Daily Brief Audio Series

Every year on this day, March 10, Tibetans around the world commemorate Tibetan Uprising Day. It marks the 1959 rebellion against Chinese rule in Tibet.

But, of course, Tibetans in China can’t mark the occasion publicly. Beijing’s repression of Tibetans in their homeland is extensive. And, in fact, it’s been getting worse under Chinese President Xi Jinping.

You don’t hear much about Tibet in international news these days. In large part, this is by design – that is, by design of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. It’s a consequence of China’s increasing efforts to seal off information from the region, through intense surveillance and censorship.

It’s the part of China’s repression in Tibet that keeps the outside world from seeing all the other parts of China’s repression in Tibet.

And there are many other parts to that repression.

In Tibet, there is no freedom of expression, no freedom of association, no freedom of assembly, and no freedom of religion.

Independent civil society – that is, people peacefully organizing themselves around shared interests – simply cannot happen. The Chinese government has decimated what little Tibetan civil society remained.

It shut down Tibetan websites that promote Tibetan language and culture. It essentially forced the use of Mandarin Chinese as the medium of instruction in schools. It closed privately funded schools, even those that followed the government-approved curriculum.

In “whole-village relocation” programs, authorities have evicted tens of thousands of people en masse from their long-established villages to new government-built and managed settlements. Hundreds of thousands more were moved under “individual household relocation” schemes.

Taken all together, these repressive policies seem intended to hollow out and erase Tibetans’ unique culture, language, and identity.

And anyone who questions any of this in Tibet is risking being disappeared, being imprisoned, and/or being tortured.

The Chinese government’s abuses don’t end at its borders either. They have silenced Tibetans in Nepal and targeted those living in Western countries.

What can be done?

First, on the larger scale, governments that profess support for human rights should step up their assistance to Tibetan groups worldwide. In particular, Tibetan groups that document human rights abuses in Tibet and seek to preserve Tibetan identity and culture need support now more than ever.

Second, on the individual level, let’s all keep talking about Tibet. As with other crimes committed by China’s authorities, like crimes against humanity in Xinjiang or the Tiananmen Massacre, the Chinese government wants the world to ignore and forget its abuses in Tibet.

Every public mention, every social media post, every shared video, is a show of support – one small act of memory against forgetting.

Looking ahead to International Women’s Day on Saturday, the good news is, there has been progress in women’s rights and gender equality in many places around the world over the last century or two.

The bad news is, it’s so slow, we’re talking in terms of centuries.

A World Economic Forum report last year put the issue in stark terms. It looked at the goal of gender parity, that is the equal contribution of women and men to all dimensions of life, public and private. Obviously, we’re not there yet. While the global gender gap has been closing, it’s going to take a long, long time before there’s full parity.

At the current rate, it won’t happen until the year 2158. That’s about five generations away. Seriously?

Now, of course, the World Economic Forum’s estimate of 2158 is just one expert analysis, and it depends on various assumptions.

Their report breaks down the problem into four separate gender gaps, and progress in some is better than in others. The gap in “Health and Survival” and the gap in “Educational Attainment” have been closing more quickly than the gap in “Economic Participation and Opportunity.” The gap in “Political Empowerment” remains largest of all.

What’s more, there are regional variations around the globe. The report authors reckon gender parity might be achieved in just two or three generations in some parts of the world, but seven or more in others.

But regardless of the region, at the current rate of progress we’re still talking about generations before humanity achieves gender parity. Generations.

You won’t live to see it. Nor will your kids. Nor likely will your grandkids.

That’s just not good enough.

The reasons progress is so slow are many. However, resistance often comes from people referring to “tradition.” As if “tradition” somehow justifies inequality.

The rise of authoritarian-minded leaders – and there’s a lot of that going around these days – reinforces the pushback against the concept of equality. The rights of women and girls is often one of the first things they target.

We saw this with Poland’s last government, in the US under Trump, and with the Taliban in Afghanistan, to name just a few examples where “tradition” is used to justify enforcing inequality and denying basic freedoms.

That the World Economic Forum report shows “Political Empowerment” making the slowest progress in narrowing the gender gap speaks volumes. The issue is largely about power. Who gets to define “tradition” is about power.

The self-serving logic of those preventing progress is essentially, “In our society, we men have power and you women don’t. That’s our society’s tradition.”

Oh, well, that’s convenient for you guys, isn’t it?

