Daily Brief Audio Series
Today marks two decades since the Andijan Massacre in Uzbekistan. Along with the survivors, we remember the victims – as well as the international community’s fecklessness in the ensuing years.
What happened that day has been well-documented. People had been protesting the trial of popular local businessmen. On May 13, after armed men broke the businessmen out of prison, a mass gathering took place. People took to the street to complain about dire economic conditions and repression in the country.
Authorities responded to their complaints with bullets. Hundreds were slaughtered. Some said 750. Some said more. No one believed the government estimate of less than 200.
Perhaps no one will ever know the true number. The Uzbek government rejected calls for an independent inquiry, and to this day, it denies the full extent of the Andijan Massacre.
What is known for sure is that, in the aftermath, authorities rounded up anyone and everyone they imagined had connections to the protests – or were witnesses to their mass murder. Hundreds were forced to flee the country. Authorities continued their hunt abroad, and at home, they tyrannized the families of those who fled for years.
A political crackdown descended on the country. Human rights defenders and journalists were sent to Uzbek prisons, well-known for torture.
In the wake of the massacre, the EU and US were quick to react, condemning the killings and calling for an independent investigation. But they soon, embarrassingly soon, backed down.
The EU’s targeted sanctions on key individuals behind the massacre were scrapped in 2008. Strongest pressure within the bloc came from Germany, with a military base in Uzbekistan, used to support operations in next-door Afghanistan.
Similar considerations also led to the collapse of Washington’s initial resolve: a US military base in Uzbekistan.
This “realpolitik” – that is, a willingness to work with mass murderers – seems not only immoral but also rather pointless today. From the perspective of 2025, with the Taliban back in power in Afghanistan, was supporting a brutal dictatorship in Uzbekistan really worth it?
Today, Uzbekistan has undergone a few changes, but overall, patterns persist. A new president showed some early signs of reform. Some political prisoners were released. But hopes have turned out to be mostly a mirage.
Authorities still attack freedom of expression. They still target activists and journalists. Torture still happens, and the torturers still get away with it.
Little seems to have improved in how security forces respond to large-scale public protests either. When demonstrations broke out in the Karakalpakstan region in 2022, authorities used lethal force against them. Nearly two dozen were killed. Then, as before with the Andijan Massacre, authorities blamed and punished the alleged organizers.
Today, twenty years on, we don’t remember the Andijan Massacre because it’s long past. We remember it because it’s still with us, in the present.
When I was a little boy and my friend and I got caught doing something dangerous, I would tell my mother: “But Paul did it first.”
She’d always reply: “And if Paul jumped off a bridge first, would you jump, too?”
If only my mother were still around to talk to Mr. Trump.
His administration’s apparent plan to send migrants to Libya is as unoriginal as it is dangerous. He wouldn’t be the first to jump off this bridge.
For years, the European Union and member states have cooperated with abusive Libyan Coast Guard forces. They’ve been providing them with supplies, technical support, and aerial surveillance. The aim is to help them intercept Europe-bound migrants at sea.
Migrants and asylum seekers who are then returned to Libya with the EU’s support face horrific conditions in detention. Overcrowding, lack of food and water, forced labor, exploitation of children, beatings, rape, and torture are all well-documented.
As Human Rights Watch expert Hanan Salah succinctly puts it, Libya’s detention centers are “hellholes.”
That the EU and member states are complicit in sending people to such hellholes is appalling.
And now, it seems, the US wants to do it, too?
There have been numerous media reports to that effect, citing Trump administration officials. However, the situation isn’t entirely clear.
Various authorities in fractured Libya have denied any deal with the US.
On Wednesday, when asked about the plans, Trump said: “I don’t know.”
That same day, a US judge ruled the government cannot immediately proceed with deporting people to Libya.
Then, on Friday, reportsemerged that detained migrants in Texas had apparently almost been sent to the north African country. They’d been bussed to a military airfield on Wednesday, where they were told they were about to be deported to Libya.
