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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, Iran, 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
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.

1. "Big Data, Meet Big Brother: China Invents the Digital Totalitarian State," 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/.

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