And wherever you have significant power imbalances, of course, you’re more likely to see human rights abuses.

Asking people to wait till the year 2158 for basic equality is ridiculous. The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is “Accelerate Action” for gender equality.

I can’t think of a better message.

In human rights work, we say what needs to be said. Sometimes, we say it for those who are unable to speak out at the moment – or speak at all anymore.

Yet, sometimes, it seems as if we shouldn’t have to say what we say. What we’re saying seems so fundamental, so obvious, that no one should have to say it at all.

For example…

We shouldn’t have to say to Australia, “don’t jail ten-year-old kids.” That’s should be clear enough to anyone.

We shouldn’t have to say to the European Union, “don’t send refugees to places where you know they’ll be tortured.” Again, obvious stuff.

We shouldn’t have to say to Israel, “don’t starve children.”

We shouldn’t have to say to the US, the UK, Germany, and Iran: “don’t keep sending weapons to warring parties committing atrocities.”

We shouldn’t have to say to Rwanda, “stop torturing people.”

We shouldn’t have to say to the Taliban in Afghanistan, “your invented ‘tradition’ is no excuse for horrific abuses.”

We shouldn’t have to remind global leaders on trade junkets that China is committing crimes against humanity in Xinjiang.

We shouldn’t have to explain to anyone that we all need a habitable planet to live on.

We shouldn’t have to say to Elon Musk, “don’t give Nazi-style salutes.”

We shouldn’t have to say to the Trump administration, “don’t negotiate away justice for victims of Russia’s atrocity-ridden invasion of Ukraine.”

All these things should be so obvious that no one should need to say them. Governments and government leaders should know their legal and moral obligations without being reminded.

Yet, here we are.

We face governments that often wilfully ignore their obligations to serve the powerful at the expense of the powerless. So, human rights groups and activists often have to say what is simply obvious.

It’s important that we do so. Because if no one pointed out the obvious, it would gradually become less obvious. Human rights abuses would seem not worth mentioning, become “normal.”

Yet, however common they are, human rights abuses should never be considered normal. We all need to remind those in power of the standards humanity expects every day. We need to say what has to be said – even when no one should have to say it.

The new chief administrator at a big city hospital wants to trim the hospital’s budget. Those electricity bills look pretty high, so he orders staff to go into the wards and operating rooms and unplug all the machines pending a review of what those machines do. A few weeks later, he announces his review complete: he’ll keep the machines unplugged.

Money saved and, bonus, no more of that pesky beeping.

It’s absurd, of course, yet this is essentially what team Trump has been doing with US foreign aid. And the impacts will be similarly disastrous.

First, in January, Trump ordered a suspension of all foreign assistance, pending a program-by-program review. Now, the administration says, their review is complete, and they’re keeping most of those life-saving machines unplugged.

Last week, the Trump administration announced it would terminate more than 90 percent of the programming of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). That’s the key US government agency that administers civilian foreign aid and development assistance around the world. Cuts will also include thousands of State Department foreign assistance programs.

Altogether, it totals about US$60 billion. That’s a lot of money, but it’s less than one percent of the US federal budget. US taxpayers won’t likely notice any difference.

Where these cuts will have a massive impact, however, is overseas. This move will imperil millions of people and undermine human rights globally.

In fact, the aid freeze has already been catastrophic. For example, it’s ended online university classes for Afghan women and girls. It’s stopped the provision of medicines to avoid mother-to-child transmission of HIV for hundreds of thousands of newborns. It’s stripped funding from emergency food kitchens in famine-stricken Sudan.

Cuts have also had other devastating human rights consequences around the world. Human rights fact-finding groups face closure or staff reductions. (Not Human Rights Watch, by the way. We don’t take money from any government.)

Also on the chopping block are independent media working to expose human rights abuses and corruption. Cuts will likewise hit organizations providing legal services for victims of politically motivated prosecutions in authoritarian countries like Russia, Belarus, and China.

There is no way the Trump administration did a proper review of thousands of programs like these before cutting them.

The State Department’s “review process” was rushed. It lacked necessary internal guidance. It had no methodology for public comment. Most importantly, there was no process to mitigate the risks of stopping programs abruptly or in their entirety.

Look, it’s fine to review tax-funded programs. Any new government might want to do that, and they have the authority of a recent election behind them to do so.

But there are smarter ways to review such things – like looking carefully at what those beeping hospital machines are doing before unplugging them.