degrees.

“A number of detainees were released into state-directed vocational skills education, which they are not at liberty to choose,” he said. “The ramification is that re-educated and coerced Uyghurs can likely end up working for larger companies such as FAW-Volkswagen in Xinjiang.”

Zenz said that such risks “cannot be ascertained through audits,” as Uyghurs are not free to speak about re-education experiences or other repressive state measures in their lives.

‘Flawed process’

Another expert, Hanno Shadler, the senior Legal Advisor at the Society for Threatened People's (Germany), called the audit a “flawed process.”

“I don't know how a really independent audit is possible when the company SAIC Volkswagen – the joint venture – has ample time to prepare for a one-day visit when they're with auditors,” Shadler said. 

“They can prepare the workers. They can intimidate the workers,” he continued. “The employees cannot speak freely because millions of workers have been in concentration camps or hundreds of thousands have been sentenced to long prison sentences.

“Many people have been forced to perform forced labor in previous years. So in this context, I think it's basically impossible to go there and have an independent audit.”

Shadler also pointed out that even a famous figure like Michelle Bachelet, the former U.N. high commissioner for human rights, was barred from speaking freely to Uyghurs when she visited Xinjiang as part of her agency’s investigation into human rights abuses in the region. 

“She couldn’t choose the people with whom she wanted to speak,” he said.

The damning 2022 U.N. report Bachelet’s agency produced concluded that China had committed serious rights violations, and that the detention of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang may constitute crimes against humanity.

‘Divest and disengage’

Rushan Abbas, executive director of the Washington-based Campaign for Uyghurs said that “Time is running out for these companies if they do not want China’s crimes against humanity to become theirs: They must divest and disengage now.”

Abbas said that given the inability of international missions and audits to ascertain the true conditions of Uyghur workers due to China’s repressive measures in Xinjiang, “immediate withdrawal and disengagement from the region is the only possible, ethical solution.”

However, Nicolai Laude, the head of Volkswagen’s Sustainability & Integrity Communications department, said that Zenz’s claims are “simply not right” and had not been proven without a doubt.

“What we did is we asked and tried to figure out if, for instance, the allegation that we are working with those education companies [was true] or that we are cooperating with them or not,” he said in an interview with RFA on Wednesday.

“There is no cooperation with those education institutes and we did not hire any new workforce in the last four or five years,” he said. “So, for both reasons … it's simply not right, what Mr. Zenz's conclusions might show.”

Laude acknowledged that he had not read the official police documents Zenz referred to in his findings and could not comment on them specifically. But he said that Volkswagen frequently meets with NGOs and human rights groups and is “happy to receive valid information so that we can use this kind of information to examine if … allegations are true or false.”

Laude referred further questions about Loening’s findings to the firm itself, which Volkswagen has said carried out its audit with two Chinese lawyers from a firm in Shenzhen, without naming them.

Earlier allegations

According to Reuters, Volkswagen reduced staff at the Urumqi plant after the pandemic from a peak of 650 to 197, of which just under a quarter are Uyghur, and has denied reports that it kept the facility open on Beijing’s orders in order to continue producing in China.

Volkswagen's China chief Ralf Brandstaetter said he saw no signs of forced labor when he toured the site in February, Reuters said, but his comments drew criticism from campaigners and investors who said determining labor conditions in the region was impossible.

In May, activists staged protests inside and outside Volkswagen’s annual shareholder meeting over the carmaker’s alleged use of Uyghur forced labor in Xinjiang.

Outside the hall, activists wore a big-headed mask of Xi and a flat paper mask of Volkswagen CEO Oliver Blume, who stood arm-in-arm. The Xi figure held a metal ring attached to a chain leading to two handcuffed people representing Uyghur workers in blue laborer uniforms.

Inside the exhibit hall where shareholders gathered, other protesters – including one woman who was topless and had “dirty money” painted on her back – shouted at executives and waved a banner that said, “End Uyghur Forced Labor,” according to Reuters. 

After the disruption, security personnel escorted the activists out of the auditorium.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jilil Kashgary for RFA Uyghur.

