Tag Archives: activists

Eight years after uprising, Egyptians say freedoms have eroded

FILE PHOTO: Anti-government protesters celebrate next to soldiers inside Tahrir Square after the announcement of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's resignation in Cairo February 11, 2011. REUTERS/Asmaa Waguih/File Photo

By Mohamed Abdellah and Mahmoud Mourad

CAIRO (Reuters) – Everyday at sunset, Ahmed Maher, one of Egypt’s best known activists, says good night to his family and heads to a Cairo police station to spend the night under police watch.

While what he describes as ‘half an imprisonment’ has disrupted his family life, career, education and freedoms, Maher considers himself luckier than other activists of the 2011 uprising that ended autocratic president Hosni Mubarak’s 30 years in power.

Like many young Egyptians who camped out for days at Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011, the 38-year-old Nobel Peace Prize nominee expected Mubarak’s downfall to pave the way for more freedoms to allow the country to flourish.

Instead, Maher and other activists say things have gotten worse.

“No one imagined that the situation would be this bad,” Maher, an engineer who is also studying for a degree in political science, told Reuters. “Even the right to gather in a crowd or to express an opinion is not available.”

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who came to power determined to crush the Muslim Brotherhood after a year in office that saw the economy suffer, has also targeted secular activists, including many prominent figures of the January 25 uprising.

Many have fled the country, others are in prison while a third group have been cowed into silence.

Maher, freed from a three-year-prison sentence in early 2017 for breaking anti-protest laws, immediately began a three-year-probation period under which he must spend the night, from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m., at a police station.

Sisi supporters, who now celebrate the anniversary of the June 30, 2013 uprising that toppled Islamist President Mohamed Mursi, argue tough action was needed to rescue the economy and get rid of Islamists they accused of trying to take steps to retain power.

Egypt’s economy has begun to turn around since Sisi came to office in 2014, but reforms adopted under a 2016 IMF loan that included devaluing the Egyptian pound and a gradual lifting of state fuel subsidies have also deepened poverty in Egypt.

WORST CRACKDOWN IN MODERN HISTORY

Rights activists say that Sisi has presided over the worst crackdown on freedoms in Egypt’s modern history.

Thousands of activists, most of them Islamists but also includes dozens of liberals and leftists, have been jailed under strict regulations imposed since 2013.

Rights activists say that intellectuals, government critics and human rights campaigners have been rounded up on charges of belonging to “terrorist organizations” or publishing false news or disturbing public order.

They include Wael Abbas, an award-winning journalist, Hazem Abdelazim, a well-known Sisi supporter turned critic, and Alaa Abdel Fattah, a prominent blogger jailed for five years.

Ahmed Douma, another figurehead of the 2011 uprising, was sentenced to 15 years in jail earlier this month after he was convicted of rioting and attacking security forces in 2011.

“Every time a human being is tortured, disappeared, extra-judicially killed, executed or arbitrarily arrested, Egypt’s authorities convey a clear message to their people, the change they demanded will not come,” EuroMed Rights, a Copenhagen-based network seeking to bolster ties between NGOs on both sides of the Mediterranean, said in a statement.

Egypt, which denies holding political prisoners, rejects abuse allegations. But Sisi’s admirers say firmness has been necessary to end years of lawlessness and militants behind attacks that have killed hundreds.

“The whole world had thought that the youths of the revolution would play a role in running the country, like in any country that looks for qualified youths would,” said Maher, who founded the April 6 Movement, a grassroots group founded in 2008 that had campaigned against Mubarak’s rule. “Sadly, there is a big hostility towards the youths,” he added.

Last September, 17 U.N. human rights experts criticized Egypt for its use of anti-terrorism laws to detain activists fighting for women’s rights and against graft, torture and extra-judicial killings.

Israa Abdel Fattah, another member of the April 6 Movement, said that Egypt was worse off now than it was before the January 25 uprising. “Egypt can change and everything will be good if it possessed one thing, and that’s justice,” said Abdel Fattah, who like many other activists is barred from traveling abroad.

