Amnesty International report highlights serious human rights abuses in China

The report documents human rights concerns in 155 countries in 2023, linking issues at the global and regional levels and anticipating implications for the future. It also provided an in-depth analysis of how human rights defenders campaigning for the rights of these communities are targeted as part of a broader repression of dissent.

Referring to human rights abuses in China, the report noted that national security is being used as a pretext to prevent the exercise of rights, including freedom of expression, association and assembly. Both online and offline discussions of many topics were subject to strict censorship. Human rights defenders were among those facing arbitrary detention and unfair trials.

According to the same report, UN experts raised new concerns that government policies and programs are contributing to the destruction of the language and culture of ethnic groups, including Tibetans.

Women's rights activists were subjected to harassment, intimidation, arbitrary detention, and unfair trials. Civic space in Hong Kong became even more limited as authorities imposed a blanket ban on peaceful protests and jailed pro-democracy activists, journalists, human rights defenders and others on national security-related charges. He also demanded the arrest of opposition activists who had fled abroad. Hong Kong courts have ruled in favor of the rights of some LGBTI people in several landmark cases.

Additionally, Chinese legal experts expressed concern that the lack of definition or scope of some of the proposed amendments would give authorities excessive powers to restrict freedoms. The government continued to systematically target human rights defenders amid efforts to crush dissent and suppress civil rights.

There were a number of cases of prosecution of lawyers, scholars, journalists, activists, and NGO workers on vaguely defined national security charges during the year. Prominent activists were sentenced to lengthy prison terms, including legal scholar Xu Xiong and human rights lawyer Ding Jiaxi, who were sentenced in April to 14 and 12 years in prison respectively after being found guilty of “subversion of state power” in 2022. Was heard, it is also mentioned in the report.

In the context of abuses against women's rights, the report cited an example in February, when authorities allowed women's and health rights defender He Fangmei to meet her lawyers for the first time after nearly two and a half years of detention. She was awaiting the verdict of a May 2022 trial on charges of “bigamy” and “picking up fights and provoking trouble” in relation to her campaign for safe vaccines and justice for children, including her daughter, whose health she believed was endangered. That it has caused damage. Unsafe vaccines. Following He Fangmei's detention, authorities reportedly placed her two young daughters in a psychiatric hospital and her son in foster care and prohibited other family members from visiting them.