We go to Gaza for an update on Israel’s attack, which is now being described as one of the worst assaults on any civilian population in recent times. As Israeli tanks enter Khan Younis and the Palestinian death toll tops 16,000, we speak with Yousef Hammash. The advocacy officer for the Norwegian Refugee Council in Gaza describes how he and his family are facing internal displacement for the third time during the assault, this time from Khan Younis, where they had fled after Israeli warnings to head to the south of the Gaza Strip. Now in Rafah by the Egyptian border, they are struggling to find shelter and, like thousands of other now-homeless Palestinians, have resorted to living in a makeshift tent. “I left everything behind,” Hammash says about leaving his home in Gaza City, now destroyed. “I didn’t care what I was going to lose. I was looking for the safety of my family.” Hammash says a paltry amount of humanitarian aid is being allowed into Gaza even as refugees of the war face starvation, dehydration and infection. “The amount of aid that’s coming to Gaza is literally not tangible,” he says.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Shealeigh.

The post #11 – Tribal Towns Forced to Relocate Due to Climate Crisis appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Shealeigh.

Xinjiang Markor Chemical Industry Co., Ltd., has operated a plant in Korla – the second-largest city in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region – with German-based multinational BASF since 2016.

German business newspaper Handelsblatt reported on Nov. 5 that some of the ownership rights to Xinjiang Markor Chemical Industry are held by the Xinjiang Zhongtai Group and its subsidiary, Zhongtai Chemical Company. 

In September, the United States banned goods made by the Xinjiang Zhongtai Group from imports due to the company’s “participation in business practices that target members of persecuted groups, including Uyghur minorities.”

Xinjiang Zhongtai is now one of 27 companies explicitly blacklisted under the 2021 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, or UFPLA, which also includes a general ban on the import of any goods made even in part by the forced labor of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority subjected to persecution and put in internment camps in China.

A statement from BASF said it routinely conducts background checks of its suppliers in Korla. 

Investigations done at the Xinjiang Zhongtai plant in 2019, 2020 and earlier this year have found no instances of forced labor or any other human rights violations, BASF said.

Also, the inclusion of Zhongtai Group in the United States’ UFLPA Entity List doesn’t have any legal implications on the products made through BASF’s joint ventures in Korla, the company said.

“Regardless of the legal implications, we regularly conduct transparency measures, to the extent legally possible, in response to the situation in Xinjiang, which also involves the joint venture partner and its shareholders,” BASF said in the statement.

Allegations are ‘no surprise’

The German Bundestag, the U.S. Congress and several other Western legislative bodies have declared that the abuses in the region amount to genocide or crimes against humanity.

But BASF, the largest chemical producer in the world, continues to invest heavily throughout China. 

The German-language Handelsblatt’s report said that the Korla factory – “probably the most controversial plant” that BASF operates in the world – produces chemical precursors used in sportswear.

“In the past, we highlighted the risks that the BASF joint venture plant in Korla implies,” Tilman Massa of the Germany-based Association of Ethical Shareholders said. “So for us, it is no surprise that there are new allegations.”

The company has an obligation to comply with German supply chain laws, to investigate its suppliers and release its latest investigation to the public, he said. 

However, BASF’s latest external audit may not be an effective measure for investigating any supplier in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Massa said.

“It is not a sufficient measure,” he told RFA. “Responsible withdrawal from the region should be what companies should do given the context there.” 

It’s also not really possible to trust any audit conducted in a region that remains under strict control of watchful Chinese authorities, said Hanno Schedler, a genocide prevention consultant who is based in Germany.

“There will be no external audit because they know that independent audits aren’t possible in that region,” he said. 

“These companies need to realize that when you deal with a system comprised of internment camps, long prison sentences, family separations as well as forced labor, you cannot escape the system,” he said. “The only way to really escape that system is to get out of the region.”

Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

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

• The United Nations was forced to stop deliveries of food and other necessities to Gaza and warned of the growing possibility of widespread starvation after internet and telephone services collapsed in the besieged enclave because of a lack of fuel. Israel announced Friday that it will allow a “very minimal” amount of fuel into the besieged territory daily. But the shipments appeared to be far less than what the U.N. has said is needed. Phone and internet services were partially restored Friday night after some fuel was delivered.
• Top United Nations officials debriefed the United Nations General Assembly about the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza today.
• The lower house of Russia’s parliament, the State Duma, has approved its biggest-ever federal budget, which will increase spending by around 25% in 2024, with record amounts going to defense.
• The White House wants House Republicans to withdraw subpoenas targeting members of President Biden’s family as part of an impeachment inquiry.
• The new GOP House Speaker, Mike Johnson, says he is publicly releasing thousands of hours of footage – some of it with sensitive material — from the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
• The chairman of the House Ethics Committee has filed a resolution to force a vote on expelling Republican Rep. George Santos from Congress.
• Workers’ rights activists joined prisoner advocacy groups this week to call on the California prison system to give a meaningful raise in wages to prisoner workers in the state. Currently, incarcerated workers get paid less than ten cents an hour.