Activists say the only positive result of the revolution, a two-term limit on presidential terms, could also soon be lost if Sisi supporters pursue plans to amend the constitution.

At a ceremony to mark Police Day, Sisi paid tribute to the January 25 uprising but stayed silent when a speaker asked him to agree to remain in office for two additional four-year terms.

Anwar al-Hawary, former editor of the privately-owned al-Masri al-Youm newspaper, said Sisi appears to favor staying in power beyond a second term, warning that any such move would be “illogical”.

“The country cannot cope with another uprising or a coup,” he said.

(Editing by Sami Aboudi, William Maclean)

Families of Chinese activists face house arrest, harassment from ‘smiling tigers’

Li Wenzu, wife of detained Chinese rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang, poses for a picture in Beijing, April 12, 2018. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj

By Christian Shepherd

BEIJING (Reuters) – When a team of Chinese state security agents picked up Li Wenzu and then prevented her from leaving her own home last week, she was scared but not surprised.

She was detained on the seventh day of a protest march she organized in an attempt to get the authorities to explain what has happened to her husband, Wang Quanzhang, a lawyer who has been missing since August 2015 during a sweeping crackdown on rights activists.

Li was initially barricaded in her home by dozens of people, including plainclothes security officers and members of the local neighborhood committee, she said. Scuffles broke out between her supporters and the crowd, according to videos shared with Reuters.

While Li was permitted to leave and go to a friend’s home the following day, her experience of being sporadically placed under house arrest and pressured by the Chinese authorities to stay quiet has become commonplace for the families of Chinese rights activists, they say.

Such “soft” detention measures are currently being used in dozens of cases, according to the rights groups, including that of Liu Xia, the widow of Chinese Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo. He died of liver cancer last July while in custody.

Many of these individuals have never been charged with any crime, but are treated as guilty by association and as a threat to national security due to the embarrassment they can cause for the Chinese state if they speak out, rights groups say.

Those affected complain of their homes being bugged, phones tapped and of security cameras being installed outside their front doors. But the main method of repression, they say, is being monitored in person by China’s state security agents.

China’s ministry of state security could not be reached for comment as it does not have publicly available telephone numbers. China’s public security ministry did not respond to a faxed request for comment.

‘SMILING TIGERS’

Since coming to power in 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping has overseen a sweeping crackdown on rights lawyers and activists, with hundreds detained and dozens jailed.

Li said the freedom she was given after her brief house arrest was in her experience “only temporary”, as state security officials have become a regular presence for her and her young son.

“In 2016, state security for a period rented a flat on the second floor of my building,” Li told Reuters in an interview at her friend’s home.

The agents are often outwardly friendly and tell Li they are there to protect her safety, she said, calling them “smiling tigers”.

When Li took her son to search for a pre-school in the neighborhood, agents went with them and warned the school against accepting her child due to the family being a “threat to national security”, she said.

“When I got angry with them, they told me that I needed to behave and wait quietly at home for my husband – then my child could go to school,” she said.

Her son has still not found a pre-school place, she said.

‘PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY’

Placing high-profile dissidents under house arrest is nothing new in China; it was even used for former head of the ruling Communist Party Zhao Ziyang after he was sacked in 1989 for showing sympathy towards the pro-democracy Tiananmen movement.

But under Xi, increasingly brazen measures have been used to silence individuals who are not formally charged in an attempt to avoid international scrutiny, according to William Nee, Hong Kong-based China researcher at Amnesty International.

“They want a degree of plausible deniability,” he said. “If they were to criminally detain Li Wenzu, they would eventually have to justify it in law.”

Liu Xia has been under supervision at home almost constantly since her husband won the Nobel prize in 2010. She is still only allowed to speak to her friends in infrequent pre-arranged phone calls and visits, they say.

Another common target for house arrest are rights activists who are formally charged but then released after they give what rights groups allege are coerced “confessions”, either to Chinese state media or during trial.

While many avoid jail time, they remain under a form of detention that Jerome Cohen, an expert on Chinese law at New York University, has dubbed “non-release ‘release'”.

Such methods, Cohen wrote in a recent blog post, go beyond simple house arrest to include an array of “informal, unauthorized and suffocating” restrictions.

