The U.S. Department of the Treasury slapped sanctions on two companies operating out of Russia on Thursday for their alleged involvement in the exploitation of forced labor from North Korea.  According to a statement by the Treasury Department, sanctions will be imposed on Mokran LLC, a Russian construction company, and Korea Cholsan General Trading Corp., a North Korean company operating in Russia.  The move follows a 2017 U.N. Security Council resolution that required all countries to send home North Korean workers by December 22, 2019, as a means of curbing the generation of foreign currency to support North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.  According to the U.N. resolution, sanctions must be imposed on those that engage in, facilitate or are responsible for the exportation of forced labor from North Korea to generate revenue for the government of North Korea or the Workers’ Party of Korea.  FILE – U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.”North Korea has a long history of exploiting its citizens by sending them to distant countries to work in grueling conditions in order to financially support Pyongyang and its weapons programs,” said U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. “Those countries still hosting North Korean workers must send these workers home.” Today’s sanctions will force all property and interests in property of Mokran LLC and the Korea Cholsan General Trading Corp. that are in the United States or in the possession or control of any U.S. citizens to be blocked and reported to the Office of Foreign Assets Control.  According to Reuters, the United States has estimated that Pyongyang was earning more than $500 million a year from its 100,000 residents working abroad, the majority of whom were stationed in China and Russia.  
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Malaysian rubber glove makers have started paying back thousands of migrant workers for recruitment fees totaling tens of millions of dollars since the U.S. stopped importing from some of them late last year over forced labor claims.Malaysia supplies nearly 2 in every 3 pairs of disposable rubber gloves used worldwide and has seen demand for the personal protective equipment soar amid the coronavirus pandemic. Most of the factories rely on an army of migrant workers, many of whom pay recruiters hundreds or thousands of dollars for the jobs and take on crippling loans to do so.Labor advocates call it debt bondage, a prime example of modern-day slavery that can shackle workers to abusive employers for years while they pay off their debts.In September 2019, U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued a “withhold release order” against Malaysia’s WRP Asia Pacific over evidence of forced labor at its factories, blocking imports of its gloves into the U.S. The agency issued a similar order in July against two subsidiaries of Malaysia’s Top Glove, the world’s largest rubber glove maker.The U.S. Customs order against Top Glove cited debt bondage specifically.Since the orders, both companies have launched efforts to reimburse their migrant workers for the recruitment fees they paid to land their jobs. Top Glove says it has been covering the full recruitment costs of new hires since January 2019. Since the U.S. started blocking its shipments, though, it has begun reimbursing migrant workers hired before 2019.In recent months, at least three more of Malaysia’s leading glove makers not facing U.S. sanctions — Hartalega, Kossan and YTY — have announced similarly sweeping payback schemes of their own.The Malaysian Rubber Glove Manufactures Association, which represents the sector, said the companies have committed at least $61 million to the effort in all to address the U.S. forced labor claims. It did not say how many workers are due to be paid back, but Top Glove said in an August statement that it alone will be reimbursing more than 9,000.Hartalega, Top Glove, YTY and the association all turned down VOA’s requests for interviews. Kossan and WRP have not replied.Fear factorLabor rights advocates say the U.S. sanctions, and even just the fear of them, are helping push the glove makers to address one of the leading labor abuses plaguing the industry.”These companies are doing it out of fear from sanctions,” said Adrian Pereira, executive director of the North South Initiative, a local nongovernment group and a member of the Migrant Workers Right to Redress Coalition.Having investigated labor abuses in the glove sector and others for many years, he added, “I personally don’t think that these companies are doing it out of genuine care and concern for the migrant workers.”Andy Hall, another labor rights advocate, said the U.S. sanctions are “translating into real impact and real money into workers’ pockets in remediation and remedy, which is really important.”One Top Glove worker, from Bangladesh, told VOA that his first monthly installment from the company’s repayment program showed up on his August pay slip, sliding straight into his bank account. He said all Top Glove workers from Bangladesh have been promised 12 