Freedom House urges stronger human‑rights advocacy and sanctions against authoritarian regimes

Freedom House To human rights organizations: Human rights groups operating from the safety of democracies should be more aggressive in publicizing the plight of political prisoners. The defense of jailed dissidents was a major factor behind the rise of the modern human rights movement. Political prisoners became a lower priority as their numbers declined after the Cold War, but today there are more than a thousand in China alone, and many others in Venezuela, lran, Azerbaijan, and elsewhere. It is past time for the phrase “prisoner of conscience’ to again become an important part of our regular political vocabulary. Furthermore, human rights organizations need to develop strategies that address the varied and sophisticated methods of repression used by mod- ern authoritarians. There should be better efforts to identify individual perpetrators of abuse, document their culpability, and expose their actions. Among oth- er benefits, such work would feed into governmental mechanisms for imposing sanctions, like the United States’ Global Magnitsky Human Rights Account- ability Act, which allows visa bans and asset freezes for foreign officials who are personally involved in egregious human rights violations. To the free world: All democratic governments should make support for civil society in authoritarian and illiberal environments a bigger priority. This is espe- cially urgent given that laws and regulations designed to neutralize nongovernmental organizations, which were first adopted by Russia, are now being taken up in countries like Hungary and Poland. Democracies will also have to push back against Chinese censorship. The sheer size of China's econo- my gives Beijing the clout to insist on unreasonable, nonreciprocal, and often antidemocratic concessions 1. “Big Data, Meet Big Brother: China Invents the Digital Totalitarian S from trading partners, the most prominent of which is the state's right to determine what its people can read, watch, or circulate via social media. The Chinese leadership expects the rest of the world to accept its brand of censorship as the normal state of affairs in China, and it is increasingly extending its demands beyond its borders, affecting the information available to global audiences. Chinese censorship practices should be challenged at international forums and in bilateral meetings. Demo- cratic governments should speak out when their own academics, artists, media companies, and corpora- tions are subjected to censorship or blocking by the Chinese authorities. As long as Beijing maintains its current policies, democracies should take measures to prevent their own media, entertainment, and other information-related corporations from falling under the control of Chinese companies that support or benefit from censorship. Finally, the free world must keep faith with states whose democratic goals are under threat from large and aggressive authoritarian powers. A prime example is Ukraine. That country represents the absolute front line in the global struggle for freedom. Building democracy in an inhospitable neighborhood is always difficult, particularly when your most powerful neigh- bor is determined to steal your land and wreck your home. Kyiv has made impressive strides; indeed, it has gone much further along the democratic path than it did after the Orange Revolution in 2005. But it still has hard work ahead, and it remains in serious danger. A positive outcome in Ukraine would not by itself erase the broader gains secured by the world’s autocrats over the past decade, but it would be a pivotal defeat for their campaign to sow chaos and disunity among those who still live or aspire to live in freedom. tate,” Economist, December 17, 2016, http://www.economist. com/news/briefing/21711902-worrying-implications-its-social-credit-project-china-invents-digital-totalitarian. 2. Feliz Solomon, “Vladimir Putin Just Signed Off on the Partial Decriminalization of Domestic Abuse in Russia,” Time, February 8, 2017, http://time.com/4663532/russia-putin-decriminalize-domestic-abuse/. www.freedomhouse.org 61 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019295