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Sviatlana Tikhanouvskaya, a Belarusian opposition leader and a 2020 presidential candidate, said in a tweet that Protasevich faced the death penalty.

Protasevich's detention came soon after the May 18 raid and shutdown of another major online media outlet, Tut.by. and detentions of at least 10 of its staff, including three journalists

Belarusian authorities raided the studios of another prominent media outlet -- Belsat, a Poland-based satellite broadcaster, which has also been reporting on anti-Lukashenko protests.

Now, Pratasevich's life could be in danger and the survival of independent media as a whole is at stake. Many journalists who are not in jail fled Belarus and are trying to find ways and funding to continue journalism from abroad.

Belarus has strong political, economic and security ties with Russia, and some observers believe Russia's FSB helped Belarus' KGB in the operation to arrest Pratasevich.

Providing support to in-country and exiled media outlets, journalists, press freedom and human rights organizations is the only way to guarantee we can continue to receive objective information about media crackdowns and human rights violations in Belarus.

There was DNA evidence that connected McHugh to the girl, former prosecutor Todd Kuhnen told CNN. The victim was 14 years old and McHugh was 23 when the crime occurred, Kuhnen said. The victim also alleged that she was intoxicated when the incident occurred.

McHugh has been charged with eight federal crimes tied to the Capitol insurrection, including trespassing charges and the more serious counts of obstructing congressional proceedings and assaulting police officers with a dangerous weapon. He hasn't yet entered a plea in court.

He has been in jail since his May 27 arrest, a federal judge in the Eastern District of California ruled Tuesday that he should be detained before trial because he poses a threat to the public. His lawyers said in a court filing Thursday that they'll try again to secure his release.

At the time of the riot, McHugh was on probation for misdemeanor convictions for driving under the influence and driving with a suspended license, according to federal court documents.

McHugh has a long rap sheet of misdemeanor convictions, including multiple DUIs and trespassing offenses, according to Negin and a CNN review of California state court records. He is one of many rioters with criminal records, and he is one of a few rioters who were on probation or parole for other unrelated crimes when they went to the Capitol on January 6.

This undercuts recent false claims from some Republicans, who have whitewashed the violent attack and claimed that the rioters were well-meaning patriotic Americans with clean records. Republicans pushed this lie at a recent House hearing about Capitol security failures. Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar complained that "the FBI is fishing through homes of veterans and citizens with no criminal records" and claimed "law-abiding citizens" were being targeted.

It's painful to see 'confessions' of Raman Pratasevich. His parents believe he was tortured. This is not Raman I know. This man on Goebbels' TV is the hostage of the regime, and we must make all possible to release him and the other 460 political prisoners," Viačorka wrote, using the Belarusian spelling of his name.

Since his arrest, Protasevich has appeared multiple times in state-controlled or pro-government media. In one video posted to a pro-government social media channel, he says he "confessed" to "organizing mass riots" in Minsk -- an admission his family and supporters believe was forced.

Protasevich is well-known as a fierce critic of Lukashenko's government. He was involved in demonstrations against the regime as a teenager and was later expelled from the journalism program at Belarusian State University. He was always on the front lines of protests, according to fellow activists.

At one point, Protasevich tells the interviewer that he respects the President's refusal to bend to public criticism. "I realized that much of what Alexander Grigoryevich (Lukashenko) was criticized for was an attempt to pressure him. And in many ways he acted like a man with balls of steel despite the pressure," he said.

"I have rethought a lot of things for myself. I never want to get involved in politics anymore, in any dirty games and showdowns again. I want to hope that I can correct everything and live an ordinary peaceful life, to have a family, children, stop running away from something," he said.

Now, as President Biden, he is doubling down on that strategy once again and assigning his own vice president, Kamala Harris, the prickly challenge of carrying out his plan to commit $4 billion in a remarkably similar approach as she travels to the region Sunday.

But the numbers tell a different story. After years of the United States flooding Central America with aid, migration from the region soared in 2019 and is on the upswing once more.

Ms. Harris, who has little foreign policy experience and no history in the region, has already been criticized for not visiting the border.

The political risks are evident, including the obvious pitfalls of investing billions in a region where the president of Honduras has been linked to drug traffickers and accused of embezzling American aid money, the leader of El Salvador has been denounced for trampling democratic norms and the government of Guatemala has been criticized for persecuting officials fighting corruption.