The post The United Nations was forced to stop deliveries of food and other necessities to Gaza and warned of the growing possibility of widespread starvation after internet and telephone services collapsed in the besieged enclave because of a lack of fuel – Friday, November 17, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with WPLN/Nashville Public Radio. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

With a glint in his eye, Richard L. Bean reminisces about the days when children in his detention center could be paddled.

“We didn’t have any problems then,” Bean says. “I’d whip about six or eight a year and it run pretty smooth. They’d say, ‘You don’t want him to get hold of you.’” Once, he chuckles, a kid had to be held down by four guards to be spanked.

Bean took the helm of this East Tennessee detention center — now named the Richard L. Bean Juvenile Service Center — in 1972. The laws and the science on how to treat children in detention have changed a bit since then.

Yet Bean has held on to an old-fashioned approach to his work. These days, he’s reliant on a different tool for keeping kids in line: locking them alone in cells for hours — sometimes even days — at a time.

“What we do is treat everybody like they’re in here for murder,” he says. “You don’t have a problem if you do that.”

Most of the children in the Bean Center are not in for murder — in fact, most have only been charged with a crime, but are awaiting court dates.

At 83, superintendent Bean uses a bamboo cane to give a tour of the 120-bed facility. It’s connected to the juvenile court by a maze of windowless corridors; kids are passed between the two buildings in uniforms and shackles.

It’s difficult to know how children have been treated inside the walls of institutions like this one because policies designed to protect the privacy of kids can also obscure what goes on in facilities that break the law.

That was the case at a juvenile court about 150 miles west in Rutherford County, where reporting from ProPublica and WPLN revealed that kids were being illegally detained — at rates far higher than anywhere else in the state — for the most minor crimes, or even, in at least one instance, crimes that didn’t exist. The proof was right there, being collected by the state and laid out, for years, in an annual report. Yet no one flagged that kids were being jailed at a staggering rate, and no one seemed to try to stop it.

Here at the Bean Center, records reveal different violations of the law.

What we do is treat everybody like they’re in here for murder. You don’t have a problem if you do that.”

Kids have been locked alone in a cell here more often than other facilities in the state, sometimes as punishment, and sometimes for an indeterminate length of time. And even as the state has implemented reforms that would have made seclusion less common, the Bean Center remained reliant on the practice.

Here too, these violations are not a secret: The facility’s licensing agency, Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services, has been documenting this improper use of seclusion for years at Bean’s center and elsewhere. The Richard L. Bean Center has repeatedly been put on corrective action plans. Yet DCS continues to approve the center’s license to operate without the facility changing its ways.

In 2016, a suit in Rutherford County challenged the use of solitary confinement in the juvenile detention center after a child was kept in solitary for days for disrupting class. Around the same time, research emerged showing that isolating children doesn’t actually improve their behavior — if anything, it could worsen it. Solitary confinement can cause psychological impacts like depression, anxiety or psychosis, and young people are especially vulnerable to those effects. The majority of suicides inside juvenile correction facilities in the United States happen when a child is isolated.

So in 2017, DCS mandated that juvenile detention centers throughout the state change the way they use seclusion, adding guidelines and a reporting requirement.

The new standards said that children kept in seclusion inside Tennessee’s juvenile detention centers could be locked into cells that are 50 square feet — about the size of a U-Haul cargo van — usually with a concrete slab for a bed and a metal toilet affixed to the wall.

Importantly, the standards made clear that seclusion was meant to be a last resort and should not be used as punishment.

“Seclusion shall only be used when necessary to prevent imminent harm to themselves, another person, prevent damage to property, or prevent the youth from escaping,” the standards dictate. “Staff shall never use seclusion for discipline, punishment, administrative convenience, retaliation, staffing shortages, or reasons other than a temporary response to behavior that threatens immediate harm to a youth or others.”

Shortly after, those standards were codified into state law.

