Draft of NGO Law Withheld

Cambodian authorities limit debate on a proposed law that would regulate civil groups.

Cambodia is expected to push ahead with a controversial law closely regulating nongovernmental organizations despite concerns by human rights groups that the legislation will severely restrict NGOs from operating freely within the country.

The Cambodian government has made amendments to a second draft of the law based on feedback from NGOs but has not made them public.

NGOs say they fear the third draft does not incorporate significant changes proposed in consultations with the government over the previous version of the law.

Beijing On Its Guard At Anniversary

The Chinese government is taking great pains to make sure its crackdown on Tiananmen activists is forgotten.

Twenty-two years on, Chinese authorities removed from the capital former political and military officials with first-hand knowledge of the 1989 military crackdown on Tiananmen Square protests.

Calls to the Beijing home of Bao Tong, former top Communist Party aide to late ousted premier Zhao Ziyang, went unanswered on Thursday.

Bao, who has been under house arrest since his release from a seven-year jail term in the wake of Zhao's fall, typically writes political essays marking "sensitive" anniversaries in the ruling Party's history, arguing for democratic change.

Uyghur in Chinese Custody?

Chinese officials accompany him as he is taken out of a detention center in Kazakhstan.

Chinese paramilitary police trucks drive through downtown Urumqi, July 9, 2009.

Kazakhstan is believed to have handed over to Chinese custody an ethnic Uyghur fighting deportation to Beijing after he spoke up about torture and death in Chinese jails.

Ershidin Israil, 38, was taken away from a detention center in Kazakhstan's largest city Almaty by Kazakh security officials and two Chinese police officers late on Monday, according to his lawyer,  Yuri Sergeivich Stukanov.

Municipal government officials said he would be “repatriated” to China.

The lawyer told the wife of Israil’s brother that  two Kazakh security guards, two Chinese officials and a Kazakh state prosecutor from Almaty accompanied Israil from the detention center to an unknown destination.

Huge Security Presence in Hohhot

 

Chinese security personnel at the Inner Mongolia Normal University campus in the regional capital Hohhot, May 31, 2011.

Chinese authorities have poured security personnel and armored vehicles into Inner Mongolia following region-wide protests over exploitation of grasslands and herders' rights.

"As I got on the train at Hohhot [the regional capital], the place looked like it was preparing for war," said a source in the region on Thursday. "There were special police everywhere wearing bulletproof vests."