分类： politics

Australia’s national online safety regulator has launched landmark civil legal proceedings against global messaging platform Telegram, accusing the service of failing to eliminate violent extremist and pro-terrorism content that includes graphic footage of two of the deadliest white supremacist mass shootings of recent years and Islamic State beheading videos.

In a public announcement Thursday, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant laid out the charges against the UAE-headquartered platform, which claims more than 1 billion monthly active users across the globe. If Australia’s Federal Court rules against Telegram, the company faces a maximum fine of 54.6 million Australian dollars, equivalent to roughly 38 million U.S. dollars, for its alleged persistent failure to identify and remove material that promotes terrorist violence.

This court proceeding marks a high-stakes test of Australia’s 2021 Online Safety Act, which mandates that large digital platforms implement rigorous systems to exclude illegal and terrorism-linked content from their services. The case specifically centers on the availability of content tied to the 2019 Christchurch mosque attack, which left 51 Muslim worshippers dead at the hands of an Australian white supremacist who livestreamed his violence, and the 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooting that killed 10 Black people, carried out by a white supremacist who cited the Christchurch attacker as inspiration. It also covers the presence of Islamic State propaganda videos depicting executions.

Regulators have long struggled with the persistence of these extremist digital artifacts years after the original attacks, as the graphic footage and accompanying manifestos continue to be shared by radicalized users to recruit new sympathizers and inspire copycat violence. Inman Grant emphasized that the content in question remained accessible on Telegram long after the platform was formally notified of its existence, noting that the platform’s unique structure — which supports public channels with unlimited audience reach and large group chats — creates an outsized responsibility to proactively remove harmful material. Channels linked to these attacks have been repeatedly used to host copies of the attack footage and praise the perpetrators.

Telegram has issued a firm denial of all allegations, stating in a written statement shared via the platform that it “reject these allegations and will contest them in court.” The company argues that its ongoing anti-terrorism work is a matter of public record, pointing to published data showing it has blocked more than 150,000 terrorist-linked communities on its platform so far in 2024. The company also framed its approach to content moderation as a defense of fundamental digital rights, noting that it has supported pro-democracy movements across the world, from Russia and Iran to Myanmar and Hong Kong, by protecting user privacy and preserving freedom of speech and assembly.

Inman Grant countered that the regulator first pressed Telegram to remove the problematic content and align with Australian rules in March 2024, but received no response for months. She added that the platform’s stance only shifted after French authorities arrested Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov in August 2024. Durov, a Russian billionaire, was held for four days of questioning over allegations that Telegram was used to facilitate a range of illegal activity, including drug trafficking and the spread of child sexual abuse material, before being released on 5 million euro bail. According to Inman Grant, Telegram became temporarily more cooperative with Australian and global regulators following Durov’s arrest, but still maintains what she called a “permissive hosting environment for terrorist content.”

The legal action comes amid mounting global pressure on Durov and Telegram: just days before the Australian claim was filed, Russia’s Federal Security Service added Durov to its international wanted list, accusing him of aiding terrorist activity, marking the latest in a string of legal challenges for the executive that have also included previous cases in Russia and France.

On Wednesday, a pivotal shift shook Turkish politics as former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, once one of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s closest allies, announced the full dissolution of his opposition Future Party and his permanent withdrawal from organized party politics. In a formal written statement shared on the social platform X, Davutoglu framed his exit as a response to what he described as Turkey’s toxic and unethical domestic political environment.

Davutoglu stressed that his choice is not an act of surrender, nor a complete abandonment of political engagement. Instead, he positioned it as a moral protest and a urgent call for broader political reflection across the country, urging all actors to reevaluate the current state of Turkish politics.

Davutoglu launched the Future Party back in 2019, with a clear strategic goal: to siphon disillusioned conservative voters away from Erdogan’s long-governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), and build a new, democratic conservative alternative that could challenge the AKP’s decades-long hold on power. But the venture never gained the popular traction Davutoglu had predicted. The party failed to convince voters it could serve as a credible replacement for the AKP, securing just 0.11% of the national vote in the 2024 local elections, a result that underscored its marginal status in Turkish politics.