“We’ve looked extensively at different programs that have been approached,” said Nancy McEldowney, a longtime diplomat who serves as Ms. Harris’s national security adviser.

Foreign aid is often a difficult, and at times flawed, tool for achieving American interests abroad, but it’s unclear whether there are any simple alternatives for the Biden administration.

From 2016 to 2020, 80 percent of the American-financed development projects in Central America were entrusted to American contractors, according to data provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“It’s an incredibly not-transparent situation,” said Eric Olson, an expert on foreign aid to Central America at the Seattle International Foundation. “It’s like this is a national secret.”

Even when aid money reached Guatemala in recent years, it often brought little change, according to interviews with dozens who worked with or received assistance from U.S.-financed projects in the country’s western highlands.

For decades, migration to the United States followed a pattern: Aside from some spikes in migration from Central America after civil wars or natural disasters, it was mostly single Mexicans who headed north in search of better jobs and pay.

Aid workers kept coming to deliver lots of seminars on topics in which the farmers were already well versed, they said, such as planting new varieties of coffee beans, and then left.

The U.S. government had more than 4,200 unaccompanied migrant children in its custody as of Sunday, according to a Department of Homeland Security document obtained by NPR.

The children are spending an average of 117 hours in detention facilities before being moved to more hospitable shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services — far longer than the 72 hours allowed by law.

The 16-year-old boy from Guatemala died in the care of U.S. Customs and Border Protection during the last record-breaking detention of unaccompanied minors during the Trump administration, when Sanders led the agency

Back in 2019, Long served as a detention monitor for the legal team that advocated for the children in court. She testified to Congress at the time about sick kids sleeping in cells and older children caring for younger ones.

She largely blames the Trump administration for hollowing out what little infrastructure existed to handle these cyclical flows of unaccompanied minors.But Long also raises concerns about transparency in President Biden's administration and questions why detention monitors like herself have been blocked from seeing certain areas of concerning facilities.

David Lapan, a former senior official in Trump's Department of Homeland Security, said the former president was more focused on sending a message about enforcement than caring for the children.

Sanders, the former acting CBP commissioner, quit the Trump administration in the midst of the last border crisis.He described the deaths of children on his watch as a transformational experience and now works with an organization, Glasswing International, that works to address the root causes of migration in Central America.

The situation resembles the huge wave of migrant children that filled detention centers in 2014 that preceded the harsh crackdown imposed by President Donald J. Trump. Seven years ago, Mr. Biden, the vice president at the time, traveled to Guatemala and declared that “the current situation is untenable and unsustainable.”

But his approach — to broadly reopen the nation’s borders to vulnerable children with what he hopes will be a welcoming contrast to Mr. Trump’s erection of legal and physical barriers — is already at risk from the grim realities of migration patterns that have roiled the globe for years. Sensing a change in tone and approach after Mr. Trump’s defeat, migrants are once again fleeing poverty, violence and the devastation left by hurricanes and heading north toward the United States.

For now, Mr. Biden has broken from his predecessor in not applying the pandemic emergency rule to children, meaning the United States is still responsible for caring for them until they are placed with a sponsor.

The Health and Human Services Department said in a statement that the number of children in its custody was constantly changing. The Homeland Security Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Biden, briefed on the issue last week, deployed his top administration officials to tour the facilities at the border this weekend. The administration has made disaster aid funding available to border communities, has redirected agents from the northern border to the southern border and is considering a pilot program that would place health officials at border facilities to speed up children’s search for a sponsor.

Some families are being released into the United States. Border agents have not been able to turn away migrant families in South Texas because of a change in Mexican law that bans the detention of small children.

Liberal politicians are denouncing the expansion of detention facilities and railing against the continued imposition of Trump-era rules intended to prevent the spread of the coronavirus from immigrants. And advocates for families separated at the border during Mr. Trump’s administration are pressuring the president to move faster to reunite them.

The number of migrant children in custody along the border has tripled in the past two weeks to more than 3,250, according to federal immigration agency documents obtained by The New York Times, and many of them are being held in jail-like facilities for longer than the three days allowed by law.

