Under the cover of COVID

 

Have measures taken in the name of defeating COVID-19 also damaged civil liberties?

Since early 2020 the world has been in the grip of a pandemic that has cost millions of lives and affected billions more of us through sickness, economic contraction and restrictions on our movements.

Much of this story has been exhaustively documented – on Al Jazeera and elsewhere – but the crisis has also thrown up a question that has received far less attention.

Hong Kong: Broken promises

 

We look at the erosion of free speech, the squeeze on civil liberties and stringent laws controlling political expression in Hong Kong.

Twenty-four years since Britain handed Hong Kong back to China, the city has undergone a transformation. In recent years, Beijing has intensified the silencing of political dissent and the squeezing of media freedom – through new laws drawn up in the name of security, the jailing of critics, and the reigning in of adversarial journalism.