monthly installments totaling about $4,900, roughly what most of them paid recruiters to find them work in Malaysia.The glove companies have shared few details about their reimbursement plans, but the payment pledges seem to match the average recruitment fees migrant workers from each country have paid, although some may have paid more or less. The Top Glove employee said coworkers from Nepal have been promised about $1,200, roughly what most of them claim to have paid recruiters themselves.”Everyone [is] really happy getting this money,” said the worker, an electrician, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the company for speaking to the media without permission.Coming from Bangladesh, he said he poured all his savings into covering half the recruitment fee up front. He borrowed the rest and spent his first two years at Top Glove paying the loan off.With the money now pouring back, he plans to spend it on a new, two-story house he and his brother are building back home for them and their parents.”I feel really great about this. You know I [was] shocked when I heard that TG would pay us back,” he said.Real reformLabor rights groups, though, say it’s tough to judge just how much impact the U.S. import bans are having without more details on how and why the sanctions are being applied and lifted. U.S. Customs and Border Protection won’t reveal the evidence of forced labor it uses to sanction companies. When the agency lifted the import ban on WRP in March, it said the company had cleaned up its labor practices but refused to provide specifics.The U.S. law that makes the sanctions possible “really does have the potential to be one of the strongest pieces of law that can punish corporations or discourage them from profiting from forced labor in their supply chains,” said Esmeralda Lopez, legal and policy director for the International Labor Rights Forum, based in Washington.”But in terms of their effectiveness, we think that without increased transparency as to CBP’s enforcement and how that’s being done and how many times they are in fact stopping imports and … the amount, the number, the financial impact, it’s really difficult to assess,” she added.Asked about the critique, the agency told VOA it was barred by law from disclosing confidential business information and any other details that were “law enforcement sensitive” or could compromise current investigations.Advocates also say that targeted U.S. import bans are far from enough to comprehensively address debt bondage in Malaysia, which may be hosting more than 3 million migrant workers, according to the World Bank, many of them undocumented. Each withhold release order can take a year or more of investigation and, by their nature, can only be applied to companies that export to the U.S.Pereira said debt bondage remains rife in other sectors besides glove making that also lean heavily on migrant workers, including garments and agriculture, and will only be rooted out among companies and recruiters with a degree of government oversight and enforcement that he believes is still lacking.He said private-sector payback programs by companies facing or fearing U.S. sanctions were a help, but no substitute for thorough government-led reform.”It’s good,” Pereira said, “but it’s not a replacement.”The Malaysian Human Resources Ministry and its Labor Department did not reply to multiple requests for an interview.
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An internal inquiry is alleging that Australian special forces unlawfully killed more than three dozen unarmed civilians and prisoners in Afghanistan over an 11-year period.General Angus Campbell, chief of the Australian Defense Force, revealed the results of a four-year special investigation during a press conference in Canberra on Thursday.Campbell said there was credible evidence that 25 special forces personnel took part in the deaths of 39 Afghans between 2005 and 2016, all of which happened outside “the heat of battle.”The report included allegations that forces engaged in a practice called “blooding,” in which senior officers would coerce rookie members to shoot a prisoner in order to achieve the soldier’s first kill. The junior soldiers would then stage a firefight to justify their actions.Campbell said the crimes evolved out of a “self-centered warrior culture” that resulted in rules being broken, “stories concocted, lies told and prisoners killed.”The report recommended that 19 current and former soldiers be referred to Australian Federal Police for criminal investigation, and that the government offer compensation to the families of the victims. Campbell also said those accused in the killings would be referred to a special investigator for war crimes.The inquiry was prompted by a 2017 report aired by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that Australian troops had committed war crimes in Afghanistan, where they were deployed to support the 2001 U.S.-led invasion in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned the nation last week to prepare for some difficult revelations to come out of the investigation.