A key strategic decision that weakened Davutoglu’s standing among his core conservative base was his 2023 choice to join the Table of Six opposition coalition and back Kemal Kilicdaroglu, then-leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), in that year’s presidential election. For many Turkish conservatives, long-held skepticism of the CHP’s staunch secularist ideology dates back to the founding of the Turkish republic, and the alliance eroded much of the limited support Davutoglu had retained.

While the coalition arrangement allowed the Future Party to win 10 seats in the 2023 general parliamentary election, the party’s parliamentary caucus shrank to just four members in recent years, as multiple deputies defected to both the AKP and other opposition groups. Beyond political challenges, the party also faced crippling financial strain: an anonymous source familiar with Davutoglu’s thinking confirmed to Middle East Eye that covering organizational costs and sustaining the party’s national infrastructure had become increasingly unfeasible.

Discussions of a potential merger between the Future Party and the AKP had been circulating in Ankara political circles as early as last year, but talks collapsed after Erdogan rejected the inclusion of both Davutoglu and his close ally, former AKP official Selcuk Ozdag, blocking any path to a political reunion.

Before his split with Erdogan, Davutoglu built a decades-long career in Turkish politics and academia: a respected academic and once a doctrinaire foreign minister, he pioneered Turkey’s transformative “zero problems with neighbours” foreign policy, which pushed Ankara to deepen political and economic engagement across the Middle East and North Africa. This marked a clear break from Turkey’s historically cautious approach to relations with Arab states, reshaping Turkish foreign policy for nearly a decade.

Davutoglu ascended to the prime ministership in 2014, after Erdogan won election to the presidency, and for a time remained one of Erdogan’s most trusted lieutenants. But tensions between the two former allies began to mount steadily from 2015, particularly after Davutoglu led the AKP to an election victory in that year’s November snap vote. Internal divisions ultimately centered on constitutional order: Davutoglu privately argued that political authority should rest with the office of the prime minister, aligning with Turkey’s then-parliamentary constitutional framework, while Erdogan pushed to expand the powers of the presidency.

This power struggle culminated in Davutoglu’s forced removal from the prime ministership in 2016, and he was further sidelined from mainstream AKP politics after the 2018 presidential election that expanded Erdogan’s executive powers. The 2020 state-ordered closure of Istanbul Sehir University, an institution Davutoglu himself founded, only deepened the public rift between the two former allies.

Davutoglu’s exit from party politics closes a chapter of intra-conservative opposition to Erdogan’s government, leaving remaining opposition groups to adjust to a shifting political landscape ahead of future national elections.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has launched a new enforcement operation that places agents on patrol at domestic airports across the country, targeting and arresting individuals who have overstayed their valid entry visas, ABC News confirmed in a report published Tuesday.

For non-citizens who entered the United States through legal channels, overstaying a visa is traditionally classified as a civil violation rather than a criminal offense. Many of these individuals are caught in bureaucratic limbo: their applications for permanent resident green cards remain pending long after their initial visas expire, leaving them in unauthorized status through no fault of their own.

According to ABC News’ reporting, at least 27 visa overstayers have been taken into custody across nine states since the airport patrol program launched. To identify targets, ICE accesses passenger travel data collected by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which screens every passenger booked on both domestic and international flights departing from U.S. airports.

In an official statement, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the federal agency that oversees ICE, claimed that visa overstayers should only use U.S. airports to facilitate “self-deportation” rather than general domestic travel.

The expanded airport operation is part of the broader agenda of the second Trump administration, led by new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. The administration has made meeting former President Trump’s campaign pledge of one million annual deportations of people it labels as “illegal immigrants” — including both unauthorized border crossers and visa overstayers — a top policy priority.

While many people in immigration limbo entered the U.S. to seek asylum, the administration has effectively closed off nearly all access to this legal protection pathway in recent months. Data from ICE confirms that enforcement activity has surged sharply: last month marked the highest number of new bookings into ICE immigration detention facilities since Trump took office in January 2025. More than 43,000 people were taken into custody to await deportation in June, averaging 1,500 arrests per day across the country.

