Amnesty International to halt India operations | Hacker News Reader

Amnesty International to halt India operations

bbc.com

107 points0xmohit35 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24625281

> Amnesty says its bank accounts have been frozen and it's been forced to lay off staff in the country, and suspend all its campaign and research work.

A good chunk of the reported charges by the organization revolve around access to funds and the use of the banking system.

It's probably no coincidence that the Indian government has been relentless in its attempts to force the country to abandon banknotes and move to electronic payments routed through the banking system.

Doing so gives the government the practical ability to bring organizations working against it to heel.

This is a pattern that will play out over an over around the world as governments force their countries to abandon physical cash.

Organizations?! individuals can now be ruined with a click! plus if you want to force buying you can always go to negative rates and people have little choice in it.

then we can get into all the privacy issues. the promises of privacy are always undone by some law, both those they let you know about and those you don't know about, and what is legal today may not be legal tomorrow.

I never understood the fascination with individuals wanting to go to a digital currency only world. the people just don't have enough oversight on their own governments to permit it.

this needs to be looked along with the new FCRA laws passed by the government, which completely cripple civil societies in India.

https://scroll.in/article/973909/behind-the-new-rules-for-ng...

From the article:

> The third, was to broaden the definition of the “government servant” category to include “public servants” among the people who cannot receive foreign funds.

So, till now public servants were able to receive foreign funding?

A decent explanation of recent FCRA Amendments.

https://lawbharat.wordpress.com/2020/09/28/fcra-amendment-20...

Great to see this. Foreign interference should end.

Speculation as I don’t think this is actually fully the case. Does this cause a survivorship bias in civil right reporting where more reports come from more open countries. I doubt if true this would effect the extremes but probably the bulk in between nuance would be lost as it’s harder to tell due to less reporting.

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