Hong Kong
On November 19, 45 prodemocracy activists were sentenced to long prison terms in a massive crackdown under the 2020 National Security Law. The activists were charged with conspiring to commit subversion for organizing an unofficial primary for the 2020 Legislative Council elections. Gwyneth Ho, a former reporter from the now-defunct Stand News, was one of the candidates in the primary and received seven years in prison. Translated excerpts from a statement she posted on Facebook the day of the sentencing appear below:
The Hong Kong democratic movement of 2019 is renowned for its impressive arsenal of tactics, combined with the creative use of technological platforms. These tactics traveled across social media, were transplanted into other movements, and bloomed anew. But what holds people together and makes all the creativity possible lies beyond technology or tactics. . . .
People are engaged. They are eager to connect with each other. Injustice and oppression, once witnessed, together with bravery and determination, once felt, bred an unstoppable urge to express oneself politically and to be part of the struggle; but it didn’t turn into a homogenizing essentialism. Learning from the failures of past movements, people made extra efforts to communicate and incorporate diverse ideas. We did not avoid lengthy, difficult conversations, even amid imminent violence, with rubber bullets flying over our heads. We were adamantly leaderless, each taking our own initiatives and emphasizing individual and equal contributions to the movement. We remained vigilant against disinformation, careful not to let rumors tear the movement apart from within.
Decentralization unleashed a political momentum unseen in Hong Kong and revealed the city’s exciting diversity, which had previously been constrained by traditional organizational structures. Accustomed to critical and intense political debate, people in Hong Kong only needed to overcome their hesitation about whether their actions mattered to emerge as their own initiators of creative new ways of struggle. They reformed connections into more direct, efficient, and inclusive networks of activism.
When social institutions crumbled one after another around us, we rose above fear and emerged as a genuine civil society, each living out the true meaning of citizenship. Though democracy was denied at various institutional levels, we built one from the bottom up. . . .
It’s not so much hope for a better future that drives the movement, because hope has always been scarce when you’re a city of seven million facing a superpower, but that even if our vision of the future is different, we trust each other, we can rely on each other to do our best. We trust, we act, we can create. All become one, united in our differences.
It was only natural that such a collective would demand to be heard and recognized in a way that the regime had to respond to. When the regime closed in and took away the people’s right to protest, we turned to the alternative path of elections.
I ran in the last free and fair election in Hong Kong. For that, I was prosecuted. . . . I pleaded not guilty to defend the political expression of 610,000 Hong Kong people, which the regime is trying to distort and reduce into a conspiracy of 47 foreign-brainwashed, faithless pawns, with life imprisonment on the table.
The situation is dire, yet when going into the details, it becomes a bit comical: The unforgivably evil subversive act of the accused was aiming for a parliamentary majority with the power to veto the annual budget. Following such logic, one may as well claim that democracies around the world suffer subversion attempts every four to six years. In a 1984-esque reality, though, democratization — or just calling for it — amounts to subversion of state power. Makes perfect sense. . . .
Our true crime for Beijing is that we were not content with playing along in manipulated elections. We organized ourselves to rise above partisan fragmentation, came together, and attempted to break through. We dared to reach for actual power to hold the government accountable. Even though it was enshrined as a right of the people under the Basic Law, Beijing never planned to see it actualized.
We dared to confront the regime with the question: Will democracy ever be possible within such a structure? The answer was a complete crackdown on all fronts of society.
Prosecuting democratic politicians and activists across the spectrum, the case was seen as the turning point at which Hong Kong became a lost cause. People were scared into silence and forced to give up hope for democracy in Hong Kong. . . .
When the regime’s rule seemed infallible and change was nowhere in sight, why does one still choose to fight despite certain conviction?
The narrative put forward by the prosecution is not just a distortion of facts or a threat to the larger public. It goes much deeper — they are forcing the accused into self-denial of their lived experiences. That genuine solidarity was just a delusion. That the bonds, the togetherness, the honest conversations among people so different yet so connected, cannot be real after all. That the difficult co-building of a collective united in difference with a shared vision for a better future was just a utopian dream.
But no. They are not just idealistic dreams but realities that I have lived through. I choose to fight to prove that such connections are not only possible but have actually been lived out and continue to live on. The only delusion here is the belief that brutal oppression can ever deny their existence.