They waited on the tarmac for hours, but the Libya destination – if that’s what it was – somehow fell through. They were bussed back to the detention center instead.
It’s hard to say if what happened actually represents second thoughts by the US administration or not. After all, under Trump, authorities have been carrying out abusive mass deportations to other countries, like El Salvador and Panama.
It would be nice to imagine the administration has come to its senses about deportations to Libya – that they took a conscious decision not to jump off the same dangerous bridge as the EU. Perhaps, more realistically, the US government is simply obeying the court order.
Either way though, for the moment at least, it’s a rare bit of welcome news.
No government should be complicit in sending people to hellholes in Libya.
When Human Rights Watch researchers interview victims and witnesses of abuses, the interviewees often ask to remain anonymous. You can understand why. They’re living in fear – justified fear – of the consequences that could result from going public with their information.
You might not expect journalists to have such concerns. After all, they’re in the public eye sharing information under their own names every day. Or, at least, you might not expect it from journalists in a European Union member state. They’re supposedly living in a system that upholds democratic values and human rights, like freedom of speech.
Perhaps then the most revealing point in our new report on media freedom in Greece is that so few journalists we talked to were willing to be identified. They fear reprisals. And understandably so.
Greece is in a media freedom crisis today. It’s also a rule-of-law crisis and a threat to democracy.
Since the current government took office in July 2019, the environment for independent news reporting has become increasingly hostile. Our new research documents harassment by government officials, as well as intimidation, surveillance, and abusive lawsuits.
Arguably the most well-known example was from 2022, when the government was strongly suspected to have used Predator spyware to target journalists, and others.
But that was hardly an isolated case.
Journalists described to us – again, mostly anonymously – their evidence or strong suspicion of state surveillance. Some told us how they were being targeted with spyware. Others cited more old-fashioned tools, like wiretaps.
Such actions and threats by the government not only raise serious concerns regarding privacy and freedom of expression. They also send a chill through reporting.
How can journalists do their job of digging up information, when both journalists and their sources have to worry about who’s listening?
This grim situation is not helped by the high concentration of private media ownership in Greece. A few powerful individuals, many with ties to the governing party, control many media outlets.
As far as public media go, the situation is just as bad if not worse. The government has undermined the independence of both the state broadcaster and state news agency.
Another major concern is the weaponization of the legal system against journalists. This is done primarily through abusive lawsuits, a form of retaliation, often called SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation).
The threat of a SLAPP, along with all the other harassment and intimidation, leads journalists to pull their punches. Self-censorship is widespread.
The public is the ultimate victim here. Their right to information is shot through with holes. Democracy suffers.
None of this is how things should be, of course – especially in a member state of the European Union, pledged to uphold democratic values and human rights.
The European Commission has a responsibility to ensure these core values are upheld. It needs to get more involved to help roll back Greece’s media crisis.
Journalists should never be afraid to speak.
Whining about “Woke” Warps Washington, Daily Brief May 7, 2025
Daily Brief, May 7, 2025.
Whenever an equal rights movement enjoys some success, it’s a reason for everyone to celebrate.
Some folks, however, mistakenly see rights as a zero-sum game in society. If there’s progress towards equal rights, they think they are somehow losing their rights. Support for legal equality, in their view, isn’t other people being lifted up but them being pulled down.
The feeling is clearly misplaced. Equal treatment under the law is good for everyone.
However, such resentment can nonetheless be a powerful political force, especially when it’s whipped up by shouty heads on big and small screens year after year. It’s a backlash that can have damaging results, threatening to undo hard-won, earlier progress.
What’s happening today at the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice offers an example.
It’s been one of the most effective and enduring institutions to emerge from the Civil Rights Movement in the US. It was born from Black Americans’ struggle to end Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation for decades after slavery.