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The U.S. State Department and American lawmakers in the Senate are outlining the risks and opportunities in Washington’s relationship with China in two new reports.At the State Department, a report published Tuesday and described as a blueprint for the U.S. response to China’s rise as an authoritarian superpower, says Beijing’s Communist Party is facing internal vulnerabilities, frustrating its growing global ambitions.”China under the CCP is marked by a variety of vulnerabilities. These begin with the disadvantages endemic to autocracy: constraints on innovation, difficulties forming and maintaining alliances, and costs arising from internal repression,” the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning wrote in the report, titled, FILE – Medical staff treat COVID-19 coronavirus patients at a hospital in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province, March 19, 2020.Beijing has consistently rejected such criticism, insisting it has been a model global partner in trying to curb the coronavirus pandemic. China has offered foreign countries access to vaccines under development and dispatched medical teams during the early part of the pandemic to advise how to combat the virus.  But that has done little to improve Beijing’s image among Western analysts, some of whom fear a nightmare scenario where Chinese leaders will respond to domestic pressures by devoting more attention to aggressive foreign policies.In recent years, one of the CCP’s biggest fears has been so-called “Western spiritual pollution,” referring to the Western ideas of liberty, rule of law, and governance that are features of democratic governments.“Xi Jinping is cracking down on that sort of teaching in the education system, even in the business system, because it terribly fears the influence of Western ideas,” said Dan Blumenthal, director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a research group based in Washington.“Mishandling of COVID-19 is causing an international backlash against him, but Xi doesn’t back down from this pressure. In fact, he escalates,” Blumenthal added.For example, Blumenthal said during the same year that China and other countries have struggled with the health and economic impacts of COVID-19, the Chinese Communist Party got into a border skirmish with India, increased political tensions in Australia, pressured Europeans to remove any language about Chinese disinformation campaigns around COVID-19, further clamped down on Hong Kong’s more open political culture, and continued its aggressive policies in the South China Sea and mass incarceration of Uighurs in Xinjiang.FILE – Watchtowers are seen on a high-security facility near what is believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, on the outskirts of Hotan, in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, May 30, 2019.China insists that all of these policies are either internal matters that foreign governments misrepresent, or as in the case of Europe and Australia, are Beijing having legitimate policy disagreements with one of its trading partners.But Blumenthal says Beijing’s actions abroad also have a goal of shaping domestic opinion, and that could lead to dire consequences.“So the nightmare scenario is as Xi gets more frustrated, he will try to compensate with more external aggression. And that’s what we have been seeing,” said Blumenthal during a webinar on Tuesday.The State Department’s paper outlines 10 tasks for the United States to focus on in its China relationship, including strengthening its alliance system and creating new international organizations to promote democracy and human rights; cooperating with China when possible and constraining it when appropriate; as well as training a new generation of public servants who understand great-power competition with China.U.S. officials have said Washington wants a results-oriented and constructive bilateral relationship based on fairness and reciprocity.“We are ready to work with China as long as China is willing to take concrete actions to address these challenges in mutually beneficial ways,” a spokesperson told VOA.Collaboration with Europe?The Senate Foreign Relations Committee also released a report Wednesday, calling for greater collaboration between the United States and Europe on the challenges posed by China.”China has become a true systemic rival to shared American and European interests. Both sides of the Atlantic increasingly recognize this reality,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman James Risch said in an event Wednesday introducing the report.”We have to turn this agreement into action. Neither the United States, nor Europe will be able to combat these threats alone. Those who suggest that possibility are simply wrong. China is simply too large and too well-equipped,” he said.Among its recommendations, the report suggests the new Biden administration provide an opportunity for the U.S. to rejoin international organizations and prevent China from filling the void left by the lack of U.S. international participation. 
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Asian markets are mostly higher Wednesday as worries about the growing number of coronavirus infections in the United States and Europe has tempered optimism about a potentially safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine. The S&P/ASX index in Australia finished 0.5% higher.  The Shanghai Composite index and South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI index both finished up 0.2%, while the TSEC index in Taiwan gained 1.3%   Japan’s benchmark Nikkei index lost 1.1%.  In late afternoon trading, the Hang Seng index in Hong Kong is 0.4% higher, and Mumbai’s Sensex is up 0.3%. In commodities trading, gold is down 0.2%, selling at $1,880.00 per ounce.  U.S. crude oil is selling at $41.56 per barrel, up 0.3%, and Brent crude is selling at $44.00 per barrel, up 0.5%.   In futures trading, all three major U.S. indices are trending negatively. 
