China keeps turning screw on civil liberties and free speech, says US-backed campaign group Freedom House

Report calls Beijing’s internment of Muslim Uygurs in Xinjiang ‘one of the world’s most extreme programmes of ethnic and religious persecution’

India and United States are democracies where overall freedoms have declined in the past 14 years, group says

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Freedom House says police and “pro-government thugs” in Hong Kong are to blame for repression of pro-democracy demonstrators. Photo: Reuters

Published: 1:35pm, 4 Mar 2020Updated: 1:35pm, 4 Mar 2020

Beijing’s pressure on civil liberties intensified over the past year, when censorship and surveillance reached “new extremes”, independence in academia hit “new lows”, and repression of religious and ethnic minorities did not relent, according to a new report from a democracy watchdog organisation.

Freedom House, a US government grant-funded, Washington-based non-profit, said that 2019 was the 14th consecutive year of deteriorating political rights and freedoms – notably in China – despite the rise of mass protest movements worldwide, including anti-government demonstrations in Hong Kong that called for greater political autonomy from China.

Freedom House’s annual assessment of global freedoms, which began in 1973, highlighted increasing repression by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including the use of artificial intelligence and facial recognition in surveillance, and continued persecution of ethnic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, where at least a million people were estimated to have been held in what the government called re-education camps.

“The authorities continued a years-long crackdown on independent civil society, with new arrests and criminal prosecutions of website editors, labour rights activists, and human rights lawyers, as well as greater scrutiny of foreign NGOs [non-governmental organisations],” the report said.

“The space for independent academic discussion and research reached new lows, with professors and students facing reprisals – in the form of censored writings, travel restrictions, demotions, arrests, or imprisonment – for expressing views that were deemed critical of CCP governance.”