Wang Yu, a prominent rights lawyer who was arrested in 2015 during the same crackdown that saw Li’s husband detained, was still under effective house arrest in late 2017, despite her release from detention in late 2016, a friend told Reuters.

Restrictions on Wang have relaxed somewhat in recent months, but she is still closely monitored by authorities, the friend said.

“She told me not to come to her home, because there were people there with her all day keeping watch, just following her around, not subtly at all,” the friend said, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case.

(Reporting by Christian Shepherd; Editing by Tony Munroe and Martin Howell)

Empty shoes, empty schools: U.S. gun law activists plan two days of theater

FILE PHOTO: Students from South Plantation High School carrying placards and shouting slogans walk on the street during a protest in support of the gun control, following a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Plantation, Florida, February 21, 2018. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins/File Photo

By Ian Simpson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A makeshift memorial made up of 7,000 pairs of shoes took shape on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, as gun control activists dramatized the number of children killed in the United States by gunfire since the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre.

The shoe demonstration comes a day before a massive nationwide walkout by students to demand tougher laws on gun ownership, part of a campaign that emerged after the killing of 17 students and staff at a Florida high school a month ago.

“This is really about putting the human cost of refusing to pass gun control at the doorstep of lawmakers,” said Emma Ruby-Sachs, deputy director of Avaaz, a U.S.-based civic organization that planned the shoe memorial. The Capitol is the home of the U.S. Congress.

Activists and volunteers gathered at dawn, placing 7,000 colorful pairs of donated children’s footwear side by side in a trapezoid shape to commemorate those who have died since the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

Dozens of people were seen standing in front of the shoes, holding large, black signs with the words “#NOTONEMORE” and “7000 KIDS KILLED” written on them.

Donors to the shoe monument include actresses Susan Sarandon and Bette Midler, and talk show host Chelsea Handler.

Wednesday’s #ENOUGH National School Walkout, organized by the activists who helped plan the Women’s March in Washington for the past two years, will begin at 10 a.m. local time (1400 GMT).

Students across the country will walk out of their classrooms for 17 minutes to commemorate the 17 victims who lost their lives in the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

The massacre was the deadliest school shooting since 20 children and six adults were shot dead at Sandy Hook more than five years ago.

About 1,300 people below the age of 18 are killed by gunfire in the United States every year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The walkout has won the support of many school districts and civil rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union. More than 2,500 walkouts are scheduled across the country, according to the organizer’s website.

Some schools will allow students to participate and have encouraged them to exercise their free speech rights under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. A few have threatened to suspend students if they disrupt class by leaving.

“When students protest at schools, our school staff will respond appropriately and allow our students to be heard,” said Robert Runcie, superintendent for public schools for Broward County, Florida, where Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman is located.

Dozens of colleges and universities across the country, including at least three Ivy League schools, have said their application processes will not consider disciplinary action taken against high school students who engage in protests.

Tuesday’s shoe memorial is reminiscent of a monument on the Danube River near the Hungarian Parliament in Budapest commemorating thousands of people, including Jews, killed by fascists in the 1940s.

Many Canadian cities have marked the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women on Dec. 6 with similar “shoe memorials.”

(Additional reporting by Gina Cherelus in New York; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and Bernadette Baum)

Trump to address U.S. anti-abortion march, cementing U-turn on issue

President Donald Trump departs following a Congressional Gold Medal ceremony for former Senator Bob Dole at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., January 17, 2018.

By Jonathan Allen

(Reuters) – Donald Trump will become the third sitting U.S. president to address anti-abortion activists at the annual March for Life on Friday, highlighting his shift in recent years from a supporter of women’s access to abortion to a powerful opponent.

Trump is due to address the march in Washington via satellite from the White House Rose Garden on Friday afternoon. Ronald Reagan, Trump’s fellow Republican, made supportive remarks to the march in 1987 via telephone, while George W. Bush, another Republican, twice did the same, in 2003 and 2004.

“The President is committed to protecting the life of the unborn, and he is excited to be part of this historic event,” Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Wednesday.