And Republicans are already signaling that they plan to put the consequences of Mr. Biden’s immigration agenda at the center of their efforts to retake Congress in 2022.

The moves are designed to alleviate some of the pressure the White House now faces over a situation that even allies say is becoming a crisis. It is, to a degree, a familiar place for a president to be. Biden’s predecessors had to address surges in migration at the Mexican border, too.

“The headwinds now making it more difficult are coming from both directions,” said a former Biden adviser. “It is among the hardest challenges for the federal government because the law is insufficient, the resources are insufficient, the politics are terrible on both sides usually because of misinformation.”

And they’ve signaled plans to use the issue to try to retake Congress in 2022. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy will travel to the border next week with a dozen Republican members.

“The situation is becoming untenable every day that passes without a coherent plan to address this crisis,” House Oversight Committee Republicans wrote in a letter to DHS.

“Republicans are eager to use it to not do something,” the former adviser said.

After he was sworn into office, he pleaded with immigrants to not come to the U.S. because the programs needed to handle the influx were not ready yet. Still, they’re coming.

He moved in a much more humane direction in the campaign,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said. “I thought he was trying to thread the needle well. But I think even if he had said nothing you were going to get an … effect because he wasn’t Donald Trump.”

“It’s logistics and capacity,” said an immigrant advocate who speaks to the White House. “You can’t solve this in weeks. You need months. They just need time to figure out.”

But the Biden administration has decided to let children crossing the border into the country to stay for humanitarian reasons. Nearly 9,500 unaccompanied children were detained at the border in February, up from more than 5,800 the prior month, Troy Miller, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, announced this week. Detentions of the minors more than doubled in February compared to the same month last year.

The administration last week directed shelters to return to their pre-pandemic capacities.

Trump-allied officials used the opening of such shelters to accuse the Biden administration of both hypocrisy and naivete on immigration policy, much as they did in 2014 when Obama faced a surge in migrant children at the border as well. But, in a reflection of the tug and pull he now faces, immigration advocates are worried that the current plans don’t go far enough in protecting unaccompanied minors.

security and intelligence officials have redoubled their warnings of the dangers of homegrown extremism and the way it manifests.

The faceoffs on Saturday come amid an increasingly tense environment between the police and demonstrators across Europe. Over the past year, protesters have clashed with the police during Black Lives Matter protests, anti-lockdown rallies and, in countries like France, against similar security laws.

“No E.U. country is immune to threats to democracy, and more concrete efforts are badly needed to revert worrying trends,” the Berlin-based Civil Liberties Union for Europe said in a report published last month.

“After reviewing a huge body of evidence — rather than a snapshot on social media — we found that there are some things the Met could have done better,” the leader of the inspection team, Matt Parr, said of the Metropolitan Police.

The clashes on Saturday may add to the ongoing debate about excessive force used by the country’s police, which in London have been shaken by several recent controversies.

Unlike the vigil organized last month for Ms. Everard, protests are now legal in England and Wales as long as event organizers make a risk assessment and take measures to limit the spread of the coronavirus.

Commander Ade Adelekan said in a statement Saturday night that a majority of demonstrators had adhered to social distancing rules and left when asked to by the police. But officers arrested protesters, he added, after a minority refused to comply with orders.

“We remain in the middle of a global pandemic and we have made great progress in controlling the spread of the virus,” Mr. Adelekan said. “We will not allow the selfish actions of a small number of people to put Londoners progress in jeopardy.”

When Mr. Abiy came to power, Ethiopia was among the most repressive countries for journalists in Africa, and he quickly won global praise for a series of sweeping reforms.

But Mr. Abiy’s ambitious reforms quickly ran into stiff headwinds, including opposition from regional political parties and outbreaks of ethnic violence in several restive regions. His government began to revert to the old ways, shutting down the internet during political protests and detaining journalists under laws that had been introduced by the previous government.

After Mr. Abiy began a military operation in Tigray on Nov. 4, hoping to oust a regional ruling party that had challenged his authority, press freedoms deteriorated further.

Last week, government officials confirmed that they had revoked the accreditation of Simon Marks, an Irish reporter based in Ethiopia working for The New York Times.