It is not a responsibility nor moral obligation. It is the strong urge within me to do justice to what I witnessed and experienced, for they constitute part of me and define who I was. And I am now going to define who I am.
I stand alone confronting these accusations, not as an individual, but as one of all those who have ever stood in the streets and raised their voices to demand autonomy for the city. As well as all those who have ever stood in the same position before unjust courts anywhere in the world. . . .
Today, no democracy is immune to the crisis of legitimacy that results from a deficit of public trust. Calls for the “orderly” and “efficient” rule of authoritarianism are growing inexorably. News of fruitless movements and the continued plight of persecuted freedom fighters in distant, hopeless places is certainly discouraging.
But you can certainly help a lot. Defend and repair your own democracy. Push back against the corruption of power, restore faith in democratic values through action. Give authoritarian dictators one less example of failed democracy to justify their rule, and give freedom fighters around the world one more inspiration to continue the struggle with better alternatives. Fight on the ground most familiar and dear to you. Prove to the world at every possible moment, no matter how small, that democracy is worth fighting for.
Georgia
President Salome Zourabichvili has been at the forefront of efforts to resist the ruling, pro-Russia Georgian Dream party and its increasing autocratization. Though the party won a majority in parliamentary elections on October 26, the opposition and international observers reported irregularities and alleged Russian interference. President Zourabichvili gave this speech on October 28 denouncing the election results, excerpted below:
I want to tell . . . those of you who are here today — you did not lose the elections! Your vote was stolen, and they tried to steal your future as well. But no one has the right to do that, and you will not allow it. . . .
I will stand with you to the very end on this European path until we reach the gates of Europe — not a dream but as a reality and our future. We have no alternative, and there is nothing else we wish to leave to future generations but independence, freedom, European identity, and this Georgian identity that we carry with us, which is so precious. . . .
A complete picture must be drawn of how this massive, systematic theft of votes took place — this unprecedented, preplanned operation that robbed us of our votes, our parliament, and our constitution. We must keep working to present these findings and demand their enforcement.
This is just the first stage. . . .
We are united — no one will accept these unjust results. Together, peacefully, as we are today, we will defend what is ours: your constitutional right to have your vote respected. For us — and for me personally — the only thing we have is the voice of the people, the voice of the nation, which we must uphold. And we will — I am sure of it!
This is no time for pessimism, giving up, or surrender. It is time to remain calm and determined, defending every vote wherever it was cast.
A large number of votes was also stolen from the diaspora. The votes that reached the precincts clearly show the will of the Georgian people, although many were miscounted to manipulate the final outcome that was written here. The results they wrote down will not be the final ones — we will achieve the truth together.
Thank you all for everything you have done during these days and for what we have achieved together. . . .
This is not some artificial unity, but today, just as yesterday, [the opposition political parties] are united on one thing: the Georgian Charter and our European path — our only way forward. No matter which party you voted for . . . you voted for Europe, for the future, and for Georgia.
Egypt
Alaa Abd el-Fattah is a British-Egyptian coder, blogger, and activist who rose to prominence during the 2011 Arab uprisings. He was arrested in 2019 and sentenced to five years in prison for “spreading false news.” While in prison, he suffered beatings, torture, and other inhumane treatment. His sentence should have ended in September 2024, but as of this writing he has not been released. On October 10, he was named Writer of Courage and joint recipient of the 2024 PEN Pinter Prize. Lina Attalah accepted the award and gave this speech on his behalf. Excerpts follow:
I met Alaa for the first time at a protest calling for the independence of the judiciary in 2006. We were in our twenties. He was effervescently protesting with his whole body, jumping up and down like fire. Shortly after, he was pulled by several cops to a police truck. Judging from the scene, he seemed to be enacting a bodily resistance as he was dragged by the police. We always smile when we remember how our first physical encounter is one where his full presence is being actively negated by the police. We laugh at how unflattering the scene was for a first meeting. . . .
When the Tunisian revolution erupted in December 2010, I was with Alaa in Pretoria, South Africa. He had then moved there to work with localisation software . . . he wanted to see an internet where Arabic content flowed seamlessly as though it was its native language; the internet being, back then, a possible site for an embodied universality. . . . I cut my trip short to rush back home, get a visa, and go to Tunisia — but the wave of Arab revolutions was moving faster than flights — and Egypt’s own revolution broke out on 25 January. I was beaten by the police, who broke my glasses. I wrote to Alaa that day about how he had missed an unflattering scene of me being beaten up and losing a shoe and, most importantly, my glasses — and my vision with them. But we agreed that something new was emerging in the blur.