Organizers of the march, the largest anti-abortion event in the country, praised Trump for his policies on restricting abortion access. These policies include efforts to eliminate federal funding to groups providing abortions. Trump sent Vice President Mike Pence, a vocal abortion opponent, to speak at last year’s march, a few days after the presidential inauguration.

Trump has also pledged to appoint more judges that support the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that affirmed a woman’s right to an abortion at most stages of a pregnancy, effectively legalizing the procedure nationwide.

The March for Life, where tens of thousands of people seeking to overturn that decision gather at the National Mall before rallying at the Supreme Court steps, is held close to the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling.

Paul Ryan, the Republican speaker of U.S. House of Representatives, will also address the march, now in its 45th year.

Trump was previously a supporter of women’s access to abortion, saying in an interview in 1999, when he was still a celebrity real-estate tycoon in New York City, that while he “hated the concept of abortion” he was “very pro-choice.”

As a Republican candidate for the presidency in 2016, Trump said his position had “evolved,” describing himself as “pro-life with exceptions,” such as in cases of rape or incest.

Trump has said he hopes Roe v. Wade will eventually be overturned and that each state would instead be allowed to decide whether to ban the procedure.

Americans tend to split roughly down the middle on abortion access, with 49 percent saying they supported it and 46 percent saying they opposed it in a 2017 Gallup poll.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Andrew Hay)

Istanbul court orders four activists detained again – website

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan makes a speech during a ceremony marking the first anniversary of the attempted coup at the Parliament in Ankara, Turkey July 16, 2017. Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Presidential Palace/Handout via REUTERS

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – A Turkish court ordered the re-arrest on Friday of four activists who had briefly been freed after being detained along with the local director of human rights group Amnesty International, Hurriyet Daily News website reported.

The activists were in a group of 10 people detained two weeks ago while attending a workshop near Istanbul. They were released on Tuesday, while the other six were remanded in custody on charges of belonging to a terrorist organization.

The website said the new detention warrants were issued following an appeal against their release by the Istanbul public prosecutor’s office.

The 10 detainees include Amnesty’s Idil Eser, and German national Peter Steudtner, whose arrest has deepened a political crisis between Ankara and Berlin.

Germany said on Friday it was reviewing applications for arms projects from Turkey, accusing it of stepping up covert operations on German soil, and a minister in Berlin compared Ankara’s behavior over the detention of the activists to the authoritarian former communist East Germany.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan told Germany to “pull itself together”.

The 10 activists were detained as part of a crackdown following last July’s failed coup attempt in Turkey. Ankara says the steps are necessary to confront many threats against Turkey, but Western countries have been increasingly critical.

Amnesty International said on Tuesday the activists’ detention was part of a “politically motivated witch-hunt”.

(Reporting by Dominic Evans; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Activists fear federal review of U.S. police agreements could imperil reforms

FILE PHOTO: U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks at a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, U.S., March 2, 2017. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas/File Photo

By Joseph Ax

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The Trump administration’s decision to review federal agreements with troubled police departments nationwide could imperil ongoing reform efforts, particularly in Baltimore and Chicago, civil rights advocates said on Tuesday, even as city officials vowed to continue pursuing improvements.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ memorandum ordering the review endangers one of the key legacies of former President Barack Obama, whose Department of Justice reached more than a dozen agreements with police departments over constitutional abuses.

Many of the Obama-era investigations took place amid a string of high-profile police killings of minorities that sparked protests across the country.

Sessions’ order will likely have its most immediate impact on Baltimore and Chicago, both of which have been negotiating reform settlements with the department since before Donald Trump became president in January.

The memo was released on Monday, the same day that the Justice Department asked a judge to delay an agreement to revamp Baltimore’s beleaguered department for three months just days before the judge was set to approve the deal.

Officials in both cities said they would press ahead with reforms despite the memo. But advocates said the review could undermine those efforts and suggests the Justice Department under Sessions will not undertake future civil rights investigations.

“He’s talking about the federal government turning its back on a pattern and practice of racialized policing that goes back decades in this country,” said Jeffrey Robinson, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “To suggest that the government should just leave it to local police departments is just frightening.”