In a war that has already caused thousands of deaths, displaced at least two million people and led to charges of ethnic cleansing, news media coverage has become a “very sensitive” topic for the government, said Befeqadu Hailu, an Ethiopian journalist imprisoned for 18 months by the previous regime.

Mr. Marks, who works for The Times and other publications, has reported from Ethiopia since 2019.

A day earlier, Mr. Marks had returned to Addis Ababa from Tigray, where he interviewed civilians who described atrocities by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers, and women who said they suffered horrendous sexual assaults.

Officials told Mr. Marks that The Times’ coverage of Ethiopia had “caused huge diplomatic pressure” and that senior government officials had authorized the decision to cancel his papers.

The next test of Ethiopia’s openness is likely to be the June 5 election, the first for Mr. Abiy since being appointed prime minister in 2018.

In a separate case, prosecutors in Texas court alleged that a retired Air Force reservist who carried plastic zip tie-like restraints on the Senate floor may have intended to restrain lawmakers

"He loved Trump, every word. He listened to him. He felt like he was answering the call of our president," Chansley's attorney Al Watkins, appearing on CNN Thursday night, said. " My client wasn't violent. He didn't cross over any police lines. He didn't assault anyone." Watkins said Chansley also hopes for a presidential pardon.

In court, prosecutors "argued that Mr. Brock intended to use the zip-ties to restrain those he viewed as enemies -- presumably, federal lawmakers, who had moments before been evacuated from the chamber,"

said the Vice President was a "child-trafficking traitor" and went on a long diatribe about Pence, Biden and other politicians as traitors.

Prosecutors accuse Chansley of being a flight risk who can quickly raise money through non-traditional means as "one of the leaders and mascots of QAnon, a group commonly referred to as a cult (which preaches debunked and fictitious anti-government conspiracy theory)."

Prosecutors say Larry Rendell Brock, a 53-year-old retired Air Force Reserve officer who was arrested in Texas, was photographed roaming the Senate chamber clutching a white flex cuff, which is used by law enforcement to restrain or detain subjects.

Prosecutors describe those who took over the Capitol as "insurrectionists" and offer new details about Chansley's role in the violent siege last week, including that after standing at the dais where Vice President Mike Pence had stood that morning, Chansley wrote a note saying "it's only a matter of time, justice is coming.

Now-viral photos show the man prosecutors have identified as Brock sporting a military helmet, green tactical vest and black-and-camo jacket.

A magistrate judge on Thursday released Brock to home confinement with electronic monitoring and limits on interacting with others involved in the riot and barred him from possessing guns or accessing social media.

According to court filings, prosecutors allege that Brock posted on Facebook about buying body armor and a helmet for a "civil war" and believed the US election was being certified by a "hostile governing force."

He repeated President Donald Trump's baseless assertions of election fraud.

He said he had picked the restraints off the ground and intended to give them back to a police officer.

But over the course of several days, the Mexican government dismantled the caravan, which at one point numbered about 4,000 people, using persuasion and force.

ut in the spring of 2018, a migrant caravan that formed near the southern border of Mexico and came to include upward of 1,200 people at its peak — a record at that time — got President Trump’s attention and became a volatile flash point in the immigration debate.

In 2019, Mr. Trump put further pressure on Mexico, as well as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, to crack down on illegal northbound migration, freezing American aid and threatening tariffs. Pressure on Mexico led to the deployment of thousands of Mexican security forces to help detain undocumented migrants as they traveled north.

The Trump administration also signed deals with the three Central American nations allowing the United States to send asylum seekers to those countries to apply for sanctuary there.

“They have no heart,” one Honduran migrant, Dixón Vázquez, 29, told the Agence France-Presse news service, speaking about the Guatemalan authorities. “We are risking our lives. There is no work in Honduras, especially after the two cyclones and the pandemic. We are going to hold out until they let us continue.”

While poverty, violence and government corruption appear to be the main drivers of the latest caravan, the change in American leadership this week may also be a factor. Migrants’ advocates and scholars have warned that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory over Mr. Trump could inspire a surge of migrants hopeful that his administration will significantly relax migration policy, making it easier for them to get into the country.

Mr. Biden said he would move quickly to undo the tougher restrictions on asylum enacted by the Trump administration, including a policy that has forced many asylum seekers to wait in Mexico pending the outcome of their cases.

