Human Rights Watch

Omani courts have sentenced online activists to prison in two separate cases in February 2016 for their social media posts.

Ethiopian security forces are violently suppressing the largely peaceful protests in the Oromia region that began in November 2015. Almost daily accounts of killings and arbitrary arrests have been reported to Human Rights Watch since 2016 began.

The Tajik government is arresting, imprisoning, and torturing members of the country’s peaceful political opposition. Tajikistan’s deteriorating human rights situation worsened dramatically in the last year with the forced closure of Tajikistan’s leading opposition party, the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT) in September 2015.

The Chinese government should immediately release the five booksellers it abducted and ‘disappeared’ under the guise of law enforcement, HRW said. The five are affiliated with the Hong Kong-based Mighty Current Media, known for publishing books critical of senior Chinese leaders.

Activist Sergei Alekseenko said that one of the online posts deemed “propaganda” was reposted from another user’s account, which stated: “Children! To be gay means to be a person who is brave, strong, confident, persistent, who has a sense of dignity and self-respect.”

Civil society groups express concern over the potential for overbroad anti-extremism practices to limit free expression

Authorities arrested the men in October 2015 in connection with Facebook posts about a text, attributed to another activist, which describes the Kazakh nation in provocative terms. Authorities claimed that the posts contained signs of ‘inciting national discord.’

Authorities blocked events organized by the outspoken Moroccan Human Rights Association (AMDH), filed charges against five activists for “harming internal security” after they organized a foreign-funded workshop on citizen journalism, and systematically prohibited demonstrations by pro-independence activists in Western Sahara.