Police unions, however, have expressed frustration with some of the court-approved settlements, known as consent decrees, and they welcomed the shift in policy.

“From a rank-and-file police officer’s point of view, we’re very happy,” said Bill Johnson, head of the National Association of Police Officers. “These agencies have come under a very heavy hand from the Department of Justice.”

‘PUNCH TO THE GUT’

The Justice Department is authorized to investigate whether police departments engage in an unconstitutional “pattern and practice,” such as unnecessary force or racial profiling.

Under Obama, it probed two dozen departments and reached reform agreements with 15, more than either of his predecessors, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.

In Baltimore, Police Commissioner Kevin Davis called the move a “punch to the gut” at a Tuesday news conference.

Though he said reforms would proceed, Davis said the court-enforced agreement is important because it ensures implementation even if he and Mayor Catherine Pugh leave office.

But the head of the Baltimore police union, Lieutenant Gene Ryan, said the union should have more of a voice in the process.

“I want to meet with Donald Trump,” he said, according to the Baltimore Sun newspaper. “I want to tell him what’s really going on.”

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson likewise said they remain committed to reforms despite Sessions’ order.

A former Obama administration official who oversaw federal police reforms at the Justice Department for six years, Christy Lopez, said the review leaves her most concerned about Chicago.

“I’ve never seen a city that cries out more for a consent decree than Chicago,” said Lopez, now a visiting law professor at Georgetown University.

A Chicago pastor and retired police officer, Richard Wooten, said activists would hold Emanuel and other city officials accountable to push reforms despite the Sessions order.

“This is a sad day, but on the flip side, we saw this coming,” Wooten said.

Trump has often decried Chicago’s rising murder rate, threatening in January to “send in the feds.”

It is not clear whether the Justice Department could secure changes to existing consent decrees, such as those governing police departments in Cleveland; Newark, New Jersey; Seattle; New Orleans; and Ferguson, Missouri. That would require approval from federal judges, some of whom have made clear they will not accept changes without good cause.

Some unions have chafed under consent decrees, calling them costly, ineffective and stigmatizing to officers. Sessions’ memo touched on that issue, saying the department should ensure police officers are not tarnished by the “misdeeds of individual bad actors.”

Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which has advocated for police reform, said the government has only investigated “the worst offenders” – 25 departments out of some 18,000 since 2009.

Robinson, the ACLU lawyer, said his group and others would consider legal action to enforce agreements but warned that any retreat by the federal government would make it harder to monitor reforms.

“If the federal government is silent, it is sending a message to local police departments: do whatever you want and we will look the other way,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Julia Harte and Ian Simpson in Washington, Timothy McLaughlin in Chicago and Tom James in Seattle; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Protesters slam North Dakota pipeline but company ‘committed’

Protesters demonstrate against the Energy Transfer Partners' Dakota Access oil pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, in Los Angeles

By Rich McKay

ATLANTA (Reuters) – Holding signs and banners and chanting “Oil Kills,” protesters in Atlanta and other U.S. cities on Tuesday shouted support for Native American activists trying to stop construction of a North Dakota pipeline they say will desecrate sacred land and pollute water.

The protests against the Dakota Access pipeline have drawn international attention, sparking a renewal of Native American activism and prompting the U.S. government to block its construction on federal land, even as the company building the line expressed its commitment to the project on Tuesday.

“We were all moved by the spirit to be here,” said Linda James Thomas, 59, who attended the Atlanta rally in support of the Georgia State Tribe of the Cherokee.

When fully connected to existing lines, the 1,100-mile (1,770 km), $3.7 billion pipeline would be the first to carry crude oil from the Bakken shale directly to the U.S. Gulf.

Protests were scheduled throughout the day in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and numerous other cities. Previous demonstrations have drawn celebrities including actresses Shailene Woodley and Susan Sarandon, and on Tuesday U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, a former Democratic U.S. presidential candidate, spoke at a rally in the nation’s capital.

