China's Crackdowns: Daily Brief
China cracking down on workers, activists, and Muslims; European Schools failing on disability rights; women's rights in Tunisia; security forces implicated in abuses in Mozambique; sanctioning DR Congo; and a huge blow to academic freedom in Hungary.
The Chinese government should immediately release workers and students arbitrarily detained or forcibly disappeared during a nationwide crackdown since mid-2018. Those held include factory workers, labor activists, college students, trade union officials, and a lawyer.
Staying with China: over the past year, Human Rights Watch has documented a spiraling human rights crisis in the western region of Xinjiang. It includes the establishment of “political education” camps in which credible reports suggest that up to 1 million people are arbitrarily detained. Countries considering asylum applications from China's Turkic Muslims have to take this into account.
European Schools, a network of 13 intergovernmental schools primarily teaching children of European Union employees, do not do enough to accommodate the needs of children with disabilities, Human Rights Watch and the European Disability Forum said in a joint report released today.
Tunisia’s parliament should take the landmark step of granting women equal rights in inheritance, Human Rights Watch said today. President Beji Caid Essebsi formally submitted a draft law to parliament on November 28, 2018, asking for urgent action on the measure.
Mozambique security forces have been implicated in serious abuses while fighting an armed Islamist group in the northern province of Cabo Delgado.
Rights groups are pushing for the renewal and expansion of the European Union’s targeted sanctions against senior officials responsible for violent repression and other serious human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
New laws under the increasingly authoritarian government of Viktor Orbán have pushed Central European University from its home in Budapest, Hungary - "the first university to be forced out of a European Union nation." Orbán's ruling party, Fidesz remains part of the European People's Party umbrella group, despite straying far from fundamental democratic values.