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As Chinese leader Xi Jinping continues to consolidate power, the Chinese Communist Party is working to include more of his writings and opinions as a mandatory part of country’s university curriculum.   Beginning in the fall 2020 semester, 37 key colleges and universities across the country offered a course, “An Overview of Socialist Thought with Chinese Characteristics in Xi Jinping’s New Era,” according to the CCP’s theoretical journal, Seeking Truth. These institutions include top universities such as Peking University and Tsinghua University.      Smaller universities across China have since echoed the call. A local news website reported on November 10 that Yantai Vocational College in Shandong province has built three teams for adding the readings to its curriculum (teaching Xi’s theory).   In many cases, the new content, commonly called “Xi Jinping Thought,” are being added to courses that already study his writings on “the four self-confidences” that he proposed in 2016. They outline core beliefs in Xi’s socialist theory, social system, culture and road, which refers to “socialist road with Chinese characteristics.”  For decades, China’s Communist Party emphasized collective leadership as power changed hands from one chosen Communist Party leader to the next. Xi has changed this approach since becoming China’s paramount leader in 2012, concentrating power and encouraging a personality cult around himself by inserting his political writings into Communist Party and government constitutions. The government even released a smartphone app teaching “Xi Jinping Thought” that it claims is one of the most popular in China.  Along with the focus on more ideological education, western news organizations are reporting that internal documents from Chinese universities show there are new efforts to track public opinion on university campuses.      In one set of documents, the Heilongjiang Institute of Architecture and Vocational Technology summarized “eight risks” for political education in universities. These eight risks include foreign non-governmental organizations stepping up contacts with students, foreign “hostile elements” promoting “street politics” activities, as well as what it called weaknesses in students’ ideology and difficulties in controlling the content of teachers’ training outside the school.     Qin Weiping, a political analyst, told VOA that taken together, these measures show how the Communist Party lacks self-confidence, and students and teachers on these campuses are not firm believers of the Communist Party’s doctrines.   “In a sense, if the CCP is really confident, it won’t spread the four confidences in the form of documents and movements across the country,” Qin said. “It reflects the deep insecurity, the urgent crisis of governance within the ruling party’s high-level ruling group. There is also doubt within the party and in society about the party’s policies and the future direction of the country.”Undergraduate students and university staff wearing face masks attend a graduation ceremony in Tsinghua University, following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease, in Beijing, China, June 23, 2020.New curriculum for liberal arts degrees      Another new Communist Party initiative at Chinese universities is aimed at modifying the current liberal arts curriculum to spread more “Xi Jinping Thought” and to “improve students’ ideological awareness and moral standards.”   On November 3, the Ministry of Education issued a Declaration on the Construction of New Liberal Arts. The declaration proposed creating a new approach for teaching philosophy and social sciences that it argues would enhance the country’s cultural soft power. This includes incorporating more of Xi’s writings and ideology into the liberal arts curriculum.   In recent years, Chinese Communist Party officials have emphasized removing “western values” from Chinese curriculum, without explicitly defining which foreign writers or ideas are objectionable.  In China’s universities, this has led some school administrators to say that some entire departments need to be restructured.    According to Chinese media reports, Xu Xianming, an official at the Ministry of Education, stressed that “liberal arts should be shifted to be under the leadership of the Chinese discourse system and out from under the leadership of the western discourse system. China’s new liberal arts doesn’t exist if the shift is not completed.”    Jia Huixuan, a retired liberal arts professor at Peking University, disagrees with this guidance.      “We at Peking University have always advocated inclusiveness and science and academic freedom,” Jia said. “Trying to put restrictions on academic activities is not wise.”      Others are more critical of the proposed changes.   “Strengthening liberal arts education may be a kind of political propaganda because the Communist Party of China’s liberal arts has been used by the regime … to strengthen the loyalty of the king’s (leadership’s) thought,” Qin said.      Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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Germany accused Russia and China on Tuesday of preventing a United Nations Security Council committee from determining whether North Korea has breached a U.N. cap on refined petroleum imports by the isolated Asian state. The Security Council has ratcheted up sanctions on North Korea since 2006 in a bid to choke funding for Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. In 2017, it imposed an annual cap of 500,000 barrels on refined petroleum imports. China and Russia are the only countries to have notified the Security Council’s North Korea sanctions committee of refined petroleum exports to Pyongyang, but they did so in tonnes instead of barrels, and the committee has been unable to agree on a conversion rate so it can determine when the cap was reached. “Despite numerous attempts — the issue has been on the agenda for no less than three years — to find an agreement on a conversion rate, Russia and China have been stalling the process,” German U.N. Ambassador Christoph Heusgen, chairman of the sanctions committee, told reporters. “While this shouldn’t be a complicated matter to solve, it has become clear that the two delegations are politicizing this topic,” Heusgen said after raising the issue behind closed doors in a formal Security Council meeting. The Russian and Chinese missions to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment. For the past three years, the United States and dozens of allies have accused North Korea of breaching the fuel cap through illicit imports and called for an immediate halt to all deliveries. However, Russia and China repeatedly prevented the sanctions committee from issuing such a statement. 