“We cannot allow our drinking water to be poisoned so that a handful of fossil fuel companies can make even more in profits,” Sanders, flanked by activists in tribal dress and business suits, told the cheering crowd in Washington, D.C.

Protesters demonstrate against the Energy Transfer Partners' Dakota Access oil pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, in Los Angeles

Protesters demonstrate against the Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access oil pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, in Los Angeles, California, September 12, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

In Ohio, about 100 people gathered at a Cleveland intersection, some clutching bunches of sage and beating drums.

Tracey Hill, 46, a Cleveland resident who is one-eighth Cherokee, said she went last week to protest at the site of the pipeline project in North Dakota. “People are sick of being run roughshod over by corporations,” Hill said.

Activists took to social media to dub Tuesday’s rallies a national “Day of Action” against the pipeline. Many used the hashtag #NoDAPL to show their opposition.

Outside the United States, activists said on social media they planned protests in countries including Britain, Spain, South Korea and New Zealand.

Last week, the Obama administration, responding to the issues raised by the Standing Rock Sioux, whose land runs about a half-mile south of the pipeline’s route, said it would temporarily halt construction on federal land. Acting moments after a federal judge denied the tribe’s request for a halt to construction, the administration asked the company building it to refrain from construction on private land as well.

On Tuesday, Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners, whose Dakota Access subsidiary is building the pipeline, said in a letter to employees it was committed to the project.

The letter did not address the federal request for a temporary halt of construction. But company officials said they would meet with government administrators.

“We are committed to completing construction and safely operating the Dakota Access Pipeline within the confines of the law,” Kelcy Warren, Energy Transfer Partners’ chairman and chief executive officer, said in the letter.

He dismissed as “unfounded” worries that oil would contaminate water in the Missouri and Cannon Ball rivers, and said the pipeline would address safety concerns connected with vehicle transport of oil.

“We have designed the state-of-the-art Dakota Access pipeline as a safer and more efficient method of transporting crude oil than the alternatives being used today, namely rail and truck,” he said.

In 2013, a runaway oil train in Canada crashed, killing 47 people, and in June 2016 a train carrying crude oil derailed and burst into flames in Oregon.

In coming weeks, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will review its initial decision to permit the pipeline and decide whether it correctly followed federal environmental law in granting permits.

Later this fall, the federal government will meet with Native American leaders to decide whether to reform its process for building infrastructure projects that will affect tribal lands.

In North Dakota, protesters have vowed to remain until the project is halted.

(Additional reporting by Kim Palmer in Cleveland, Catherine Ngai in New York, Valerie Volcovici and Ruthy Munoz in Washington, and Olga Grigoryants in Los Angeles)

Thai activists mother charged under insult law over facebook post

Patnaree Chankij, the mother of an anti-junta activist, is escorted by police as she arrives at a military court in Bangkok, Thailand

BANGKOK (Reuters) – The mother of a leading activist against the military junta in Thailand was charged on Monday with insulting the country’s monarchy in a one-word Facebook post.

Patnaree Chankij was brought to a military court in Bangkok after the country’s attorney general decided to press charges despite police saying earlier that they would not pursue a case against the 40-year-old woman.

According to her lawyer, Patnaree was charged with violating Thailand’s royal insult laws for writing the word “ja” – which means “yeah” in Thai – in response to a private Facebook message critical of the royals.

She was released on bail.

“The court accepted the case from the attorney general and freed Patnaree on bail,” said Anon Numpa, her lawyer.

Under Article 112 of the criminal code, anyone who “defames, insults or threatens the king, queen, heir-apparent or regent” faces up to 15 years in prison.

The case has drawn international criticism since May, when police first issued an arrest warrant for Patnaree and charged her with defaming the monarchy. The police subsequently said they would drop the charges.

The United States and several rights organizations, including the New York-based Human Rights Watch, condemned Patnaree’s arrest and the charges brought against her. The State Department in May said it created a “climate of intimidation”.

The junta has clamped down on dissent ahead of a referendum next week on whether to accept a military-backed constitution that critics say is designed to enshrine military power.