Though DHS officially denies the existence of a mandatory arrest quota, off-the-record conversations between agents overheard by third parties reveal that ICE staff are promised financial bonuses for exceeding arrest targets. This new airport patrol operation follows the administration’s earlier controversial large-scale enforcement campaign, Operation Metro Surge, in Minneapolis, which ended earlier this year after widespread condemnation over violent tactics. ICE’s approach to street arrests has remained largely unchanged, however: earlier this month, ICE agents fatally shot two unarmed people in Texas and Maine, neither of whom had any prior criminal record.

Widespread accounts from detainees and viral social media footage have documented that plainclothes ICE agents often cover their faces and identifiers during arrests, leading targets to believe they are victims of kidnapping when agents tackle them mid-activity, whether they are working, shopping, or walking down a public street. Footage of hundreds of these incidents sparked national outrage across the U.S. last year, and that public backlash appears to have shifted public opinion on immigration policy.

New data from a Gallup poll conducted earlier this month shows a dramatic reversal of long-standing public attitudes. In 2024, the year Trump was re-elected, 55 percent of U.S. adults said they supported reducing overall immigration levels. Today, that number has dropped to just 30 percent. This shift ends a four-year trend of growing support for stricter immigration limits. Currently, nearly 80 percent of Americans — a record high in polling history — say they believe immigration is a net positive for the country.

A core component of the Trump administration’s new immigration policy is the elimination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a program that allows hundreds of thousands of people from crisis-stricken countries to live and work legally in the U.S. while conditions in their home countries are too dangerous for safe return. TPS is approved in 18-month increments with no statutory cap on total extensions, and allows recipients to obtain formal work authorization during their designation.

To date, the administration has revoked TPS designations for eight countries: Myanmar, Venezuela, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Cameroon. The existing TPS designations for Haiti and Syria are scheduled to expire this week, meaning more than 350,000 Haitian TPS holders — most of whom have lived in the U.S. since 2010 — and roughly 6,000 Syrian TPS holders, who received designation in 2011, will now become eligible for arrest and detention by ICE.

“Enforcement will be carried out,” DHS warned in a post on the social media platform X, urging affected people to either coordinate voluntary departure through the CBP Home digital portal or wait for official deportation. The agency has offered up to $2,500 in travel reimbursements for people who arrange their own departure through the app, though there is no public record of any individual actually receiving the promised funds to date.

It has been 12 months since former Macao pro-democracy legislator Au Kam San was taken into custody in July 2025, a landmark arrest that marked the first public use of the region’s 16-year-old national security law. Today, nearly all details of his case remain hidden from public view, and even Au’s own daughter has been barred from meaningful access to the legal process, drawing sharp new scrutiny of how Beijing is expanding its crackdown on dissent across China’s special administrative regions.

A former Portuguese trading port that reverted to Chinese control in 1999, Macao operates under the “one country, two systems” framework, mirroring the structure of neighboring Hong Kong. Long known globally as a major casino and tourism hub, Macao has never seen the large-scale pro-democracy activism that shaped Hong Kong’s recent political landscape. Au, a 69-year-old who stepped down from his lawmaker seat in 2021 from a legislature dominated by Beijing-aligned loyalists, remained one of the few public voices willing to criticize government policy and political trends through social media and public interviews—criticisms that observers widely describe as mild.

When police took Au into custody last year, they leveled a series of national security charges against him: colluding with unspecified anti-China organizations based outside Macao, distributing false and seditious materials online and abroad, and repeatedly supplying misleading information to foreign entities and their affiliated media outlets to incite hatred against Beijing and the Macao regional government. On July 2 of this year, a court upheld the full indictment, labeling Au the primary perpetrator of multiple offenses including subversion of state power, breach of national confidentiality, and colluding with overseas groups to carry out acts that threaten national security. A conviction on all counts could carry a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.

