Freedom House

In a Washington Post op-ed, relatives of three Chinese prisoners of conscience are calling for the release of 100 political prisoners before Xi's visit next Thursday.

Human rights organization Freedom House is also backing the call.

Some cases cited include lawyer Gao Zhisheng, unseen since 2017, and Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai.

Detained American citizens were also mentioned.

First, Congressman Joe Wilson from the 2nd District of South Carolina.

Congressman Wilson serves as a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he's a member of the Middle East and North Africa subcommittees, as well as a subcommittee on Europe, which I've testified to him several times.

He's also the most senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, where he's on the Subcommittee on Readiness and Strategic Forces.

I'm also joined by Dr. Ivana Stradner.

Ivana serves as a research fellow with FDD, works very closely with myself and the Russia Center.

And so with the Graham sanctions, Well, it was incredible that it passed the Senate, 86 to 11.

And then yesterday was very, very important because Sadly, due to Trump derangement syndrome, if President Trump is for something, there are other people against it.

And despite that, we were able to get the bill through Congress and through the House with a margin of 103.

I think probably the discontent is a little bit more extreme this time.

Freedom House says that the aggregate level of freedom in the world has declined now for the last 20 years, since about 2008 or so, and I think that one of the reasons for being more pessimistic is really what's happened in the United States, because for the entire post-World War II period, the United States was the model liberal democracy.

Yeah.

And my Chinese students 20 years ago all said they wanted China to be like the United States.

Right.

But, you know, the VDEM rating changing and Freedom House also, you know, reclassifying.

And CAA and

RC protests and so on.

So I'm honored to welcome you all to the latest convening in the Council's Values and Interests event series, which aims to interrogate the relationship between morality and power in the practice of geopolitics.

So tonight's fireside chat will feature Carnegie Council President Joel Rosenthal in conversation with Freedom House CEO Jamie Fly.

So Jamie recently joined Freedom House after a multi-decade career working across the foreign policy, democracy, and humanitarian spaces, where he served as CEO of Radio Free Europe, held leadership roles at the German Marshall Fund, and worked within the George W. Bush

administration at the National Security Council.

So before passing the program over to Joel, because we're at Carnegie Council, I wanted to provide a bit of an ethical framing for tonight's conversation.

Jamie, thank you for coming all the way to New York to do this with us.

And I thought I would start, we're gonna start a little bit lofty, as Kevin cued us to, and then we'll move into some more specifics.

But I know that Freedom House is celebrating its 85th.