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Several leaders from 15 Asia Pacific countries, who signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) on Sunday, have praised what is being regarded as the world’s biggest trade pact. RCEP members, which include 10 ASEAN members plus China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, represent 30% of world’s population and 28% of its economy. The purpose of the partnership is to reduce taxes on the trade in goods and remove nontariff barriers.  Japanese trade minister Hiroshi Kajiyama said the deal will create a set of “free and fair economic rules.” Chinese Premier Li Keqiang described the pact as “a ray of light and hope amid the clouds.”The RCEP is widely regarded as a China-backed alternative to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which covers 11 countries around the Pacific, but not China. The agreement is a culmination of “eight years of negotiating with blood, sweat and tears,” Mohamed Azmin Ali, Malaysia’s international trade and industry minister, said.  Huge Asian Trade Pact Signed in Coup for China ASEAN members and five other Asian countries are included, but not USAfter years of deep suspicion that China would dominate the trade club, intense squabbling over trade rules, and India dropping out of the negotiations, in the end, the RCEP is a rather simple agreement focused on the trade of goods. But will the agreement enhance China’s global image at a time when Beijing is engaged in a trade war with the U.S.?  “The RCEP allows China to cast itself as a champion of globalization and multilateral cooperation. It also puts China in a better position to determine the rules governing regional trade,” said Gareth Leather, Senior Asia Economist, at Capital Economics. Beijing is relieved that the new pact does not commit members to a significant opening up of services, liberalization of government procurement, or rollback of industrial policy, demands imposed on CPTTP members, Leather suggested.The CPTPP replaced the U.S.-backed Trans-Pacific Partnership after the Trump administration walked out of it. Its members are Australia, Brunei, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. The RCEP signing has raised questions about whether it would prompt the United States, under a President Joe Biden, to return to an international trade agreement like the CPTPP instead of remaining isolated.  “Given the massive challenges on the domestic front and preexisting concerns about the unequal benefits of free trade agreements, it’s not obvious Biden will choose to join the revised CPTPP,” Matt Ferchen, head of Global China Research at the Berlin based think tank, Merics, told VOA. “Yet the signing of RCEP will be a further spur to the U.S., and presumably to India, to not be left outside looking in at the largest trade agreements in the Indo-Pacific region,” he added. Though signed with much fanfare, the RCEP leaves many thorny issues unsolved. It does not deal with trade disputes among its member countries, such as China and Australia. It focuses on the exchange of goods but does not address trade in the services sector, which is growing faster worldwide than trade in goods. “It does not address such major trade barriers as IP protection and state subsidies,” said Lester Ross, a partner in an international law firm, WilmerHale.“It is also unclear whether RCEP will have any impact on coercive trade barriers imposed by a member state against another member state, like China’s recent restrictions on certain categories of goods from Australia,” he said.  Australia’s Trade Minister Simon Birmingham sees the RCEP as an opportunity to open the trade doors that China has shut. The deal puts the ball in China’s court to abide by not only the terms but the spirit of the new trade pact, he said. Australia hopes China will relax restrictions it has imposed on imports of certain Australian goods.Australian Exporters Brace for More China Trade PainCanberra’s trade war with Beijing is intensifying with state media in Beijing reporting that seven categories of imports are to be restrictedThough RCEP had helped reduce tariffs, smaller countries in the pact, like the 10 ASEAN members, have different reasons to worry. For instance, their dependence on China might increase although it is not clear if China will buy more of their products.“Laos and Cambodia are already part of the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area, so RCEP won’t necessarily imply a major change in trade barriers with China,” Ferchen said. The ASEAN members are Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam.  “Their bigger challenges are being overly dependent both economically and geopolitically on China, especially at a time when U.S.-China strategic competition is rising in Southeast Asia and countries are being asked to choose sides,” he explained.   