On his first day in office, Mr. Biden plans to ask Congress for a broad overhaul of immigration laws, changes that would include a pathway to citizenship for 11 million immigrants now in the United States illegally, plus aid for damaged Central American economies and plans to help people fleeing violence.

Going by “Jay Y. Lee” in the West, he has led the Samsung conglomerate since his father was incapacitated by a 2014 heart attack. But with his father’s death in October, Mr. Lee was expected to formally take the Samsung chairmanship, a transfer he will now have to navigate from behind bars.

His father’s death triggered a hefty inheritance tax under South Korean law. It puts Mr. Lee, his mother and two sisters on the hook for more than 11 trillion South Korean won, or roughly $10 billion, to inherit the patriarch’s shares in various Samsung companies. The tax must be paid over the next five years.

The activists could face up to two years in prison if convicted on charges of offending religious sentiment and desecration of Poland’s most-revered icon, the Mother of God of Czestochowa, popularly known as the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.

A group of supporters with rainbow flags and banners reading “The Rainbow Gives No Offense” gathered outside the court.

Podlesna was arrested in an early morning police raid on her apartment in 2019. She was detained for several hours and questioned over the posters of the icon that were placed around Plock. A court later said the detention was unnecessary and ordered damages equaling some $2,000 be awarded to her.

The case has highlighted the clash over social issues in predominantly Catholic Poland.

A jazzed turnout by the pro-Trump base is vital to GOP hopes of winning the House in the 2022 midterms. But there is also a chance that a flurry of fervently pro-Trump Senate candidates in swing states could damage the party's hopes of overturning the thin Democratic majority in the chamber.

In a key impeachment test vote this week, 45 GOP senators signaled that they plan for Trump to pay no price for inciting the most heinous assault by a president on the US government in history in the Capitol riot.

In another sign of the GOP's future course, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was not censured by her party after CNN's KFile reported that she expressed supporting in recent years assassinations of Democratic leaders before she ran for Congress.

Greene, was rewarded with a plum committee assignment.

Remnants of the old GOP -- such as former George W. Bush aide Rob Portman -- who are unwilling to sign up to the unhinged populism that now drives the party of Lincoln have nowhere to go. The Ohio senator announced this week that he will not run for reelection.

But in Arkansas, former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders is wearing her wars with the Washington media in her dishonest tenure as a badge of honor to appeal to the fervidly pro-Trump base in a gubernatorial run.

And in Arizona, Oregon and Pennsylvania, anti-Trump Republicans such as Cindy McCain are being purged while Trump loyalists take prominent positions

Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is now a CNN commentator, said on "The Situation Room" that the GOP needed to move swiftly against Greene and compared the failure of leaders to honor its values with the courage shown by detained Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny.

The warning cited the presidential transition "as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives" as potential catalysts for uprisings. Those narratives were pushed for weeks by Trump and his Republican enablers in Washington and still find a home in sections of the conservative media.

The former President has long enjoyed elevated approval ratings in his party that have protected him from the consequences of his unconstitutional power grabs and failures among Republicans leaders he bullied for years.

Still, a CNN/SSRS poll published just before he left office, found however that 48% of Republicans wanted to move on from Trump while 47% hoped that he would continue to be regarded as the leader of the party.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whose presidential dreams were crushed by the former reality star in 2016, was long seen as the poster boy for a new, more optimistic and inclusive GOP. A career trajectory that now has him standing strongly with Trump and branding impeachment as all about "vengeance from the radical left" is an apt personification of the transformation Trump wrought in the party. It may also have something to do with chatter about a possible primary challenge from Ivanka Trump.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was among the most distraught Republicans over the attack on his beloved US Senate incited by Trump in his effort to thwart the constitutional transfer of power to Biden.

Another key Republican figure, former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who expertly engineered her exit from Trump's administration with the ex-President's blessing, has walked back her tame earlier criticism of Trump after the insurrection.

As the Islamic State's self-declared caliphate collapsed in Syria, tens of thousands of men, women and children who had lived in it ended up in squalid camps and crowded prisons run by the Kurdish-led militia that had partnered with the United States to defeat the jihadists.

