SOCIETY

What Happened: Last week, an Australian police officer was acquitted of murder in the death of a 19-year-old Indigenous man. The verdict was deeply disappointing, but sadly unsurprising, to Indigenous activists, who say systemic racism in the justice system remains a major issue for Indigenous Australians. In the Northern Territories, Indigenous people make up around 25 percent of the population yet account for 84 percent of the incarcerated.

Our Focus: Australia’s police force has a bloody history of murdering Indigenous Australians, with near-complete impunity. “Every year, Aboriginal people suffer racist or violent mistreatment and abuse by police,” Cheryl Axleby, co-chair of the Indigenous justice group Change the Record, told The Diplomat. “They don’t report it for fear of reprisal. For those who do, complaints often take months, sometimes even over a year, to be investigated and resolved.” In the thirty years after a landmark government report on “Aboriginal Deaths in Custody,” there have been over 500 Indigenous deaths while in custody. Not a single officer has been found guilty for any of those deaths. “It is hard to feel justice,” Axleby told The Diplomat, “when time and time again Aboriginal people are killed in custody, but no one is held accountable.”

What Comes Next: Indigenous activists have been vocal about reforms they say will help tackle inequalities in the justice. Yet government progress to date has been slow, and reforms have been mostly cosmetic, activists say. “Whether as accused people, offenders or victims, outcomes for First Nations peoples in the criminal justice context clearly continue to worsen,” Law Council of Australia President Tass Liveris told The Diplomat.

INTERVIEW

Darren Byler, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere, the co-editors of “Xinjiang Year Zero,” on the symbiotic relationship between advances in surveillance technology and mass detentions in Xinjiang: “The mass internment coincides directly with new data analytics tools that were used to evaluate the past digital behavior of Uyghurs… Without the technology it is likely that much of this previously normal, legal behavior would not have been detected, and many fewer people would have been detained.”

Northeast Asia

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi is in South Asia this week for visits to Pakistan and Nepal. Speculation is rife that Wang will also pay a visit to India. While China and India remained locked in an acrimonious border dispute, they also have adopted similar stances on the Russia-Ukraine war, potentially opening space for cooperation. Wang will also seek to push forward the Belt and Road in Nepal, with his visit coming shortly after Kathmandu approved a controversial U.S. infrastructure grant.

South Asia

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan is facing the most serious challenge yet to his leadership, as opposition forces plan a no-confidence vote. Khan is trying to bolster support ahead of the vote, which could come as early as Monday. Pakistan’s loose opposition coalition has challenged Khan before, but new defections from within the ruling party make this round a more formidable challenge to the prime minister.

Southeast Asia

Cambodian Foreign Minister Prak Sokhonn, ASEAN’s special envoy to Myanmar, is paying his first official visit to the country this week. The three-day mission will be aimed at coordinating humanitarian shipments and fostering “political consultations/dialogues” between the military junta and its array of opponents. But with the opposition National Unity Government striving to remove the military from the country’s political life, and the military junta refusing to deal with what it deems “terrorist” organizations, the mission is unlikely to yield any immediate breakthroughs in resolving the crisis.

Central Asia

With Russia trying to wind the clock back in Ukraine, it’s interesting to note how other parts of the Soviet Union have gone about remembering their past. In parts of Central Asia, local leaders from the Soviet period are increasingly memorialized as integral to the construction of national historical narratives that link the region’s glorious (and pre-Russian) distant past to its independent present.

Climate Central forecasts the severe flooding in Bangkok, Thailand, that is now projected to occur as soon as 2030.

DIPLOMACY

Yahapalana: literally “good governance” in Sinhala, it has become a sarcastically critical way to refer to the previous government in Sri Lanka, formally known as the United National Front for Good Governance.