Chinese state media has seen in this an opportunity to pat the government’s back.  “The RCEP includes multiple U.S. allies; their agreement to the deal is an affirmation that China will remain an intrinsic economic partner for them and that the region will ultimately work and cooperate together,” CGTN, the state-owned broadcaster, said.  It would take some time before any country sees the benefits of the deal because nine of the 15 member nations have to ratify it before it takes effect.”The economic benefits of the deal might only be marginal for South East Asia, but there are some interesting trade and tariff dynamics to watch for North East Asia,” said Nick Marro at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).”Ratification will likely be tricky in national parliaments, owing to both anti-trade and anti-China sentiment,” he said.
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A Cambodian newspaper publisher who made critical comments about Prime Minister Hun Sen on Facebook has been sentenced to 18 months in prison. A Phnom Penh Municipal Court on Wednesday jailed Ros Sokhet for incitement and ordered him to pay a fine of $500 (2 million riels), said Sam Sokong, a lawyer for the journalist. Sokhet runs the Khmer-language news website Cheat Khmer. The publisher said he believes the conviction affects his freedom of expression, because the posts were his personal opinion, and has asked to appeal, the lawyer said. FILE – Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen waves to government civil servants in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Jan. 7, 2020.Article 41 of Cambodia’s constitution guarantees freedom of expression. Sokhet is the second journalist in recent weeks to be convicted of  incitement. The vaguely defined charge is often used to target detractors and critics of Hun Sen and the Cambodian government, rights groups say. In October, Sovann Rithy, who founded the social media news outlet TVFB, was convicted of incitement and given a suspended sentence, and last week Sok Oudom, who runs Rithysen Radio News Station in Kampong Chhnang province, went on trial. Rights groups have criticized the Cambodian government for using accusations of incitement to curtail press freedom.Cambodia’s Use of Incitement Law Chills Press FreedomThree arrests in as many months could make journalists fearful of reporting on critical issues, media experts sayIth Sothoeuth, media director at the Cambodian Center for Independent Media, said the recent legal actions send a threatening message to journalists working on controversial stories.  “I think the sustained conviction of journalists can be a threatening signal to other journalists who are doing their work,” Sothoeuth said.  In Sokhet’s case, the conviction relates to Facebook posts in June that accused Hun Sen of failing to help people who are in debt, and for urging the prime minister not to nominate his son as his successor, according to the media watchdogs Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders. TVFB journalist Rithy faced similar accusations when he was arrested in early April. Rithy’s charge related to his reporting on comments made by Hun Sen at a press conference in which the prime minister said that informal workers, including motorcycle taxi drivers, should sell their vehicles to buy rice because the government could not help them during the COVID-19 economic downturn. In a statement earlier this month Human Rights Watch described Rithy’s conviction as “an especially outrageous case which exemplifies Cambodia’s relentless attack on media freedoms.”  Radio station owner Oudom is accused of inciting villagers against the military. The journalist broadcast a Facebook Live report on a long-standing land dispute in Kampong Chhnang province’s Phnom Aural Wildlife Sanctuary, according to his wife, Nuth Sovanthou. Authorities accused him of “exaggerated news reporting.”  Oudom often posted stories on the Rithysen Radio News Station Facebook page about land disputes, clashes between people and police, and provincial court cases. “It is unfair for my husband,” Sovanthou said, adding that under Cambodia’s press law, journalists who publish an error should run a correction, not be arrested. Un Chanthol, the lawyer representing Oudom, denied that the journalist incited villagers. “He went to report news, not to incite,” Chanthol said. More than 50 local and international rights groups called on Cambodia earlier this month to end its attacks on free expression and to protect journalists who are critical of the government. The statement listed at least 13 journalists whom it said had faced court complaints for news coverage and said authorities had revoked four media licenses during the coronavirus pandemic for the alleged sharing of false news. 