Patnaree’s son, Sirawith Seritwat, is a student activist with the New Democracy Movement and Resistant Citizen, groups that the authorities have regularly targeted because of their activities, including handing out leaflets urging people to reject the draft constitution.

During its two-year rule, the military government has taken a hardline stance against perceived royal insults and has handed down record sentences.

Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who also heads of the junta, has said he would show zero-tolerance to insults of the monarchy.

For more than a decade, Thailand has been bitterly divided between rival camps, one led by former populist premier Thaksin Shinawatra, who was toppled in a 2006 coup, the other dominated by the royalist and military establishment who accuse Thaksin of corruption and nepotism, charges he denies.

National anxiety over the frail health of 88-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej has compounded the political tensions. Thais mostly see the king as a unifying force and celebrated the 70th year of his reign in June.

(Reporting by Amy Sawitta Lefevre and Aukkarapon Niyomyat; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

Activists put pressure on Nigerian government for kidnapped schoolgirls

Bring Back Our Girls" campaigner Christabell Ibrahim, 8, speaks during the media conference marking two years from the abduction of the Chibok girls, in Abuja

By Ulf Laessing and Alexis Akwagyiram

LAGOS/ABUJA (Reuters) – A video showing 15 of the 219 schoolgirls held by the jihadist group Boko Haram has added pressure on the Nigerian government to secure their release, after activists accused authorities of mishandling the case in the two years since their mass kidnap.

Weeping parents identified the girls captured by Boko Haram fighters, who want to establish an Islamist state in northeast Nigeria and have waged a seven-year campaign of violence, killing thousands of people and displacing two million.

President Muhammadu Buhari, elected a year ago on a promise to end endemic graft and crush the group, said in December the government could talk to Boko Haram if credible representatives emerged.

In January he said the government was launching a new investigation into the kidnapping, vowing to return the girls captured at a school in the town of Chibok while taking exams. But little has emerged since then.

In the video, apparently taken in December and given to government officials by Boko Haram as proof of life for the negotiations, a person asks the 15 girls to say their names as they stand quietly in two rows, wearing headscarves.

“I saw all the girls and they are Chibok girls,” Esther Yakubu, a parent of one of the abducted girls who saw the video broadcast by CNN said. “I recognize some of them because we are in the same area with them.”

Yakubu was marching with some 30 other parents and activists to the presidential villa in the capital Abuja to demand the government do more to return the girls. Police stopped them at the road leading to the villa.

Witnesses to the kidnapping, Nigerian military and security officials, Western diplomats and counter-terrorism experts blame a series of failings by politicians and the military in dealing with the militants, including a lack of co-ordination.

Information Minister Lai Mohammed told CNN the government was still reviewing the video. When asked about efforts to get the girls released he only said: “There are ongoing talks.”

A top government official who declined to be named said an official reaction would only be made once the military had established the video’s authenticity.

INFORMATION “LOST”

Activists said Buhari’s government is not doing enough, urging the state to use the video for clues to find the girls and speak to girls who had managed to flee Boko Haram captivity.

“The incredible wealth of information that victims of terrorists can offer our security forces is being lost in the current undefined and ineffective approach,” Aisha Yesufu of the #BringBackOurGirls group said in a statement.

Buhari has blamed his predecessor Goodluck Jonathan who was slow to react to the abduction.

Under Buhari’s command, Nigerian troops backed up by Chad, Niger and Cameroon have recaptured most of territory held by Boko Haram, which pledged allegiance to Islamic State last year.

However, Boko Haram has no unified leadership which makes it difficult for the government to find someone to negotiate with, analysts say.

Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau appeared in a video circulated last month in which he seemed to suggest he was ailing and Boko Haram was losing its effectiveness. But another video emerged last week saying there would be no surrender.

Fulan Nasrullah, a security analyst, said there was little chance of a breakthrough in the talks between the government and the militants after the failure of previous efforts.

“The government is angry about the leak, as are the insurgents,” he said. “The insurgents are not currently willing to negotiate for the girls following the government’s alleged bad faith in previous negotiations,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Felix Onuoha, Writing by Ulf Laessing; Editing by James Macharia and Dominic Evans)