Asia Democracy Chronicles

Countries in mainland Southeast Asia are becoming unfriendly toward rights advocates and political activists who are seeking refuge from the wrath of authoritarian governments.

Persistence and perseverance pay off big for India’s transparency campaigners – and the rest of the country’s citizens – with its legal win regarding the controversial Electoral Bond Scheme.

Left hurting from rising healthcare costs, Singaporeans are wondering what the government has been doing with the substantial amounts they have been putting in mandatory state health savings and insurance plans.

Women have emerged as among the hardest hit by the worsening pollution in South Asia, but calls for cooperation particularly between Pakistan and India to mitigate the problem are falling on deaf state ears.

On World Press Freedom Day (May 3), we highlight the extremely important role a free and independent press plays in addressing the most pressing environmental challenges of our time.

As the region increasingly adopts artificial intelligence, concerns about algorithmic bias in one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse regions have prompted calls for a fair and inclusive tech development.

In Pakistan, women farmers are being hit hard by increasing weather disturbances caused by climate change, but they have few opportunities to change or improve their circumstances.

Despite fervent public pleas and clear presidential powers of clemency, Vietnam has rarely acted to rectify wrongful convictions or address the deep-seated issues within its legal system.

Feminists want to disrupt the tech world with a focus on products and projects that focus on communities and step away from the shadow of Big Tech.

Already spooked by the recent implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act, Indian rights advocates and members of the opposition worry that the Modi government has a follow-up move that will have a more negative impact on the country’s Muslim minority.

An almost-guaranteed win by the Bharatiya Janata Party led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the upcoming polls has India’s religious minorities, particularly the Muslims, more worried than ever.

Myanmar nationals who left their homeland in haste to avoid military conscription are trying to figure out their next steps in Thailand.

Red-tagging continues unabated under the nearly two-year-old administration of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., with most of the cases escaping public scrutiny.

Article 23, Hong Kong’s ‘homegrown’ national security law, sparks fears of a widening crackdown on the city’s already diminished civil society and beleaguered pro-democracy actors.

Hong Kong pro-democracy activists say sustaining local interest for their cause in Japan has been challenging.

The recent court conviction of a man in Pakistan for sodomizing his wife established an important legal precedent for marital-rape cases in the country, but deeply embedded societal norms and beliefs mean women are still far from being free of sexual violence from their husbands.

Across India, the country’s revered peafowl go head to head with farmers over crops.

The Indigenous peoples in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts say that so long as the 1997 peace accord is not fully implemented and enforced, they will remain at risk of being abused without any means of redress.

A new draconian national security bill is on the fast track to becoming law in Hong Kong, but this early many of the city’s people know they no longer have the option to even just speak up against it.

The constant reuse of syringes and needles and the preference of many people for injections over oral medicine are helping spread HIV in Pakistan.