 
“In the past years, the Cambodian government adopted a series of repressive laws that have enabled a crackdown on independent media and social media and resorted to provisions in the penal code – in particular articles 494 and 495 – to silence critical reporting and its reporters,” read the statement, referring to the criminal code provisions on incitement. In response, Cambodia’s Information Ministry said the rights groups’ statement is baseless and intended to deceive public opinion. It added that the journalists were arrested for wrongdoing. Reporters Without Borders ranks Cambodia 144th out of 180 countries, where 1 is the most free, in the 2020 World Press Freedom Index.   
 
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The head of the International Olympic Committee said he is “very confident” that spectators will be allowed to attend next year’s postponed Tokyo Olympic Summer Games — as long as they are vaccinated against COVID-19.   IOC President Thomas Bach made the pledge Monday in the Japanese capital after meeting Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga for two days of talks to discuss the coronavirus  countermeasures organizers are putting in place for the Games.   Bach said the IOC “will undertake great efforts” to ensure all Olympic participants and visitors are vaccinated before they arrive in Japan next July, if a vaccine is available by then, so that spectators will have “a safe environment.”  The Tokyo Olympics were initially scheduled to be held between July and August of this year, but organizers and then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe decided to postpone the event for a year as the pandemic began spreading across the globe.   Organizers’ hopes that the Games could still be held were boosted last week after Tokyo successfully hosted an international gymnastics competition. But public opinion surveys suggest most Japanese residents are opposed to staging the Games. Organizers said last week that participating athletes will not have to enter a mandatory 14-day quarantine period when they arrive. Tokyo Olympics Chief Executive Toshiro Muto told reporters that a decision on allowing foreign spectators to observe the events would be finalized next year, but said it is a possibility the two-week quarantine could be waived for them as well.   
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Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi and her ruling National League for Democracy have clinched a second consecutive landslide win in national elections, though analysts still expect slow going for democratic reforms and peace talks in the war-torn country.The Union Election Commission Saturday declared the NLD the winner of the Nov. 8 poll, with the party gaining 396 of the 498 contested seats in the bicameral parliament. That not only puts it well over the 322 it needs to govern alone but gives it nine more seats than it won in 2015, when it swept to power in Myanmar’s first democratic elections after decades of military rule.”I think it was a very straightforward message, which is, ‘You trusted us five years ago, trust us again, and Mother Suu’s in charge and everything will be OK,’” said Myanmar analyst David Mathieson, borrowing a favorite term for the country’s de facto leader among her followers.Transition courseHot and cold conflicts between the military and ethnic armed groups fighting for autonomy in Myanmar’s hinterlands saw the election commission cancel 22 parliament races over security concerns, disenfranchising 1.4 million eligible voters in areas where ethnic minority parties do best. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya were also denied a vote because the government refuses to recognize them as citizens, even though many trace their roots in Myanmar back several generations.The Carter Center, a U.S.-based election monitor, flagged concerns with those denied a vote and possible election commission bias in the NLD’s favor, but said that for the most part “voters were able to freely express their will at the polls.”U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also raised concerns about the canceled races, disenfranchised Rohingya, and the many seats in parliament reserved for the military but said the election was still “an important step in the country’s democratic transition.”Abroad, Suu Kyi has seen the democratic credentials she earned over years of house arrest for standing up to the military shredded by her defense of the army’s bloody 2017 operations in the western state of Rakhine. A well-documented campaign of arson, rape and murder drove more than 700,000 Rohingya into neighboring Bangladesh that year. Myanmar’s military called its operations a justified and mostly clean counterinsurgency; the United Nations dubbed it a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”At home, though, most people believe Suu Kyi and the NLD are their best bet for driving the widely reviled military out of politics for good. Myanmar’s generals still have absolute control of key ministries that run the country’s armed forces, police and borders, and are guaranteed a quarter of the seats in parliament under the constitution