Human Rights Archive

In the months after the storming of the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, law enforcement agencies received an avalanche of tips and witness statements claiming to have evidence that might help identify those allegedly involved in the insurrection. Many of these tips from the public were the result of online crowdsourcing and amateur detective e-sleuthing, and with their help, the FBI has arrested over 700 suspects in the year since then. The use of crowdsourced, open-source intelligence, or OSINT, to hold the Capitol rioters accountable highlights the ways in which this technique has rapidly spread in recent […]

The crackdown on political freedoms and civil liberties in Hong Kong appears to be continuing unabated, as Hong Kong residents rang in the New Year with news of the conviction of the activist Chow Hang-tung on charges of incitement, which stemmed from a June social media post calling on people to light a candle on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre last year, after police banned the annual vigil. In addition to Chow’s conviction, Stand News and Citizen News, two of Hong Kong’s independent media outlets, were forced to shutter last week, decisively narrowing what little space remains for meaningfully independent […]

In mid-December, with little forewarning, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that he would soon be visiting Mali, a country in West Africa’s Sahel region that, along with several others there, has been afflicted with rising communal violence in recent years. It seems that the surprise Macron trip was conceived in order to serve multiple goals. Foremost was the desire to call Mali’s interim leader, who took power in a military coup last May, to heel, and get him to commit to a calendar for democratic elections early in 2022. By the same token, Macron surely also wanted to personally warn […]

In late 2018, a violent attack in Indonesia brought sudden, global attention to West Papua, a region whose fight for independence was by then decades old. The attack targeted construction workers who were building a stretch of the controversial Trans-Papua highway, a project the central Indonesian government has said will improve quality of life, but that many locals oppose. By the end, 17 civilians and Indonesian military members had been killed; a separatist militant group, the National Liberation Army of West Papua, later claimed responsibility.  It was the deadliest attack Indonesia had seen for several years—and it was a sign of […]

What would it take to transform the way countries in the Middle East are governed? That question has taken on added urgency over the past year, in which we’ve seen stark new tests of competing theories of power and change in the Middle East. The region’s reformers and despots are still engaged in a struggle over the central purpose of government: Should the state provide social goods and services—including security—as well as a sense of belonging to the governed, or is the state simply a vehicle to uphold sovereignty, as defined, personified and exploited by a country’s rulers? This bedrock […]

Antonio Guterres starts his second five-year term as United Nations secretary-general this week. He spent much of his first term navigating very difficult relations with the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump. He would like to spend the coming years overhauling the U.N. system to respond to challenges like climate change and inequality. Geopolitics may get in the way. Diplomats in New York rate Guterres as an extremely intelligent but instinctively cautious politician. He has had good reasons for caution. In addition to dealing with the mercurial Trump, Guterres has had to accommodate an increasingly influential China in the […]