alt Hacker NewsA statement about why RightsCon 2026 will not take place in Zambia
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Government put their national interest ahead of NGO organisations should not come as a surprise to anyone.
This reads like a failing part on the organisers to manage such risk, and decided to kick up a stink about it instead of implementing a fallback strategy.
Is there any other African country that’s not this beholden to China?
Fun fact: Zambia’s GDP per capita was greater than China’s in 1975. So there’s a parallel universe where a human rights conference in China gets cancelled because of Zambian influence.
Related:
Largest Digital Human Rights Conference Suddenly Canceled
One of the key reasons that college campuses no longer talk about Tibet and certainly don't talk about Taiwan or dare I even mention the Uygers or anything else mainland China related is of course that Chinese influence is a 10,000 pound gorilla. When you look at it more closely you realize Qatar, Turkey, Iran, and Russia influence campaigns all perfectly complement China's objectives to avoid themselves being a focus on human rights related topics
This is why more well known human rights conferences are held in places like Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
This sounds like a South Park episode
As much as the west has been shooting itself in the foot lately, discovering that they are still much less subject to interference sounds like a lesson that could have been had for way less money
All of this sums up why trust and risk concerns are so important. For example if you put your money into a bank in a country that might not exist tomorrow you might wish you had instead put your money into Chase, depending on what events ensue... those Bankers in that other country might charm you up the Wazoo but at the end of the day trust and risk concerns truly matter
tl;dr - It appears that the PRC pressured Zambian officials due to Taiwanese participation in RightsCon.
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> We are disappointed that our international participants won’t get to experience the Zambia we have come to know through our planning for RightsCon
This strikes as a bit naive. Like a bunch of kids who saw a Disney movie about Zambia and then decided to go there and have a RightsCon. Have they seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Zambia and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Zambia? I could see if they wanted to sponsor an action there or protest or something but it's unrealistic expecting RightsCon to go without issues there. Unless... the whole point was to show that Zambia would never allow this and they just wanted to "expose it".
I was in route to Zambia when rumbling started happening that the event was in trouble. I boarded a 15 hour flight at JFK and landed in Nairobi with the news that it was done.
You may wonder why they don’t continue online: because transitioning a 5000+ person conference online is a gargantuan task that takes even the most well resourced institutions quite a lot of preparation, five days before is just un feasible.
And then there’s the question of principle: Access Now runs a human rights conference, which is actively being censored, what are they going to do? Kick out the Taiwanese presenters? What leg would they have to stand on if they did that?
Civil society has so few opportunities to come together, learn from one another, and build solidarity at a grand scale. The loss of RightsCon this year is a profound and unimaginable setback.
It is significant that this event was in Southern Africa. The U.S. and other western countries have been quietly exporting advanced surveillance technologies and digital infrastructure to the region, turning these nations into testing or waste grounds, all while treating the continent as an extractive resource for the cheap data and invisible human labor required to power modern AI.
At RightsCon, a researcher from Africa will meet an organizer from India or a well-connected funder from the UK, become friends, trade notes. It’s exactly the kind of innovative, revolutionary place authoritarians don’t want.
It was in Africa because the people there cannot come to Europe, the U.S., or parts of Asia.
This is just an unimaginable loss.