@matthewfsmith

Founder & CEO @FortifyRights. We investigate human rights violations, engage people w/ power, & strengthen HRDs. Fellow at Harvard's @CarrCenter '19-20.

Joined May 2009
Here is my essay in @nytimes on why I’m suing the Trump admin. The admin’s sanctions against the ICC are an attack on global justice and the rule of law. This isn’t just policy—it’s a dangerous overreach that violates our First Amendment rights. @ACLU nytimes.com/2025/06/06/opini…
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While most of us still do not even know when the ICJ’s The Gambia v. Myanmar Judgment is going to be presented, Ambassador Waltz seems to be aware of specific details, not only about the position to be be adopted by Judge ad hoc Pillay (OK, this much could be an educated guess), but also about her role in strictly confidential deliberations (‘tipping the scales’). Wow! If he is privy to relevant information, it is highly alarming. If he is not and is just setting the scene for a future US strategy to dicredit the judgement/Court, in the event that it is unfavourable to Israel’s position, it is also alarming. 😳
ICJ ad hoc "judge" Navi Pillay is tipping the scales on the ICJ’s current proceedings on Myanmar, intending to lower the legal threshold for proving genocide so that weakened and false standard can later be weaponized against American and allied soldiers whenever they raise a finger against terrorists that hide behind civilians. Pillay: We see your agenda and we'll be watching the ICJ’s handling of these proceedings very closely. As our actions against the ICC demonstrate, we will not allow globalist, faux-judges to weaponize the law against our troops, undermine our sovereignty, or put American lives at risk.   The Nobel Committee has disgraced itself by awarding the Peace Prize to Pillay. What a shameful choice to "honor" someone who represents an "international community" with a leftist, globalist, antisemitic agenda. President Trump is showing a better way, by actually ENDING WARS, bringing hostages HOME, and making PEACE.
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Read this carefully. A senior U.S. official is invoking American sanctions against the ICC while warning the ICJ judges hearing a genocide case against Myanmar... The U.S. itself declared the Rohingya genocide to be genocide, but that doesn’t seem to matter to this “ambassador.”
ICJ ad hoc "judge" Navi Pillay is tipping the scales on the ICJ’s current proceedings on Myanmar, intending to lower the legal threshold for proving genocide so that weakened and false standard can later be weaponized against American and allied soldiers whenever they raise a finger against terrorists that hide behind civilians. Pillay: We see your agenda and we'll be watching the ICJ’s handling of these proceedings very closely. As our actions against the ICC demonstrate, we will not allow globalist, faux-judges to weaponize the law against our troops, undermine our sovereignty, or put American lives at risk.   The Nobel Committee has disgraced itself by awarding the Peace Prize to Pillay. What a shameful choice to "honor" someone who represents an "international community" with a leftist, globalist, antisemitic agenda. President Trump is showing a better way, by actually ENDING WARS, bringing hostages HOME, and making PEACE.
