Reports

Underwater

Human Rights Impacts of a China Belt and Road Project in Cambodia

The 137-page report, “Underwater: Human Rights Impacts of a China Belt and Road Project in Cambodia,” documents economic, social, and cultural rights violations resulting from the Lower Sesan 2 dam’s displacement of nearly 5,000 people whose families had lived in the area for generations, as well as impacts on the livelihoods of tens of thousands of others upstream and downstream. Cambodian authorities and company officials improperly consulted with affected communities before the project’s start and largely ignored their concerns. Many were coerced into accepting inadequate compensation for lost property and income, provided with poor housing and services at resettlement sites, and given no training or assistance to secure new livelihoods. Other affected communities upstream and downstream of the dam received no compensation or assistance.

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  • Chinese Orphanages

    A Follow Up

    The publication of Death By Default on January 7, 1996 was followed by several weeks of intense coverage of the report by the international news media.

  • Death By Default

    A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China’s State Orphanages

    China’s claim to guarantee the “right to subsistence” conceals a secret world of starvation, disease, and unnatural death a world into which thousands of Chinese citizens disappear each year.

  • China: Religious Persecution Persists

    In the last two years, the Chinese government has issued new directives requiring all congregations to register with religious authorities, stepped up pressure on evangelists, and tightened control on contact with foreigners and distribution of religious materials.

  • “Leaking State Secrets”: The Case of Gao Yu in China

    Gao Yu, 51, one of China’s most prominent journalists, was sentenced to six years in prison on November 10, 1994, for “illegally providing state secrets to institutions outside [China’s] borders” in a series of four articles in Mirror Monthly and Overseas Chinese Daily, both Hong Kong-based publications.

  • China: Keeping the Lid on Demands for Change

    One year after President Clinton unconditionally renewed Most Favored Nation status for China and international pressure on China to improve its human rights practices dropped off dramatically, the Chinese government continues to impose tight controls on dissent and to engage in a pattern of systematic abuse of prisoners.

  • The Three Gorges Dam in China

    Forced Resettlement, Suppression of Dissent and Labor Rights Concerns

    In April 1992, China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) formally approved the “Resolution on the Construction of the Yangtze River Three Gorges Project,” marking the conclusion of decades of controversy within the Chinese leadership in favor of supporters of the world’s biggest-ever river dam project.

  • China: Enforced Exile of Dissidents

    Government “Re-entry Blacklist” Revealed

    The existence of confidential Chinese government blacklists barring overseas-based pro-democracy and human rights activists from returning to China has long been suspected by the exiled Chinese dissident community and other concerned observers.

  • Political Prisoners in Tibet

    New lists of prisoners supplied by former inmates and smuggled out of the Tibet Autonomous Region substantially increase the known number of political prisoners in Tibet. In this report, Asia Watch and the Tibet Information Network present the cases of some 275 prisoners with all extant biographical material.

  • Off Limits

    Censorship and Corruption

    Far from thanking their critics, governments go to great lengths to silence them.