The Twice-Coerced Zambia and the Synergy Between Human Rights Violations and Prohibited Intervention

Last week, like many other scholars and activists, I was due to participate in RightsCon, the leading conference on human rights in the digital age. This year it was supposed to take place in Zambia, with thousands of participants. The conference is organised by Access Now. They had for many months directly cooperated with the Zambian government, which had supported the conference and had signed a memorandum of understanding with the organizers. Yet, just days before the conference, and without any consultation with the organizers, Zambian state media announced that the conference would have to be ‘postponed.’ Access Now decided that the conference simply could not take place, even in a fully online format.

The reason for the ‘postponement’ was communicated in a letter written in unintelligible bureaucrat-speak. The real reason for the cancellation of the conference was, apparently, pressure on Zambia from China, because various experts and activists from Taiwan were due to speak at the conference. Thus, a conference on digital human rights was effectively cancelled by Zambia, in a manner and for reasons that are clearly at odds with international human rights standards on freedom of assembly and freedom of expression. However, the main culprit, acting through Zambia, was China.

Yet, China was not Zambia’s only coercer, nor were these human rights the only ones being violated. It has been alleged that coercion orders of magnitude worse had been going on at the same time, but at the hands of the United States of America.

The Trump administration has been practicing overt coercion worldwide, sometimes successfully, often less so. And it has not shown much sympathy for the effects its coercive measures have on the populations of states that it is trying to compel to do its bidding – the collapse of the electrical grid and many public services in Cuba being a case in point. Yet, the allegations regarding Zambia, if true, would indicate that the Trump administration has sunk to a new low: that it is conditioning the continuation of funding essential for the control and treatment of HIV/AIDS in Zambia, which affects more than a million people there, on the conclusion of a new agreement on critical minerals. This, apparently, is the blackmail at hand: thousands of people will suffer from HIV/AIDS in Zambia, unless Zambia gives the US the minerals it wants.

Both of these examples show how coercive interferences with a state’s reserved domain can be coupled with human rights violations – in this case, at the hands of both the coercing state and the victim state. Intervention and human rights violations need not always be so coupled, as I have explained previously in the context of the right to development. But here, they are. Both examples do, however, raise some lingering uncertainties in the applicable legal framework, regarding both the prohibition of intervention and human rights law. I will explore some of these in this post. (Health warning: the post is a long one.)

Dictatorial intervention and coercion-as-extortion

The prohibition of intervention is traditionally understood to require a coercive interference in a state’s reserved domain, i.e. those internal or external affairs on which the state has the discretion, under international law, to decide freely. I have previously extensively discussed the coercion element of prohibited intervention (see here, here and here), arguing that coercion can be understood as encompassing two different models: coercion-as-extortion and coercion-as-control.

Coercion-as-control is not going to be the focus of this post. In the coercion-as-extortion model, however, the non-intervention principle is violated through the combination of a demand, a threat, and a harm – do what we say, or else. The demand must constitute an unjustified interference with a state’s reserved domain, those matters on which it has the choice to decide freely.

Similarly, in his recent book on the prohibition of intervention, Marco Roscini has also distinguished between two different types of coercion (at 382-383):

Dictatorial coercion consists in the binomial ‘demands + threats’: by causing or prospecting a certain harm, it bends the will of the victim state so as to make it do or not do something. A demand is coercive when it is accompanied by a clear, specific, and credible threat and the threatened harm, whatever its nature, is sufficiently serious. […]  the principle of non-intervention prohibits not only dictatorial interferences in the domestic affairs of other states but also forcible ones, that is, the exercise of power in the territory of another state without its valid consent or a permissive rule of international law. In this case, the intervening state imposes a certain condition of things on the target state by carrying out the unauthorized act itself instead of compelling someone else to do anything

Roscini’s typology is essentially the same as mine. The differences are just terminological. His understanding of dictatorial coercion is equivalent to my coercion-as-extortion.

This particular understanding of coercion is broadly supported by states. To my mind, there can be no doubt that this type of coercion is covered by the non-intervention rule. What there is some doubt about, however, is where the threshold of that type of coercion lies – what kind of threatened or implemented harm crosses the boundary between permissible pressure or influence and impermissible, dictatorial coercion.

As I have also previously explained, there are three possible approaches to defining this threshold of harm:

First, that only harms that states specifically agree on count as coercion – but that minimalist approach runs against the whole idea of the generality of legal rules, and states have not endorsed it.

Second, that only harms that are already illegal under some other rule of international law constitute coercion. Thus, threatening unlawful force is coercive. Or, so-called hostage diplomacy – arbitrarily detaining some innocent citizens of another state, and otherwise violating their human rights, in order to compel their state to do or not do something – is coercive. Or, economic measures that violate WTO law, or regional trade treaties, would cross the threshold of harm for coercion for the purpose of the non-intervention rule as well.

The third approach – which is to an extent complementary to the second – is to say that even lawful harms can become coercive, if their impact on the target state is sufficiently severe. Thus, a threatened or implemented economic measure that is legal on its own would become illegal, as prohibited intervention, if it is coupled with a demand that intrudes upon the victim state’s internal or external affairs. The prohibition of intervention would thus prohibit not only conduct that is prohibited already, under some other rule, but also conduct that would otherwise be lawful were it not for its purpose – compelling the victim to comply with an illegitimate demand.