A few days later, Alaa would pack and come back home; at the time, home was Tahrir Square. Days after, the president had fallen, the government had fallen, the parliament had fallen, the constitution had fallen. I met Alaa in Tahrir Square: He had a list on a draft paper that he was crossing out. Revolutionary change was a laundry list in Alaa’s hands. He was striking out items, and writing out new ones that now needed attention. . . .
Alaa went on working with different formations, students, activists, journalists, techies, artists. He taught workshops on how to write a political statement as a poetic act. . . . He led meetings on how practicing politics online — as opposed to through the political party — had restored space for emotion. . . .
In the months to follow, there were many reversals to the revolutionary triumphalism that we experienced in the early days of 2011. But the ultimate reversal was in 2013: a military coup. By then, my newspaper’s management had decided to pull our funding — as an act of censorship. I became jobless. . . . I had an intuition that this was going to be the summer of unprecedented political violence and finitudes. I asked Alaa to help us build a website where we could house our displaced journalism, to at least bear witness to the coming summer of violence. He spent days and nights with his partner Manal back then, writing code for our new website. . . .
By the time our website, Mada, was up and running, the military was in power and Alaa was in prison. He finished developing our code in smuggled letters and instructions during prison visits. In the ten years that followed, there would be two active bodies of archives of the military’s violent cancelation of public politics: sustained publishing in Mada, and letters to and from Alaa.
Alaa’s handwriting in the letters is barely legible, and reading them is an exercise of deciphering. . . . It would turn into a spiritual ritual of some sort, where Alaa is summoned, and suddenly there is much more to the content we are reading. . . .
Alaa’s first years of imprisonment were marked by a determination that a voice can transcend confinement and trespass. His body was incarcerated, but his voice was fugitive. With profound depth, the kind he is ordered to summon within a prison architecture, he wrote about failure as instruction, progress as ideology, Palestine as universal politics.
In his later years of imprisonment, Alaa’s writings shifted to his own predicament as a prisoner, again universalising it to urge a solidarity embodied in a belief that this concerns us all, that we too can be prisoners like him one day. Why? Because states ultimately survive through preserving their right to enact power on our bodies. In a text he wrote in 2019, he described with graphic precision a violent account of his incarceration. He did not do it to invite us to pity him, but to understand that the Authority’s enmity with its opponents is predicated on the negation of the voice and the body. This is a moment when the political failure of the collective has returned us to the body as an ultimate site of resistance. . . .
Through years of a friendship I am so privileged to have with Alaa, I witnessed his digging into origins like a philosopher, turning his findings into political artifacts for organizing, and mobilizing like a politician, and then, essentially putting it all in our hands in codes, letters, and articles like an orator.
Alaa’s is a friendship that unleashes political imagination. He is a pedagogy that keeps giving, through words and silence. He is the ghost of spring past; he is the absentee we should all summon to presence.
China
Xu Zhiyong is a legal scholar, political activist, and founder of the New Citizens’ Movement, a network that works to promote government transparency and expose corruption. In April 2023, Xu was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for “subversion of state power.” He began a hunger strike on 4 October 2024 to protest Lunan Prison’s inhumane treatment of him. A group that advocates for Xu’s freedom wrote this open letter on November 11, the fortieth day of his hunger strike, which is excerpted below:
On 23 October, it was revealed that Xu Zhiyong began his hunger strike on 4 October to protest Lunan Prison’s illegal denial of his right to correspond with Li Qiaochu [his fiancée]. . . . Since Xu’s detention in 2020, Li has campaigned tirelessly for his freedom and, as a result, was unjustly sentenced to three years and eight months in prison. Li’s sacrifice and dedication are deeply moving to Xu, and corresponding with her is the only channel for him to maintain contact with her. However, since September, their communication has been obstructed, with Xu’s repeated attempts to restore it being blocked by the prison’s arbitrary censorship. When a prison officer recently tore up Li Qiaochu’s letter to him before his eyes, this act of deliberate humiliation and degradation drove Xu to escalate his protest to a hunger strike — a decision not made lightly but compelled by his firm desire to reclaim his dignity and the fundamental rights denied to him. . . .