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Very moved today in @UKParliament to be presented with an award, from "The Underground Church in China, In the Spirit of Cardinal Kung and Cardinal Zen", as a "Voice of Solidarity". Significantly, it is dated June 4 - the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. My first visit to Hong Kong in 1980, as a young MP @HouseofCommons and later I visited Shanghai, where I secretly met persecuted Christians whose bishop, Cardinal Ignatius Kung, had languished for more than 30 years in Chinese jails. In more recent years, @UKHouseofLords I have had the huge privilege of meeting China’s courageous Cardinal Joseph Zen @CardJosephZen . The extraordinary courage, the faith of China's persecuted Christians - and the refusal of Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims and Falun Gong practitioners - to be crushed by the CCP is deeply inspiring. In whatever ways we can all of us must use every opportunity to be Voices of Solidarity. Someone who has always been a Voice of Solidarity for the persecuted people of China is @benedictrogers, Senior Director of @fortifyrights and founder and Chair of @hongkongwatch, and I am grateful to him for bringing this beautiful glass plaque and book safely to me at Westminster today. The stories of those who suffer so grievously for their beliefs should inspire us all - especially those who live in free societies- to be a Voice of Solidarity. #FreeChina #FreeHongKong #FreeUyghurs #FreeTibet #FreeZion8 #PrayforChina @UyghurStop @MahmutRahima @vicmaywhite @TibetPeople @SamuelBrownback @RFInstitute @IRFSummit @APPGFoRB @RaymondArroyo Also see xitter.cf/davidaltonhl/status/20…
The CPP’s persecution of Chinese people with religious beliefs has led to horrific suffering - underlined today by the death and story of a Trappist monk Benedict Chao – and vividly illustrated in the life of an Irish cousin of my mother who in the 1920s and 1930s worked in China for 20 years. He was hunted down by the Chinese Communist Party’s Red Army. He survived but others from his community were murdered. Today, Christians in China continue to be persecuted. Think of Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison xitter.cf/DavidAltonHL/status/20… #FreeJimmyLai Think of the courage and witness of Cardinal Joseph Zen and Think of the incarcerated Zion Church pastors xitter.cf/DavidAltonHL/status/20… Think of Uyghurs – including Uyghur Muslims @MahmutRahima @UyghurCongress Think of Tibetan Buddhists @info_tibet – Think of Falun Gung Practitioners @vicmaywhite . In China, persecution continues – but too many look away or collaborate. What is happening now is simply an extension of the terror unleased by Mao and the CCP, continued through the Cultural Revolution, and to this day. Benedict Chao’s Obituary, published today (August 18th) by The Daily Telegraph, vividly describes the ordeal of Cistercian monks who saw members of their community murdered and tortured. Note how the CCP burned down their monastery in Hebei, tied their wrists with chains or wire, and put them on a forced march of 100 miles. Of the community of 75 monks, 33 died of malnutrition or exhaustion. Benedict Chao’s own story led to escape, exile, and then the re-establishment of a community in what was free Hong Kong. Underlining the nature of historic CCP persecution, are the accounts from the 1920s and 1930s of my mother’s cousin, Fr.Patrick Malone, who was born and is buried in the tiny Mayo village of Aughagower, at the foot of Croagh Patrick. He spent twenty years as a Maryknoll priest – later becoming known for his poetry, prolific writing, photography and amateur film making. What I still find deeply inspiring is his endurance in the face of being hunted down by the CCP’s Red Army, seeing parishioners and colleagues murdered, and insisting that every person has the right to believe or not to believe – and not to be terrorised by a totalitarian regime for doing so. When I was growing up, my late mother spoke warmly about the work and bravery of her relative. She was right to do so and it is wonderful that another of his relatives, Noreen Malone Tunney, has recorded his life and times in her book “Friends You Used To Know.” When you consider the suffering which people of religious belief have experienced in China, it vividly illustrates why the Vatican is wrong to have made a secret Pact with the CCP cruxnow.com/vatican/2026/08/… and why it should reassert what Pope Leo has described as “the supreme value of human rights….universal and inalienable” . Article 18 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights insist that every human being has the right to believe, not to believe, or to change their belief. St.John Paul II said that the Declaration was “a milestone on the long and difficult path of the human race… an expression of intrinsic human dignity, which the international community is called upon to protect and promote.” Article 18 is violated by the CCP every day of every year. The Vatican should not be signing up to secret pacts, discredited Concordats, and offering only silence in the face of grave suffering, even genocide. It should once again be the world voice for religious freedom.  See: davidalton.net/2026/08/18/th… @CardJosephZen @declanganley @RonanMullen @NualaLoan @TomTugendhat @HumanRightsCtte @LordSpeaker @acn_uk @CSW_UK @JubileeC @NDLawRLC @RFInstitute @tozzi_piero @IRFSummit
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Matthew Smith retweeted
Fortify Rights’s Senior Director @benedictrogers has spent the past week in Washington, DC, meeting US Congressional offices, the US State Department, think tanks, civil society groups and media to brief them on #Myanmar and #China, and to advocate for action to protect human rights, defend religious freedom, free political prisoners and pursue accountability for atrocity crimes. He also met with exiled Chinese activists, Taiwanese representatives and Myanmar advocates. #Rights4All
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Matthew Smith retweeted
🇲🇾In #Malaysia, there’s a crackdown on freedom of expression and human rights defenders. Authorities have arrested @MandiriMY’s leaders, frozen their bank accounts, charged #Rohingya human rights defender @ZAFARAHMADABDU2, and courts have upheld @yankewong96’s conviction for a peaceful protest. These cases threaten freedoms of expression and association and risk silencing others who speak out. The Malaysian government should drop charges against peaceful activists, end harassment of civil society, and reform repressive laws. Read our news release: fortifyrights.org/mly-inv-20…
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Matthew Smith retweeted
URGENT: We are receiving extremely alarming reports that the #ArakanArmy has ordered #Rohingya villagers in #Rathedaung, #RakhineState, to leave their homes by 17 October. The genocide did not end in 2017. Our people are being eradicated from Rakhine state. Urgent international intervention is desperately needed to protect Rohingya before there are no Rohingya left in Rakhine state.
