Authoritarian regimes have deliberately targeted and intensified attacks against human rights and democracy advocates over the past year, according to the annual review of Human Rights Watch.
“We’ve seen the ways in which governments create a very hostile environment where human rights defenders are detained, harassed, or threatened,” Human Rights Watch program director Iain Levine tells RFE/RL. “We see very restricted regulations being imposed on NGOs. Russia perhaps is the worse country in the world for this.”
The report notes that some regimes – including Eritrea, North Korea, and Turkmenistan – are so repressive that no human rights movement can operate.
In addition to Russia and Sri Lanka, human rights monitors have been murdered in Kenya, Burundi, and Afghanistan.
Sudan and China routinely shut down human rights groups while Iran, Uzbekistan, Colombia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua openly threaten and harass dissidents and human rights defenders and other critics.
Human rights advocates confront violence in countries such as The Democratic Republic of Congo and Sri Lanka. Governments in Ethiopia and Egypt employ restrictive regulations to frustrate or paralyze nongovernmental organizations.
Other states resort to disbarring lawyers, or using faked criminal charges – often faked from staged attacks (Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan), or criminal libel laws (as in Russia and Azerbaijan) to silence dissidents.
[...] over the administration’s treatment of human rights issues surfaces, Democracy Digest is reporting on Human Rights Watch’s annual report which indicates that authoritative regimes “have [...]