they drafted, just enough to veto any attempt to take those seats away.”The election outcome is proof that the most important consideration for Myanmar voters is that the country stays the course on its democratic transition. To many, the NLD still represents their best chance to ensure that,” said Dereck Aw, a senior analyst for consultants Control Risks who follows Myanmar.Military relationsHe and other analysts have their doubts, though, about how much more the ruling party can do with a second term.Aw reckons the NLD will continue to “walk [a] fine line” with the military.”It will hesitate to challenge the military’s enduring grip on politics and the economy. This would limit what the NLD can realistically achieve in the next five years,” he said.The NLD made a big push in its first term to strip the constitution of many provisions that preserve the military’s political sway, only to see the generals dash months of negotiation by blocking their proposals.Mathieson said the NLD could use the mandate it has earned by once again drubbing the military’s political proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party, at the polls to push the military even harder on reform. The USDP, the closest thing Myanmar has to a formal opposition, won only 33 seats, eight fewer than it did in 2015.He said, though, that the NLD made little effort over the past five years to even peel back repressive parts of the constitution it could amend with a simple majority, without support from the military.”They didn’t seem very interested in that in the past five years, so why would we think they’re going to be interested now?” he said.There’s also concern that relations between the NLD and military, already declining by some accounts, could fray further still.Khin Zaw Win, who heads the Tampadipa Institute, a Yangon think tank, said a battle is brewing over the presidency.Barred from becoming president by the constitution, Suu Kyi has appointed loyalists to the post who let her rule from the sidelines as “state counselor,” a title contrived just for her as a workaround. Khin Zaw Win, however, said military chief Min Aung Haling, who is overdue for retirement, is widely believed to covet the presidency himself.”So there could be a big clash coming,” he said.Peace talksThe analyst said those tensions will also make it tougher for Myanmar to make progress on the long-running peace talks Suu Kyi’s civilian government and military have been holding haltingly with ethnic armed groups who want to turn the country into a federation.Suu Kyi has squandered much of the good will she first had with the ethnic parties closely tied to those armed groups with her imperious approach, said Christina Fink, a professor at George Washington University in the U.S. who studies Myanmar.In Rakhine, for example, the NLD appointed one of its own as chief minister, even though a local party representing the ethnic Arakan who live there dominates the state legislature. The north of the state is now racked by heavy fighting between the military and Arakan Army, another armed group that wants autonomy for its region.While working to whittle away the military’s political power, Fink said, Suu Kyi and the NLD have let the military set much of the agenda in the peace talks and even endorsed its fight with the Arakan Army.”A lot of ethnic parties feel that they’ve been marginalized and that the NLD has just kind of pursued things on its own,” said Fink. “So it has to do a lot of work to really prove to the ethnic parties, both within the peace process and outside of the peace process, that it is committed to establishing a federal democratic union.”
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Fifteen Asian and Pacific countries Sunday signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement on the sidelines of the annual Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit.The agreement, signed virtually, creates the largest trading bloc in the world and includes about a third of global economic activity.Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc chaired the summit.”And I am delighted to say that after eight years of hard work, as of today, we have officially brought RCEP negotiation to a conclusion for signing,” he said.Phuc added that the agreement will help global and regional economies cope with the obstacles and challenges arising from COVID-19 and the resulting decrease in global trade.“The conclusion of RCEP negotiation, the largest free trade agreement in the world, will send a strong message that affirms ASEAN’s leading role in supporting the multilateral trading system, creating a new trading structure in the region, enabling sustainable trade facilitation, revitalizing the supply chains disrupted by COVID-19 and assisting the post pandemic recovery,” he said.The deal, which was first proposed in 2012, will lower tariffs on trade among the signatories and opens services trade.RCEP includes the 10 ASEAN countries plus China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, but not the United States.Analysts see the accord as offering huge advantage for China in extending its influence.
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