From the moment of his arrest, Au has been held under conditions that have sparked widespread concern over the fairness of his upcoming trial. Most critically, his family has been blocked from providing a legal representative of their own choosing. Au’s daughter, Au Hon I, who resides in London, says the family’s independently selected lawyer was denied access to her father in detention, and authorities ultimately forced the appointment of a court-approved lawyer, a decision the court justified citing a binding opinion from Macao’s national security committee, which is chaired by Macao’s Chief Executive Sam Hou Fai. The court has claimed that Au’s legal rights have been fully protected under Macao law, but the younger Au rejects that assertion.

“For almost a year my family could not speak with my father as he was kept in cruel incommunicado detention,” Au Hon I told the Associated Press. “Now we are still unable to speak to him about his case nor provide him with a lawyer so he can properly fight his case.”

Authorities also seized books from Au Kam San’s home connected to the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement, according to the family. The preliminary hearing held in July was closed to the public, as permitted under Macao law when national security interests are deemed to be at risk, and no public trial date has been announced. The Macao government has not responded to requests for comment on the case.

Notably, Au Kam San has also been cut off from any direct contact with his family. Even as he maintained unwavering faith in Macao’s justice system before his arrest, that system has now left him isolated, his daughter says. “He always believed in the justice system of Macao. He believed it so much that he feels that he will be protected by the very own justice system that is putting him in where he is right now,” Au Hon I said.

Au’s case has drawn comparisons to the broad national security crackdown in Hong Kong, where Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law in 2020 that has led to more than 400 arrests and over 180 convictions. Critics, however, note that Au’s treatment is in many ways more restrictive than even the highest-profile cases in Hong Kong. For example, Jimmy Lai, the former Hong Kong media mogul and pro-democracy activist who was sentenced to 20 years in prison on national security charges, was allowed family visits shortly after his detention and was permitted to select his own legal representation, even after a requested British lawyer was blocked from the case.

“It’s much worse than Hong Kong,” Au Hon I said of her father’s case.

Michael Polak, a British barrister representing Au’s family internationally, confirmed that Au Kam San holds dual Chinese and Portuguese citizenship, and the Portuguese consulate in Macao requested consular access to him, a request that was ultimately denied. This mirrors the case of Lai, a British citizen who was also denied British consular access, as China does not recognize dual nationality for its citizens. Polak has called on the Portuguese government and European Union to publicly condemn the case, and the EU has already issued a statement arguing that the denial of due process violates Au’s fundamental rights, noting that it continues to raise concerns directly with Macao authorities.

Legal analysts who study the two special administrative regions say the differing treatment of Au reflects deeper structural differences between Hong Kong and Macao’s legal systems. Under Macao’s rules, all lawyers seeking to represent defendants in national security cases must receive approval from a designated judge, and all requests are vetted by the national security committee. Jorge Menezes, a Portuguese lawyer with decades of experience practicing in Macao, notes that while Hong Kong’s national security crackdown has been more high-profile, Hong Kong’s judiciary still retains a stronger tradition of judicial independence, and its legal community has a far more active culture of defending civil liberties. In Macao, by contrast, judges are less independent, and lawyers rarely take on high-profile civil rights cases, creating what Menezes calls “the land of silence.”

“The trial itself will be a farce,” Menezes said. “It’s a politically conducted trial.”

Urania Chiu, a law lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, says direct comparisons are complicated by the fact that Au’s case is the first of its kind under Macao’s 2009 national security law. Still, she points to the complete lack of public information around the proceedings and the barriers facing Au’s family as clear red flags. “What stands out is the complete secrecy that all of these procedures have been conducted in,” Chiu said.

For Au Hon I, the past year has taken an enormous personal and emotional toll. She says she is heartbroken that her father, who spent decades prioritizing the needs of his constituents and community, has been publicly portrayed as a villain. Before his arrest, Au Kam San told his daughter that if he ever ran into political trouble, she should focus on living her own life and not worry about him. But she has refused to abandon his case, even though the situation has forced her into exile.

“I don’t think it would be wise for me to set foot in Macao again, which is also very sad because I don’t know when I could ever see my dad again,” she said, weeping during the interview.