Reports emerged as early as July this year detailing Lunan Prison’s illegal restrictions on Xu’s basic human rights, including psychological abuse such as placing him under constant surveillance by assigned monitors known as bao jia, which severely restrict his movements and isolate him. Over the past few months, Lunan Prison has intensified these oppressive measures. Despite grueling conditions, Xu has persisted in his resistance, though the extent of his struggle has remained hidden from public knowledge.
Now, forty days into his hunger strike, Xu’s health has undoubtedly reached a critical juncture. There are urgent questions regarding his physical condition: whether he has been subjected to forced feeding or other inhumane treatment, and if Lunan Prison has punished, coerced, or continued to abuse him. Such vital information concerning Xu Zhiyong’s safety and well-being remains hidden behind Lunan’s prison walls due to deplorable and unlawful obstructions.
In defense of his fundamental rights, Xu Zhiyong has exhausted every lawful means of protest available to him within the prison system. External support has been continuous, with statements of concern issued by various governments, human-rights organizations, and civil society groups. The Chinese government has thus far remained silent in the face of these criticisms and demands for accountability. Meanwhile, Lunan Prison — effectively acting as an instrument of repression — has denied the hunger strike, misled the public, pressured Xu’s family, and is intent on forcing this situation to fade into obscurity. At the same time, they continue to disregard their own legal violations, ignoring Xu Zhiyong’s rights and any possibility of improving his conditions of detention.
For this reason, Xu’s hunger strike urgently requires the attention of democratic governments, heads of state, international human-rights organizations, and all who advocate for justice and human dignity. . . .
Xu Zhiyong has made immense sacrifices in his fight for a better China, demonstrating tremendous courage in the face of a long prison term and relentless abuse. Humanity’s struggle for justice and freedom is unceasing, and we believe that your attention and support for Xu Zhiyong will not only stand as a defense of what is just, but also inspire change that transcends borders, religions, and political ideologies.
Nigeria
Civil society activists and young people took to the streets the first ten days of August 2024 in the #EndBadGovernance protest to demand lower taxes, policies to ensure food security, reduced government spending, and judicial reform. More than a thousand protesters were arrested, including more than a hundred minors, on charges of treason and inciting a military coup, and were being held in custody until the investigation concluded. After multiple children collapsed in the courtroom due to malnutrition, Senator Ireti Kingibe condemned their treatment in a Facebook post on November 2, excerpted below. Since this post, the minors have been released.
I condemn in the strongest terms the recent arraignment of over a hundred young boys, aged between ten and sixteen, who participated in the #EndBadGovernance protest. These minors, who bravely voiced their grievances against the unbearable hardship and hunger ravaging our land, are now being charged with treason — an offense that, if found guilty, carries the death penalty.
When did we become a nation that turns against its own children — our very hope for tomorrow? When did we lose our compassion and humanity to the extent that we humiliate, arrest, and drag young children into court for the “crime” of speaking out? This shameful prosecution of our youth is not only unjust — it is a betrayal of our humanity and an assault on our future. How can we stand idly by as the dreams of our children are crushed under the weight of oppression? This must end.
This is utterly disgraceful, and everyone involved should feel ashamed. We owe our citizens, particularly our children, not just protection from external threats but also from unjust treatment within. Children deserve quality education, better healthcare, and protection from domestic violence and abuse, not brutal treatment for exercising their constitutional rights. . . . Yet, these minors were held in maximum correctional centers for over 85 days before being charged with treason.
How have we, as leaders, stooped so low? Instead of addressing the root causes of their protest, we prosecute those who cry out against them. How can a government tasked with protecting its citizens justify holding minors in correctional centers, treating their peaceful protest as a criminal offense? When did peaceful protest — a fundamental right of citizens — become a crime in Nigeria?
Numerous videos circulating on social media and news platforms show malnourished children with visible collarbones, countable ribs, fainting, crying, hungry, sick, and, most horrifically, being manhandled.
This is not only condemnable but an absolute disgrace, and it cannot stand. I demand that every relevant authority . . . as well as the Human Rights Commission and all human-rights lawyers, urgently unite to secure the immediate and unconditional release of these minors. I also call upon all mothers and women across the nation to rise in protest against this deplorable treatment of our children. This is not the Nigeria we dreamed of; we cannot allow our future to be sacrificed in silence.
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press