As of the end of January 2020, four Chinese human rights defenders have been held in incommunicado detention for a month, as reported in the ProtectDefenders.eu digest of alerts. In December 2019, police from Shandong province arrested human rights defenders Dai Zhenya in Xiamen, Fujian, Ding Jiaxi in Beijing, Li Yingjun in Zhangzhou, Fujian, and Zhang Zhongshun in Yantai, Shandong. Their arrests were part of a year-end crackdown in December 2019 affecting more than 20 human rights defenders across China.
Also, in Iran, ProtectDefenders.eu received information about the ill-treatment of imprisoned women human rights defenders Narges Mohammadi and Atena Daemi in Evin prison, following their participation in a peaceful sit-in protest. Atena Daemi was put in solitary confinement, where she was physically abused and denied medical assistance. Narges Mohammadi was physically abused by security agents and transferred to the Zanjan prison located over 300 km from Tehran. In DRC, ProtectDefenders.eu’s partners were informed about the arbitrary detention and the judicial harassment against human rights defenders Jean-Claude Malitano, coordinator of the NGO Action for Rural Promotion (APRu), which runs a legal clinic on human rights issues in Faradje, and Etienne Tandele, president of the New Civil Society of Faradje, in the province of Haut-Uélé, in the northeast of the country.
Only in January 2020, at least 20 new attacks against HRDs have been reported in the ProtectDefenders.eu's Index of alerts.
