Huang Qi, founder of Sichuan-based website “64 Tianwang” (www.64tianwang.com), was taken from his home in Chengdu, Sichuan Province by 15 public security officers on 28 November.

At least 130,000 people are still being denied access to life-saving humanitarian services, more than two months after the Myanmar authorities began major security operations in northern Rakhine State.

On 10 December Nicaraguan police returned two vehicles that they had taken possession of from human rights defender Francisca Ramírez 10 days before.

Journalist Abdelkhaleq Amran is in urgent need of medical attention after being tortured or otherwise ill-treated, according to his family. Nine other journalists arbitrarily detained with him also require medical attention.

Iranian Revolutionary Guard officials have pressured British-Iranian charity worker Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe, a prisoner of conscience, to choose between moving her two-year-old daughter into prison with her for up to three days a week or sign a document to say that she does not want the “right to be with her young daughter”.

A hearing on 6 December should have been the last opportunity for the Israeli military prosecution to produce the witnesses in the case against Palestinian lawyer – and former prisoner of conscience – Anas Barghouti.

Anthony Nyero and James Lual, staff members of the United Nations Mission in the Republic of South Sudan (UNMISS), may have been subjected to enforced disappearance by South Sudan’s National Security Service (NSS).

Iranian teacher union activist Esmail Abdi, the Secretary General of the Iranian Teachers’ Trade Association (ITTA), was arrested on 9 November and taken to Tehran’s Evin Prison to begin serving a six-year prison sentence.

On 12 December the Appeal Court in Bahrain issued its verdict against opposition leader Sheikh Ali Salman and sentenced him again to nine years in prison after a retrial.

Iranian human rights defender and anti-death penalty campaigner Atena Daemi was violently arrested on 26 November and taken to Evin Prison to begin serving a seven-year prison sentence.