Human Rights Watch announced Hellman/Hammett grants today for 42 writers from 20 countries in recognition of their commitment to free expression and courage in the face of political persecution.

Cheap labor, no independent unions and a bottomless pool of impoverished migrant laborers. That model for China's export manufacturing sector--which over the past three decades has made the country's Pearl River Delta region the "workshop of the world--suddenly looks less certain than in the past. In recent months, a series of rolling strikes in southern Guangdong province by mostly migrant workers at factories for Japan's Honda and Denso Corporation have up-ended popular conceptions of a workforce content with the calculated injustice of the status quo.

Eyewitness accounts confirm that Chinese security forces used disproportionate force and acted with deliberate brutality during and after unprecedented Tibetan protests beginning on March 10, 2008.

China has made some strides in the fight against AIDS. But the government should be held to account for stifling the work and voices of Chinese AIDS activists and nongovernmental organizations.

The European Union should set benchmarks for human rights improvements with the Chinese government during this week’s EU-China human rights dialogue.

The fact that June 26 is both "International Day against Drug Abuse and Drug Trafficking" and "International Day in Support of Victims of Torture" has become more than a coincidence. Evidence from around the world indicates that people who use drugs are all too often victims of torture.

The Chinese government should immediately drop trumped-up charges against Karma Samdrup and investigate the serious and detailed allegations of torture in detention he and his lawyers made in court on June 22, 2010.

Pretend it didn't happen. That's apparently the strategy of the Chinese government, the World Health Organisation, and the International Olympic Committee toward China's melamine milk contamination scandal during the Beijing Olympics.