In order to have their licenses renewed, which happens annually, juvenile detention centers are supposed to abide by DCS’ standards. Every few months, a DCS inspector drops into facilities unannounced to take a tour, review documentation of the use of tools like chemical sprays, and interview a few kids. The resulting inspection reports are written almost like a journal entry and provide a glimpse of life inside juvenile detention centers.

WPLN and ProPublica reviewed eight years of those inspection reports, covering 2016 to 2023, and found multiple instances of children being locked up in seclusion — sometimes for days or more than a week — for minor rule infractions like laughing during meals or talking during class. One facility put a child in seclusion for eight days for simply having head lice, which the inspector called “a little extreme.”

And while many facilities were documented using seclusion improperly, the Richard L. Bean Center emerged as particularly prolific in its use of seclusion as a means of punishment, even years after the state standards were imposed.

Tyshon Booker was 16 years old when he says he was secluded in the Richard L. Bean Center. Now he’s 24 and incarcerated at a nearby prison, serving a 51-year sentence for homicide — a sentence the state Supreme Court recently ruled amounted to cruel and unusual punishment for juveniles like Tyshon.

But even though it was years ago, he remembers his two-year stay at the Bean Center like it was yesterday. During his 2015-2017 detention there, he says he was kept in seclusion twice for several days on end, without reprieve. He was stripped to his boxers, a T-shirt and socks before being placed in a cell alone.

He says he had to get creative to keep his mind from spinning out.

“I learned how to make dice out of bread,” Booker says. “I made dice, roll the dice for hours. And then you’ve got to remember, we’re in solitary confinement, so I’d get hungry and I’d eat the dice. So, like, just imagine, the savage life in solitary confinement — rolling dice on a dirty floor for hours,” he recalled. “It was horrible.”

He says he would also lay on the ground of his cell with his face pressed against the cold floor, trying to yell to another kid who was locked in a solitary cell nearby.

He says it was worse than anything he’s experienced in adult prison. He thinks prison conditions are better because there’s more oversight. At the Bean Center, on the other hand? “They think, ‘Oh, they’re kids. Nobody is going to do this to kids, nobody would treat kids like this.’ So I don’t think it’s as much eyes as the penitentiary.”

In 2018 reports from visits to the Bean Center, one child said he was secluded after he forgot to bring his books to class. “Staff will put you in seclusion if they don’t like you,” he told the inspector. Another child said he was secluded but he didn’t really understand why.

They think, ‘Oh, they’re kids. Nobody is going to do this to kids, nobody would treat kids like this.’ So I don’t think it’s as much eyes as the penitentiary.”

The same inspector visited the facility twice in October of 2018. On Oct. 16 she wrote that the facility “continues to be in good standing with the DCS licensing” and that the facility had corrected all its problems and could have its license renewed for the year. But when she returned the next day, Oct. 17, documents show the facility was put on a corrective action plan for a list of problems, including using seclusion as punishment.

Then in 2019, an inspector returned and found that the Bean Center’s reliance on seclusion as punishment had escalated. Seclusions at the facility that year were about double what they had been the year before. In just a few months, it reported more than 160 instances of locking up children alone.

On that visit, the inspector talked to five kids. Each one of them had seen youth placed in seclusion for fighting or not following the rules. One child said he was secluded for talking back. That would break not only DCS’ standards but also the new state law. Despite documenting evidence that the Bean Center’s problem with seclusion had only gotten worse, the facility was taken off its corrective action plan and had its license approved for another year.

In an email to WPLN and ProPublica, DCS says it has multiple levers it can pull if a facility isn’t in compliance, including freezing or slowing admissions, decreasing capacity, or even refusing to approve a license. But DCS says it has never used any of those options at the Bean Center.

From the outside, the one-story brick Bean Center looks more like an elementary school than a junior jail. It’s situated just a few miles from downtown Knoxville, next to an ill-kempt sports field where kids play peewee football.

Inside, colorful stripes on the walls help kids navigate the hallways, an eerie counterpart to their neon orange prison outfits and the handcuffs they sometimes wear.

Bean can be found sitting behind a massive desk in his office. Where the rest of the detention center is sparse, his office is stuffed. His walls are covered in photos of himself through the years with visitors to the facility. His tenure has lasted so long that he’s run out of wall space — the photos spill out of his office and into the hallway.

The room is cluttered with memorabilia — a can of pinto beans from his family’s renowned meals with local politicians, dubbed Bean dinners; bumper stickers for the current juvenile court judge; figurines of elephants; and political tchotchkes.