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Matthew Smith retweeted
The Rohingya suffer mightily in places like Bangladesh and Malaysia, but at home in Myanmar -- where reporting is so difficult -- the situation is simply unbearable.
The past few weeks have been truly devastating for #Rohingya. Governments are moving towards returns, deals and renewed engagement with the #MyanmarMilitary. Meanwhile, the news from #RakhineState is truly horrifying. Our sources tell us Rohingya are trapped between Myanmar military airstrikes and their communities terrorised by the #ArakanArmy. Young Rohingya are forcibly recruited to become human shields. People are being arrested and extorted. Families are fleeing. Homes, land and villages are taken by the Arakan Army. On 28 September, 34 Rohingya from one village in #Rathedaung were arrested at once by Arakan Army. The next day, one man was returned to his family dead.The other 33 are still missing. Their families have been given no answers. Politics is going backwards while Rohingya face total erasure. This is an emergency.
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When we started responding to Russia’s operation against our data centers, and when our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms. A lot of people noticed it. There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations. Because there were fewer bots. And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from – if they disappeared when Yandex went offline. This proves, again and again, that Europe is not the source of the problems. Europe is not the one making everything more difficult. Most importantly, we need people in America, every morning, when the day in Europe is already moving toward evening, to really see what is happening. To see the truth. From a speech at the Warsaw Security Forum. (3/3)
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This is fantastic.
I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good. I know. I know. I think about it on the tram. We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle. It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species. Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate. 287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself. We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it. Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name. A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog. And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters. People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all. So who did we give it to? An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us. She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown. The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him. Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept. It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall. But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for. That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it. We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was. He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him. Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.
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Fresh off receiving the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, Navanethem "Navi" Pillay visited the ICC today. A moment of recognition for officials and staff working every day to advance justice and help build a #MoreJustWorld
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Matthew Smith retweeted
🇲🇲 A new @BBCNews investigation reveals how civilians are being abducted by #Myanmar’s military and forced into military service. The article cites @FortifyRights’s documentation of forced recruitment and research by @MyanmarWitness, which analyzed hundreds of missing-person advertisements posted on Facebook between 2021 and 2025. bbc.com/news/articles/c680zl…
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Matthew Smith retweeted
Last call to apply! 📣 Want to build practical skills in human rights research, interviewing, and ethical documentation? Join @FortifyRights’s Human Rights 101 training for #Myanmar human rights defenders based in Mae Sot. 📅 October 24 or 25 📍 Mae Sot, Thailand ✍️ Applications close October 13 Women and LGBTQIA+ individuals are strongly encouraged to apply. No previous experience required. 👉 Apply now: bit.ly/fortifyhumanrights101
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Matthew Smith retweeted
The sanctions imposed by the United States against the International Criminal Court must be condemned. The bullying and intimidation of international institutions and officials must stop. The Court is not the property of any politician, any government or any generation. It represents a solemn promise to victims of the gravest crimes that the law will not abandon them, however powerful those responsible may be. States Parties and all those who believe in the rule of law must stand firmly with the Court and its officials and staff, to protect its independence and to ensure that it has the means to fulfil its mandate. We must never allow the promise of justice to become a casualty of political power and vested interests. The victims of atrocities have suffered enough. They must not be deprived of hope, protection and effective redress.
