Peng Shuai Emerges at Olympics: Daily Brief

As Chinese athlete Peng Shuai emerged again during the opening weekend of the Beijing Winter Olympics for a "controlled interview" with French sports magazine L'Equipe and a dinner with International Olympic Committee (IOC) officials, the world cannot know what surveillance, coercion, or duress is being applied to her or what she would say if she lived in a country where voices are not systematically silenced. But we do know that no Beijing-supervised interviews, or meetings with officials can mask the Chinese government’s ugly repression of activists, journalists, and athletes. Peng Shuai, who accused a senior official in the China Communist Party of sexual abuse in a social media post published and quickly removed in November, "may or may not be saying what she actually thinks — we simply don’t know," comments Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch. International organizations such as the IOC and media outlets like L'Equipe "should think twice before engaging with her. Don’t ask a person how she feels knowing she can’t speak freely."

The opening ceremony in Beijing on Friday marked another troubling Winter Olympics low. One of the final two athletes who lit the Olympic torch is from Xinjiang, where the Xi Jinping regime is committing crimes against humanity.

A four-year trial in the Democratic Republic of Congo has failed to uncover the full truth about the 2017 murders of two United Nations investigators, Zaida Catalán and Michael Sharp, and the fate of their Congolese interpreter and motorbike drivers. Despite UN assistance, the court ignored leads pointing to the involvement of senior Congolese officials. The United Nations, the United States, and Sweden should urgently open a credible international inquiry into the killings and the role of Congolese officials. “Throughout the four-year trial, the prosecution never examined who planned and ordered the killing of the UN experts,” said Thomas Fessy, senior Congo researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The UN, US, and Sweden should acknowledge Congo’s failure to adequately investigate this crime and urgently lead a new and credible international inquiry into state responsibility for the murders.”

The Pegasus spyware scandal is expanding each day it seems. "This is an earthquake", said a government minister after news broke that the police in Israel has used Pegasus to hack the phones of public figures, including protest leaders, journalists, government employees and associates of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Calls to urgently regulate the worldwide surveillance industry are gaining strength. Human Rights Watch has also been the target of Pegasus attacks. Lama Fakih, Crisis and Conflict director and head of the Beirut office at HRW, was targeted with Pegasus spyware five times between April and August 2021. Pegasus is developed and sold by the Israel-based company NSO Group. The software is surreptitiously introduced on people’s mobile phones. Once Pegasus is on the device, the client is able to turn it into a powerful surveillance tool by gaining complete access to its camera, calls, media, microphone, email, text messages, and other functions, enabling surveillance of the person targeted and their contacts.

It is important that the United States military took such care to investigate the bombing in Kabul that killed US service members. Their families deserve that transparency and to understand how their loved ones were lost. It’s past time for the US military to offer the same care when addressing civilian harm.

Russian authorities have assigned “state system” status to the country’s uniform biometric database. The system aims to confirm identity in online banking and primarily consisted of bank clients’ facial images and voice samples. The new status (established on December 30) might appear to be a formality — in fact, it shows that the government is seizing ever-more control over biometric data of everyone resident in Russia. This carries serious risks for their rights. 

And HRW just published a new report on Sri Lanka's discredited Prevention of Terrorism Act. The authorities are using it to commit abuses such as prolonged arbitrary detention and torture. The European Union, other trading partners, and donors, should press for time-bound action to repeal the abusive law and reject the government’s proposed amendments, which would not end widespread abuses.