The Civil Rights Division has long served as a federal check against systemic discrimination at state and local levels. It enforces federal civil rights laws in things like housing, education, policing, employment, and voting. Its goal has been to protect people from discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, disability, national origin, and so on.
The Trump administration has launched a reckless assault on the Civil Rights Division. Over the past few months, it’s been attempting to remake the department to serve its ideological agenda.
That agenda is, essentially, an anti-equality backlash. It’s steeped in racism and encouraged by the on-screen shouty heads, of which Trump has been one of the shoutiest.
Under the new director of the Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, the institution is shifting focus. It’s moving away from defending the rights of marginalized groups to targeting what the administration describes as “woke ideology.”
Of course, “woke ideology” is never defined, but at the very least, it’s a code phrase Americans understand well, particularly in racial terms. Anyone who supports equal rights is “woke.” Undoing this “woke ideology” means pushing the US back in time, perhaps to when racial discrimination was legal.
Early steps at the Civil Rights Division this year move the country in that ugly direction.
In a new dispatch, Human Rights Watch expert Trey Walk describes how the administration has removed senior civil servants working in the voting rights section. It has also ordered attorneys to abandon voting rights cases.
This is a government body that should be enforcing federal laws. It should be protecting people against voter suppression, racial discrimination, and police misconduct.
Instead, it’s aiming to dismantle civil and human rights protections.
And it’s happening in no small part because some people sadly fear equality.
The death of Viktoriia Roshchyna, the 27-year-old Ukrainian investigative journalist, is as straightforward as it is horrific.
Russia disappeared her. Russia tortured her. Russia then returned her mutilated body to Ukraine.
The details of the case only add to the horror.
In August 2023, Roshchyna went missing in the Russian-occupied part of the Zaporizka region of Ukraine. No one heard anything from her until a year later, in August 2024, when she called her parents from Russian custody.
It was the one and only time they heard from their daughter after her disappearance.
In October 2024, her parents received a three-line communication from Russian authorities. It said their daughter had died a month earlier. There was no information about the circumstances of her death.
Then, just a few days ago, the grisly particulars finally began to emerge.
Last week, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office reported Roshchyna’s body had been identified among those of Ukrainian servicemen returned to Ukraine in February. A body bag labeled “unknown male” contained a severely emaciated female body. A tag attached to the leg had the name “Roshchyna.” DNA analysis confirmed with 99% certainty it was her.
A forensic examination found numerous signs consistent with torture. There was bruising, a broken rib, and “possible signs of electrocution.”
An investigation by Ukrainian and international media uncovered further details. It found Roshchyna had been detained for four months in the Russia-occupied Ukrainian city of Melitopol’. There, she was held incommunicado and tortured with electric shocks.
She was then transferred to a detention facility in Taganrog, Russia. The place is notorious for torturing both Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilian detainees. It’s known as “hell on earth.”
Russia’s vile treatment of Viktoriia Roshchyna is appallingly typical behavior for Russian forces.
Human Rights Watch and other groups have extensively documented enforced disappearances and torture by Russian forces in Ukraine. We’ve also catalogued how Russia has unlawfully transferred detainees to facilities inside Russia, where they were tortured.
In March 2025, a United Nations investigation concluded Russian authorities’ use of torture and enforced disappearances amount to crimes against humanity. They called it “part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population and pursuant to a coordinated state policy.”
Today, much of the talk around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is focused on the possibility of negotiations to pause, perhaps even end, the war.
But as these events unfold, the world needs to make sure at least two things aren’t forgotten.
First, there should never be any kind of amnesty for grave crimes, like torture. Ceasefire or no ceasefire, peace deal or no peace deal, the perpetrators should be brought to justice.
Second, any talks should prioritize the immediate release of thousands of Ukrainian civilians unlawfully held by Russia.
As long as they remain in Russian detention, they face torture. Russia’s barbaric treatment of Viktoriia Roshchyna and many others makes that all too clear.