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Matthew Smith retweeted
2026 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Navi Pillay’s commitment to universal legal principles and her firm moral compass are constants in a long career. Born into a family of Indian Tamil origin under apartheid in Durban, South Africa, Pillay became a lawyer and legal pioneer, confronting deep structural discrimination, segregation and exclusion. A common thread runs from her early work defending Nelson Mandela and others who stood up against apartheid to her service as a judge in some of the key international court cases of our time. This year’s laureate has significantly enlarged the scope and impact of international law. She has served as a judge on the High Court in South Africa, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court. She was the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and, until recently, she chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Today Navi Pillay is a judge on the International Court of Justice in the case where Myanmar stands accused of genocide. In historic international court cases, she has shown that legal measures can help prevent acts of war and violence. Navi Pillay has also contributed to strengthen the institutions of international law. Her independence, expertise and steadfastness have made her one of the most respected international jurists of our time. Learn more about the 2026 #NobelPeacePrize: bit.ly/4xjOJ03 #NobelPeacePrize #NobelPrize
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Matthew Smith retweeted
In Maine, the cost to fill a standard heating-oil tank as of Wednesday was $1,650, up roughly 80 percent from a year earlier, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, which represents state governments in securing federal money for heating bills. Earlier this year, Mr. Trump tried to eliminate a federal program to help poor Americans cover their heating and cooling bills, arguing that the United States needed to prioritize military needs.
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Gross. Dangerous. Irresponsible.
Memulakan pagi ini dengan menyambut ketibaan Presiden Myanmar, Min Aung Hlaing sempena lawatan beliau ke Malaysia. Saya dan Presiden Aung Hlaing kemudian mengadakan pertemuan empat mata dalam suasana saling menghormati, sebagai kesinambungan pertemuan kami di Bangkok awal tahun lalu. Di pejabat saya hari ini, kami berbicara secara terbuka mengenai isu yang menyentuh kepentingan kedua-dua negara. Dalam pertemuan selama setengah jam itu, kami bertukar pandangan mengenai penyelesaian isu pelarian Myanmar di Malaysia, khususnya penghantaran pulang secara sukarela, selamat dan bermaruah tanpa mengira etnik. Saya percaya bahawa perbincangan dan rundingan secara langsung dengan Presiden Aung Hlaing serta pimpinan Myanmar penting untuk mencapai penyelesaian yang lebih tuntas dalam isu pelarian. Pendekatan selama ini yang mengehadkan ruang dialog tidak membuahkan hasil, bahkan isu yang berlarutan selama puluhan tahun ini terus meruncing dan menimbulkan kegusaran dalam kalangan rakyat Malaysia. Justeru, ruang perbincangan yang berasaskan sikap saling menghormati dan kepercayaan ini perlu dimanfaatkan sepenuhnya untuk mengusahakan penyelesaian yang nyata. ===== President Aung Hlaing and I met one-on-one this morning, continuing the dialogue we began in Bangkok early last year. We spoke openly about matters of shared concern to our two countries. Our half-hour discussion focused on the plight of Myanmar refugees in Malaysia and the prospects for their voluntary, safe and dignified return, regardless of ethnicity. I believe direct dialogue and negotiations with President Aung Hlaing and Myanmar’s leadership are essential to securing a lasting resolution. Approaches that have restricted dialogue have borne no fruit. Meanwhile, the refugee issue has continued to worsen over the decades, causing growing concern among Malaysians. The trust and mutual respect underpinning these discussions must now translate into concrete progress towards an amicable solution. 🇲🇾🇲🇲 #MalaysiaMADANI #DiplomasiMADANI #YakinMADANI
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Matthew Smith retweeted
🇲🇾 @FortifyRights Leadership Council urges Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim to immediately suspend further returns of #Myanmar nationals, protect refugees, and restore UNHCR access to immigration detention centers. Read the full news release: fortifyrights.org/mly-inv-20…
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Matthew Smith retweeted
Scoop by @Simondlewis - the U.S. has reversed its policy of isolating Myanmar's military regime and is now engaging in direct talks, in a shift led by US Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, Michael Vance. reuters.com/world/asia-pacif…
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