But now that a military incursion by Turkey against Kurdish forces has set off a new wave of violence and weakened their control over the area, uncertainty has grown over the fate of the huge population of people who survived the toppling of the Islamic State and have been warehoused since then in prisons and detention camps.

their governments have instead chosen to leave them in the custody of a Kurdish-led force that lacks the resources to house, feed and protect them, much less to investigate the adults and provide the children with education and rehabilitation.

Most of their home countries have refused to take them back,

The detention crisis in northeastern Syria is a bleak byproduct of the war against the Islamic State.

Mr. Polat’s prison is a converted industrial institute that now holds more than 5,000 people. One-quarter of them are Syrians, the rest hailing from 29 other countries, including Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan, the Netherlands and the United States.

Most of the 400 men in a vast medical ward wore them. Many of them were sick or wounded. Men with metal braces holding broken bones in place lay on thin mattresses, while others shuffled to the bathroom on crutches or dragged their legs on the ground behind them. A few were so emaciated that their cheekbones stuck out and their legs were as thin as arms. When one man made the call to prayer, many of the prisoners prayed sitting down because they were too injured or ill to stand.

The Kurdish guards assumed that most of the men had been fighters and still followed the Islamic State’s ideology, but the prisoners themselves played down their roles in the world’s most fearsome terrorist organization.A Palestinian man with a broken leg said he had come to Syria because he “wanted to help.” A mechanic from Trinidad said he had not fought because he had been too busy fixing cars. A tall, muscular Russian said he had been a cook — in an elementary school.In dozens of interviews in two prisons, no one admitted to being a fighter.

The boys in prison said they received almost no services.“The situation is pretty bad here, so if they could hurry up and decide,” said a 16-year-old boy from Mauritius. “Months like this without knowing what is going to happen, people could start going crazy. They could say these guys were terrorists before with ISIS, but they are still human.”

Not only has the attempted overreach roused the people of Hong Kong; their example will be noted in Shanghai, Shenzhen and even Beijing itself. Moreover, years of progress toward the party’s cherished goal of the reabsorption of Taiwan has been derailed. Everywhere, people who might have resigned themselves to dictatorship now realize that liberty has more support than they had dared to hope.

“one document explicitly states that the purpose of the pervasive digital surveillance is ‘to prevent problems before they happen’ — in other words, to calculate who might rebel and detain them before they have a chance.”

“There’s no other place in the world where a computer can send you to an internment camp.”

Over the same period, ByteDance has flourished. Its TikTok app has been downloaded a billion times, of which nearly 100 million came from the United States, and it has a jaw-dropping valuation of $75 billion.

ByteDance has also been working with Xinjiang authorities under a program called “Xinjiang Aid,” whereby Chinese companies open subsidiaries or factories in Xinjiang and employ locals who have been detained in the camps. Its operations are centered on Hotan, an area of Xinjiang considered backward by the Communist Party and where the repression has been among the most severe.

ByteDance has been guiding and helping Xinjiang authorities and media outlets to use its news aggregation app and Douyin to “propagate and showcase Hotan’s new image,” according to the ASPI report.

Leaked documents have previously shown how ByteDance censors content that the Chinese government disapproves of, including Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong.

In the case of Huawei, which is locked in an existential battle with the Trump administration, there is evidence of extensive and direct work with Chinese security organs in Xinjiang, including helping authorities there with the “digitization requirements” of public security projects.

“Together with the Public Security Bureau, Huawei will unlock a new era of smart policing and help build a safer, smarter society,” a Xinjiang government website quoted one Huawei director as saying last year.

When the Xinjiang Public Security Department and Huawei signed the agreement to establish an “intelligent security industry” innovation lab in the regional capital of Urumqi last year, a local official said Huawei had been supplying “reliable technical support” for the department, according to the report

Huawei has also participated in a program called “Safe Xinjiang,” which the ASPI experts said was “code for a police surveillance system.”

“The Chinese tech companies in this report enjoy a highly favorable regulatory environment and are unencumbered by privacy and human rights concerns,” it concludes. Many are engaged in deeply unethical behavior in Xinjiang, where their work directly supports and enables mass human rights abuses.”

“Time and again, police officers meted out violence prior to and during arrests, even when the individual had been restrained or detained. The use of force was therefore clearly excessive, violating international human rights law,” said Nicholas Bequelin, the group’s regional direct for East and South East Asia.