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Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin has slammed US ambassador to China Gary Locke for the remarks he made in an interview with Charlie Rose on China's recent human rights record. more ›

'Tis the season for exceptionally harsh prison sentences. China seems to have made a habit of convicting its political activists at Christmas time, and this year is no exception. In the last week, two Chinese democracy advocates, Chen Wei and Chen Xi, have been sentenced to prison terms of 9 and 10 years, respectively. And today, a couple goes on trial for campaigning against forced evictions. more ›

In a seminal speech to mark Human Rights Day which commemorates the 1948 signing of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton challenged leaders of the world to “be on the right side of history” and to recognise that "gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights". It's a moving, impassioned speech which totally earned her the standing ovation at the end, and it's worth 30 minutes of your time. Read the full transcript of the speech here. more ›

“There is an artiste; a world famous artiste who has donated the most to philantrophy causes, who is also the most misunderstood and suffered the most pain in the world. You may guess many names but actually, this one is Michael Jackson, the superstar of the United States. more ›

"Today, the West feels very shy about human rights and the political situation. They’re in need of money. But every penny they borrowed or made from China has really come as a result of how this nation sacrificed everybody’s rights. With globalization and the Internet, we all know it. Don’t pretend you don’t know it. The Western politicians—shame on them if they say they’re not responsible for this. It’s getting worse, and it will keep getting worse.” more ›

After dissident-artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未) was freed from an 81-day detention and slapped with a RMB15 million fine for tax evasion, a princely sum he has been given 15 days to cough up, his mother Ai Ying (高瑛) did what any mother would. She began looking for things to sell. Together with her other son Ai Dan (艾丹), she announced that the former residence of her husband, the poet Ai Qing (艾青), was now up for sale. more ›

It's that time of the year again -- Norway's Nobel Committee has met to decide who should be the winner of its peace prize this year. Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland says the choice has "not been particularly difficult" this time round while pundits are placing their bets on representatives of the Arab Spring revolution which swept across the Middle East earlier this year. Among the top contenders are Google executive Wael Ghonim from Egypt, and Tunisian blogger Lina Ben Mhenni. Jagland also took the opportunity to defend the decision to award last year's prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, even though that immediately led to frozen Sino-Norwegian ties and possibly made life more difficult for Liu:

"The reactions (from China) were as expected. They were not more extreme than what we expected," he said. more ›

Xinhua today trumpets a series of changes to the national code of conduct for prison inmates made by the Ministry of Justice in order to "show respect for the human rights of prison inmates". Among the changes: an end to the practise of forcing inmates to squat with both hands behind their heads, a lift on the ban on dyed hair (particularly among female inmates) and the use of execution by lethal injection to replace the firing squad (we'll still kill you but in a more humane fashion). more ›

You may remember Shanghai human rights lawyer Li Tiantian (李天天), who was given a horrifyingly humiliating interrogation of her sex life shortly after being released from three months of "disappearance" for tweeting about the Arab Spring and the Jasmine protests. more ›

Joshua Rosenzweig, the excellent blogger behind www.siweiluozi.net (on Twitter at @siweiluozi), talks with Al Jazeera about the release of Hu Jia, Ai Weiwei, and the complexity of understanding whether or not international pressure can have an impact on human rights in China: more ›

Just days after Ai Weiwei's release from prison, prominent activist Hu Jia and the four individuals who'd been taken away on account of their relationships to the artist Ai Weiwei have been released. Hu was released after completing a three and half year sentence for state subversion. His wife, Zeng Jinyan confirmed that he arrived home at 2:40am today through her Twitter account. more ›

The United Nations Human Rights Council has passed a historic resolution on human rights violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity by a vote of 23 to 19 with three abstentions, in Geneva yesterday. more ›

Chen Guangcheng, his wife and five-year-old daughter have been under informal house arrest since February 24th. On June 15th, China Aid received a letter from Chen's wife, Yuan Weijing, revealing what happened after he released a video to China Aid on Feb. 9. He had been beaten unconscious and not allowed to see a doctor. Yuan was also severely wounded. In the video, he said police threatened to beat him up or imprison him again if he spoke up. The letter says that on Feb. 18, a group of 70-80 men including the vice secretary of the Communist Party of Shuanghou Town, Zhang Jian, stormed their house and beaten the two of them for two hours, ransacked their home and restricted them from seeking medical attention. It says that Zhang Jian told them they were following orders from higher-level officials. Reuters said it couldn't verify the truth of the letter, while AFP said that reporters who tried confirming this back in February were roughed up.

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Shanghai human rights lawyer Li Tiantian (李天天), one of many activists to have 'disappeared' during the crackdown on the Jasmine protests, was recently freed on May 24 after three months of detention. more ›

The Sino-American human rights talk that happened in Beijing (which one side considered really concerning and unsatisfying while the other side felt was frank, open and constructive) seems to have had a good result for at least one dissident: human rights lawyer Teng Biao was released Friday afternoon. more ›

Apparently, now the FBI is getting involved to see who began issuing the DDOS attacks against Change.org after it put up a petition in support of Ai Weiwei. From the more ›

As to be expected nowadays, China no longer takes any official criticism of its human rights record sitting down. When the U.S. State Department released its annual human rights report on Friday, with several sections being critical of the endemic corruption and flagrant detentions of dissidents, China wasted no time coming out with its own report on how much the U.S. sucks. After all, a country still suffering from racial tensions, wealth inequality and increases in violent crime has no right to say anything about anyone else, right? more ›

Surprise! The rest of the world doesn't like China's human rights record. Human Rights Watch has released a critical report entitled "Promises Unfulfilled," concluding that the Chinese government had "violated many of the key goals of the National Human Rights Action Plan" it created for itself in April 2009 by "tightening restrictions on rights of free expression, association and assembly." HRW is urging the U.S. State Department to pressure China about it, but... well... good luck. Nobody in China believed the promises would be fulfilled anyway and, as one ex-dissident tells the Washington Post, "Americans don't really care about human rights in China." more ›

"Hong Kong is my branch -- a branch that has a purpose to serve even after the flowers have faded. It's in keeping this branch that we can look forward to more flowers blooming. Since 1997, I think the human rights situation in Hong Kong has been regressing slowly. It could be that in China, the situation has been improving slowly, and when both sides eventually meet, they can move forward together. My hope is that the regression in Hong Kong will be a little slower, and the improvement in China a little faster, so that both sides meet at a higher point." more ›