Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo are two journalists working for international news agency Reuters. They have formally been charged with breaching Myanmar’s Officials Secrets Act, and are now facing 14 years in prison.
They were investigating the brutal military crackdown in Rakhine State against the Rohingya minority, and their arrest is a blatant attack on freedom of expression in Myanmar.
Koo Jeong-hwa (previously identified as Lee Su-jung in China) has been detained since 3 December 2017 in Hoeryeong, North Korea, and a decision on her sentence is expected from the Ministry of State Security in March.
There is a high chance that she will be convicted without a fair trial, and given a life sentence at a political prison camp, where she is at risk of being subjected to forced labour, torture, and other ill-treatment. Horrifically, her 4-year-old son is also at risk of being sent to the prison camp with her.
Aser Mohamed is currently held at the Talbeya police station in Giza, Egypt with 12 other detainees in a 4x6 metre cell. He is not permitted to leave this cell at any time and his family has not been allowed to visit since 2 August.
Aser is 14 years old.
Help reunite Aser with his family - please text FREE + your name to 70505
(Eg. FREE John Smith.)
Forcibly disappeared
Our SMS Action Network, Pocket Protest, now has over 150,000 members defending free speech and standing up for human rights, simply by using their mobile phone.
Here are just a handful of the people and communities our Pocket Protestors helped to protect in 2014...
In February, thanks to thousands of you who signed our SMS petition to the UN supporting our call to send more peacekeepers to stop the mass slaughter in Central African Republic.
Six weeks after she was sentenced to hang, Meriam Ibrahim, a 27-year-old mother of two young children who was facing execution for refusing to renounce her Christian faith, has been freed from Sudan's death row.
'I would like to thank all those who stood beside me.'
Meriam, interviewed by the BBC on her release
In March this year, the parliament of Mozambique was close to ratifying a Criminal Code that would permit rape within marriage. Not only would the proposed law allow impunity in existing abusive marriages, but if a rapist were to later wed an unmarried victim (including girls as young as 12 years old), the abuser would escape prosecution altogether.
Thankfully, authorities in Mozambique have publicly stated they will not follow through with these proposals.
In January this year, Elena Klimova was charged under Russia’s new anti-'gay propaganda' law for running Children 404, a website offering support to LGBTI teenagers.
On 21 February 2014, Elena's case was heard in court. The court ruled in her favour. Elena has been told that she can continue Children 404, her project that offers a lifeline to Russian teens.
Prominent anti-government protestor Dmitrii Bulatov went missing in Kiev on the evening of 22 January. We had already received reports of other protestors being detained by police, tortured and even killed and we were very worried for Dmitrii's safety.
We asked you to join our call and demand an investigation into his disappearence. But now he has been found. On the evening of 30 January he was thrown from a car and left to die in freezing temperatures in a forest on the outskirts of Kiev.