Marking the 75th anniversary of the United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, human rights groups said Beijing is increasing its crackdown against dissent both within China and abroad, adding they fear that the situation in the world’s second most populated country is getting worse.
Western governments are failing to pressure China hard enough, and a more powerful country under President Xi Jinping has become more impervious to international pressure, they added.
Sophie Richardson, China observer and former China director at Human Rights Watch, said, “If you look at independent activism around the time that Xi came to power, relative to what you can see now, what is disturbingly clear is that Xi’s leadership sought to obliterate civil society and to silence dissent, not just inside the country but globally, to ensure that anybody who criticizes him and the regime has to think twice.”
On the same day, the Rome-based rights group Safeguard Defenders published a new report to mark International Human Rights Day, which alleged that in recent years, the Chinese government has stepped up its use of “collective punishment” against relatives of human rights advocates.
“Under Xi Jinping, China is increasingly unwilling to allow political targets to leave the country, slapping them and their families with exit bans, and using transnational repression methods to control the ones who make it out,” the report stated.
Citing interviews with more than a dozen rights activists and compiled media reports, the report said that from 2015 to 2022, it identified some 50 such cases, including detention, home eviction, harassment, and violent assault of activists’ family members.
This year’s International Human Rights Day, marking 75 years since the UN adopted the global foundational document for protecting the rights of every individual everywhere, comes just days after European Union leaders visited China.