He says he thinks the politicians making the rules around juvenile detention centers and seclusion don’t know what it’s like inside these facilities.

“Most people think we’re running a kindergarten,” Bean says. “We’re running the juvenile junior jail for Knox County. And there’s some tough kids — tougher than the ones in the jail, I guarantee.”

Bean doesn’t see reform laws as the state trying to do right by these kids; instead he sees it as the state making his job more difficult. He compares his relationship with the state and DCS to his marriage of 55 years.

“You have to do a lot of kissing,” he says, laughing. “A lot of, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ You can’t always have it your way in this business.”

In 2021, when the state ruled that kids could not be secluded for longer than six hours because of the damaging effects isolation had on them, Bean didn’t shy away from telling inspectors his thoughts.

An inspector wrote in August 2021 that Bean “stated that he did not feel two to six hours was enough time to lock the youth in their rooms,” a reference to the limits in the new law. “I also asked if the facility’s policy and procedures manual had been updated to reflect the new seclusion bill requirements. … The current policy and procedure manual for the facility was last updated in 1999."

That inspector also noticed a pattern: Instead of writing down the time the child was let out of the cell, as he was supposed to do on forms for the state, Bean would just write his initials, “RLB.”

Despite DCS’ policies and the state law dictating exactly how long kids could be kept in seclusion, Bean decided to use his own discretion. He said writing “RLB” was his way of denoting that it was up to him to decide when the children were ready to be released and rejoin the other kids. He told the inspector that he’d make that decision based on how “remorseful” a child was.

“I asked them how their attitude is,” Bean says. “I can’t let the kids run the place. Sometimes you get a kid, you put him in his room, and he cuss and call you everything in the books. It’s hard to let him out.”

The use of “RLB” instead of a specific time also made it impossible for the state to discern how long kids were being locked up alone.

For those seclusion incidents that were documented properly, it was evident that Bean was keeping kids in their cells longer than he was supposed to. Most of the incidents of seclusion were “either definitively over 6 hours, or for an indeterminate amount of time,” the inspector wrote in the same report. One youth told the inspector that he had been placed in seclusion for “several weeks” for fighting.

Then in late 2021, something new happened: Bean’s seclusion numbers started dropping. It was the same year that a new law laid out the option for something called “voluntary time-out,” through which a kid can request to be left alone in their room for a few hours but is allowed to come out whenever they want to.

As the number of seclusions has fallen at the Richard L. Bean Center, the number of what inspectors called “voluntary seclusions” skyrocketed — in August of 2022, the facility reported just 44 seclusions compared with 122 the previous August.

According to the inspections, the facility also reported 344 voluntary seclusions.

“We don’t use it as punishment,” Bean explains. “So all of it’s volunteer.”

But the DCS inspector who visited that year noted that it was uncertain how voluntary the process actually was at the Bean Center.

“It is unclear whether the youth are aware that they can come out of their room by choice,” the inspector wrote. “The previous rule at the facility was that youth had to stay in their room for the remainder of the day if they chose to voluntarily go to their room.”

Recently, Bean said he started a new rule — if a kid requests a voluntary lockup to avoid going to school, he responds by secluding them until the next morning.

“And then next morning, we say, ‘You want to go to school today?’” Bean said. “Most of them say, ‘Yeah, I want to go. I don’t want to be locked up.’”

Bean doesn’t seem to worry too much about getting caught.

“If I got in trouble for it, I believe I could talk to whoever got me in trouble and get out of it.”

When asked what happens to inspection reports after they are filled out, DCS said that evaluation summaries “are distributed to the appropriate administrative parties and filed in the licensing record.” The department also said it provides a list of violations to the facility administrator; the administrator typically has 30 days to submit compliance documentation, which is verified by licensing staff.

DCS confirms that in the time it has been licensing juvenile detention centers in Tennessee, it has never terminated a license. And records from the Bean Center illustrate that corrective action orders can be lifted without the violation being resolved.

The department declined to comment further on why it never did more to crack down on the Bean Center.

“You can write everything into statute and create some really solid legislation, but if it’s not being used or it’s not being enforced, then what’s the next step?” asks Kylie Graves, policy director of the independent state agency Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth.

Graves said that there has been a tendency for the state to look the other way when it comes to juvenile justice in Tennessee.

“The idea of this practice ever being used in a foster home or something like that would immediately raise flags and horrify people,” she said.

The Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth is calling for a third-party review of juvenile detention centers and the entire youth justice system. The agency points to Kentucky, which has proposed setting aside money to do just that. Several other organizations are likewise advocating for a review, including Disability Rights Tennessee, an organization that acts as a monitoring agency for juvenile detention facilities and has special access to the kids and documents inside.

“What seems like a good approach starting in January when the legislature reconvenes is to talk about putting in some type of mechanism for enforcing compliance,” says Zoe Jamail of Disability Rights Tennessee.

One proposal, Jamail says, could be a clean-up bill that would take oversight of juvenile detention facilities out of DCS’ purview, though she says she isn’t sure what agency could take that on. An audit last year found that nearly half of new DCS workers quit within their first year. That problem was compounded by an influx of kids entering the foster care system.

And the involvement of a third party could help mitigate a conflict of interest — DCS is invested in keeping county detention centers open and operating. In addition to being the licensing agency for the county detention centers, DCS also has contracts with most of those facilities to hold kids who have been convicted of a crime while they try to find placement for them.

DCS declined to comment on that arrangement.

It’s an arrangement that Richard Bean says is mutually beneficial — DCS pays his facility more than $175 per day per kid. He calls those kids paying customers.

Bean says that’s in addition to the $120 per day he gets from detaining kids from surrounding counties that don’t have a juvenile detention center.

Resting his chin on his cane, Bean says he doesn’t intend to slow down. He has big plans to hire more staff and get more bodies in beds — especially kids sent his way by DCS.

“I mean, you’ve got to take care of the kids,” Bean says. “But … you got to kind of run it like a business, too. I could make over one million dollars for the county.”

Meribah Knight contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio.

Under the watch of armed guards, the prisoners must walk to the fields while overseers wearing red vests and holding police dogs monitor them, the two people said. Armed soldiers surrounded the work area, some on horseback, to prevent any from escaping.

“I witnessed prisoners being forcibly taken out to work during the day and returned to their cells at night,” said the prison employee – a Uyghur himself – who has worked at the prison for nine years, including one as a “team leader” of a group of inmates, although he was not allowed to mingle or talk much with them.

Many inmates also work in factories located inside and outside the prison walls producing cement, shoes, gloves and tea, a prison guard told RFA Uyghur.

Those serving sentences of more than 10 years work in factories inside the prison yard, while those serving less than 10 years work outside the prison, the guard said.

The goal seems to be two-fold: To harness the prisoners’ free labor for the benefit of Han Chinese businessmen who rent the 1,650 acres of farmland that is owned by the prison, and to reform the inmates through labor, the two sources said, insisting they not be identified for fear of retaliation.

“They want to make the prisoners undergo ideological transformation through labor in these big fields,” said the prison employee.

The farm itself is called Lao Gai Nong Chang in Chinese, which means “Re-education through Labor Farm.”

The work was arduous and painful, he said. Before the fields were converted to jujubes, they produced cotton, and he recalls seeing some inmates picking cotton worked until their hands bled.

Arbitrarily sentenced

The offenses committed by the Uyghur inmates in Keriye Prison – located about 25 kilometers (16 miles) from Siyek township in Hotan prefecture and which houses about 10,000 inmates – remain unclear. 

Most Uyghurs detained in Xinjiang in recent years have never been formally charged with any crime or tried by the government. 

More than 30 Uyghur teachers from Hotan Normal Technical High School jailed on charges of “national separatism” and “religious extremism” are serving their sentences in Keriye Prison, RFA previously learned. 

Though China formally abolished its “reform through labor” system in 1994, this account shows that it has remained in practice in some areas.

Starting in 2017 and 2018, Chinese authorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region detained an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in “re-education” camps, where they were subjected to forced labor in factories producing textiles, wigs, tomatoes and solar panels for export.

The forced work and other abuses, including torture and sexual assaults, are part of a wider genocide that China is committing against the Uyghur people, the United States and other governments have declared.

Beijing denies the abuses, saying the camps were vocational training centers meant to prevent terrorism and religious extremism while teaching job skills.

Chinese rent the land

Many Han Chinese from Henan province and Xian, capital of Shaanxi province in northwestern China, rent the prison land under three-to-four-year contracts, the team leader said.

For example, a Chinese businessman from Henan province leased about 200 acres on which he grew cotton for five or six years before switching to jujubes, he said.