A statement about why RightsCon 2026 will not take place in Zambia | Hacker News Reader

A statement about why RightsCon 2026 will not take place in Zambia

rightscon.org

105 pointsbenbreen48 comments

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.

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

Well you can also read around CIA propaganda these days much easier. Maybe this overlaps with the influence campaigns other countries push, but it's not like we actually had humanitarian interest to begin with.

Human rights are a pretext of US controlled media to advocate for expanding US imperial interests. Notice how US support of Israel, Gulf state dictatorships, South American dictatorships are glossed over whenever warmongering toward China or Iran is advocated with the thin excuse being human rights.

Anyone who claims a one sided information war has let themself become a casualty of that war.

Whether is a pretext or not is less important. I don’t mind if the U.S is overthrowing a dictatorship for his own interests while using democracy and human rights as a pretext if at least is trying to enforce a human rights and democracy agenda once the new gov and usually U.S does it with more or less success.

You can’t really expect people to go to war with no national interest. I think for a while democracy was more than a pretext as it helped the U.S keep away communism from its own shores.

> while using democracy and human rights as a pretext if at least is trying to enforce a human rights and democracy agenda once the new gov and usually U.S does it with more or less success.

You mean like in Chile and Indonesia where there were legitimately elected leaders who we got kicked out of power leading to mass killings?

I recommend a book called The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins. It really knocked me back and was a pretty sad story.

> is trying to enforce a human rights and democracy agenda

When did this happen?

The US installs dictatorships, overthrows democracies, supports genocide, mass targets civilians in its bombing campaigns. It doesn't care about human rights or democracy except as an excuse to start new wars which only harm the people it claims to want to help with its wars.

it does care about human rights but of course the national interest is first otherwise why they didn’t just support dictatorships in South Korea, West Germany, Japan, Taiwan etc ? The U.S is not great but is the best alternative. China, Russia and pretty bad because they don’t have freedom not even for their own people

It's not just China though. Try mentioning Japanese "comfort women" in any kind of official/noticeable capacity somewhere and see what happens.

Largest Digital Human Rights Conference Suddenly Canceled

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47964996

Is there any other African country that’s not this beholden to China?

Who cares what flag capital operates under if you're fucked either way?

Mauritius for one.

Is there any other country that’s not this beholden to China? Welcome to 2026.

Eswatini (fka Swaziland) is the only African country that officially recognizes Taiwan. But it's also a tiny little place fully surrounded by South Africa.

It's not though, is it? That's Lesotho, Eswatini borders Mozambique.

You are correct (source: I was a volunteer in Lesotho many moons ago).

Eswatini is also an absolute monarchy which bans the formation of political parties, does not allow women to own property, and has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS infection of any country in the world. So, probably not a great place to hold a conference.

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.

They were not told of any issues until 8 days before the event, this week, after talking to government officials since 2024.

What would your “fallback” be, eight days out? Very curious.

Change the physical conference into a virtual one, this way it respects the speakers, allow people to mingle and ideas to flourish.

It's no replacement for an in-person conference, but this approach is better than straight up cancelling everything.

It was actually less than eight days out before they knew they were cancelled. It's hard to do something in so little time.

It's Friday and the conference is Tuesday. Half their people, it sounds like, at least, are on the ground in Zambia already.

You'd take a conference a year in the making and shift it online over a weekend from your hotel room in a developing country? No you would not. I don't blame them for not doing that.

Fallback would be doing

> What the government wanted from us in order to lift the postponement

Take away someone's rights for your rights conference, what could possibly go wrong.

They weren’t told of any issues because there weren’t any issues until the Chinese government started applying pressure to Zambia.

This is why more well known human rights conferences are held in places like Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

Where a huge percentage of participants will have trouble getting visas

Or at least that's what Fox News told you.

I've been to all three countries, you just go there with no fuss or problems.

The other person commenting does have a point, if you're inviting a bunch of attendees from the 'global south' nations, there's many places in South America, Africa, where it is difficult, complicated and by no means guaranteed to get a Schengen zone visa. You can't just "go there".

Ah, good point, a number of the people going to RightsCon would by definition be coming from countries where this was difficult. I withdraw 'n apologise.

Just don't mention Israel.

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.

I don't think there's a reasonable possible world where whatever government controls the land area of Zambia overtakes whatever government controls the land area of China in the long term, regardless of what the GDP per capita metrics specifically looked like in 1975. The discrepancies that make Chinese civilization more prone to being globally-influential than central African civilization (like "rice agriculture") are at least thousands of years old.

That's true but a bit misleading. In 1975 China had a vast population and was at the tail end of decades of Maoist mismanagement, so the per capita income was very low. Zambia OTOH was still in the ten-year honeymoon period after independence where established institutions mostly functioned and the country had enormous mineral wealth, so things ran OK for awhile even under UNIP one-party rule... and then went downhill rapidly. Graphs of per capita GDP for the two countries would look something like an X, Zambia being the line going down, China being the one going up.

In today's world this shouldn't have come as a surprise.

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.

There's more.

  What the [Zambian] government wanted ... in order for RightsCon to continue, we would have to moderate specific topics and exclude communities at risk, including our Taiwanese participants, from in-person and online participation.

  We invested months in building government relationships focused precisely on transparency and mutual understanding, including explicit conversations about the diversity of our community ...

  This was our red line. Not because we were unwilling to engage, but because the conditions set before us were unacceptable and counter to what RightsCon is and what Access Now stands for.

> 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 would wager that the people running RightsCon are more familiar with Zambia than someone who's read two Wikipedia articles.

> I would wager that the people running RightsCon are more familiar with Zambia

One would hope, but their actions don't seem to point to that?

So you might have lost that wager, unless you wagered also that this part of an exposure or performance to highlight the issue. It would be kind of an expensive, round-about way to do then.

> who's read two Wikipedia articles.

I read more https://www.equaldex.com/equality-index?continent=Africa. Zambia is one of the most restrictive countries as far legal rights and how lgbtq-friendly it is. Senegal and Gambia are only "ahead" of it.

Here is another https://www.fandmglobalbarometers.org/wp-content/uploads/202...

> Zambia has received a score of F..."

If wikipedia are not enough another 10 sources probably not going to convince anyone. That's my wager :-)

> We invested months in building government relationships focused precisely on transparency and mutual understanding, including explicit conversations about the diversity of our community. If this foundation was somehow deemed insufficient, we are left to ask: why was that not communicated to us earlier, rather than only five days before our participants were due to arrive?

> This was our red line. Not because we were unwilling to engage, but because the conditions set before us were unacceptable and counter to what RightsCon is and what Access Now stands for. The manner of the government’s communications process this week also raised serious questions as to the integrity, forthrightness, and value of any future engagement based on good faith

I can't read that as anything but being naive and not being able to read between the lines.

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

> As much as the west has been shooting itself in the foot lately

By ‘west’ do you mean US? Or US and UK?

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