This third, severity approach, is the one that I broadly argue for, even if it is less determinate than the other two. Roscini also endorses it. More importantly, the clearest and perhaps most comprehensive articulation of this approach was adopted by the EU in its recent Anti-Coercion Instrument.

Thus, if we were to look at an example such as the comprehensive embargo that the United States has imposed on Cuba, with the explicit purpose of compelling regime change, we can see how economic pressure, coupled with demands and threats, can cross the threshold of coercion because of the magnitude of the harm being threatened and inflicted on the target state. Under Trump, that coercion has escalated so much that Cuba has been able to import only minimal amounts of fuel, causing repeated collapses of its electrical grid and public services more broadly. Again, I don’t think it can be disputed that this level of economic pressure can amount to coercion. That coercion, which is coupled with an illegitimate demand – forcing regime change – that clearly interferes with Cuba’s political system, a core part of its reserved domain, crosses the line into prohibited intervention (see also McLaughlin and Schmitt).

What, however, of the pressure apparently being exerted on Zambia by the US and China? Does that, too, cross the line of coercion? To answer that question, we need to look at the facts more closely.

Has the US coerced Zambia?

By way of background, the US has for decades admirably provided billions in HIV aid to Zambia and other African countries through the PEPFAR programme, which paid the salaries of health workers and enabled the distribution of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs), saving millions of lives. Some of that aid was disrupted last year when the Trump administration devastated USAID. The key point for me here, however, is not to discuss the cuts to USAID. Rather, the issue is how the continuation of aid is apparently being coupled with demands directed against African states that have nothing to do with control of the HIV epidemic or the resiliency of their health care systems.

With regard to Zambia in particular, on 16 March 2026 the New York Times reported on a draft State Department memo, which expressly linked the continuation of HIV-related aid to the conclusion of agreements between Zambia and the US on access to Zambian critical minerals, and on removing the apparently preferential position that China currently has regarding those minerals. The memo expressly said that the US ‘will only secure our priorities by demonstrating willingness to publicly take support away from Zambia on a massive scale.’

On 25 April, the New York Times published a follow-up story, explaining some of the harm that has been inflicted on HIV-positive people in Zambia due to the previous disruption in aid.  The story also reported that the Trump administration set Zambia a 30 April deadline to conclude agreements on all of the matters previously raised. If Zambia did not comply with these demands, aid would be suspended, with disastrous impacts on the ground.

On 30 April, there was no public statement by the Zambian government regarding the American ultimatum. But, that evening, the American ambassador in Zambia, Michael Gonzales, gave a farewell speech as he was about to depart Zambia. Gonzales is a career diplomat. By career diplomat standards the speech was simply extraordinary, excoriating the Zambian government for its alleged corruption, incompetence, links with China, the hushing up of the impacts of a major environmental disaster caused by a Chinese mine in Zambia, and apparent unwillingness to engage in a dialogue with the US (video here).

Crucially for our purposes, in the speech Gonzales flat-out denied that the continuation of life-saving HIV assistance was being conditioned on a critical minerals deal. He said (at 2:23):

I know there have been alarmist allegations recently, so let me be clear:

Any suggestion that the United States would withhold critical, life-saving health support from Zambians whose lives, whose health depend on it unless we get critical minerals is disgusting.

It is absolutely, patently false.

In reality, since October, my government has offered more than $2 billion in additional grant assistance for health and economic growth to Zambia.

But we can no longer accept empty promises. The future has to look different.

Zambian government must also increase Zambian funding, staffing, and ownership of its systems.

This isn’t to impose our will. It is the only way that we know for Zambia to truly own a sustainable health care system and enable robust growth.

It is the only way we know to ensure the system serves the people while finally breaking the pattern of aid dependence.

Then, at 17:08, he continued:

The United States will absolutely continue honoring our long-standing commitment to the Zambian people to provide critical life-saving health care support. We will not leave Zambians without access to ARVs.

We are actually redoubling our support to ensure that babies are not being born HIV-positive in Zambia.

But against the unmitigated systematic theft of US assistance, against the refusal by Zambian government to engage and to own or enable sustainable health care systems that serve the people, in an environment where only the most exceptional of American investors can do clean business, where Zambian government officials often can scarcely be bothered to take meetings with American officials or companies. Not to mention capture the billions of dollars of its own money secreted out of the country to East Asia or hold accountable the company that unleashes generations of cancer and birth defects onto the people without fundamental change. As the American ambassador to the Republic of Zambia, how can I ask American taxpayers? How can I ask the American Congress? How can I ask Donald Trump to continue the massive aid budgets that have been the hallmark of our relationship for decades?

The United States remains intent to work with Zambia towards our mutual objectives, but how Washington responds to silence, inaction, aversion to accountability, and lack of ownership really remains to be seen.

Again, both the tone and the content of the speech are simply remarkable for a diplomat. For our purposes, the key point is the categorical denial of any conditionality of the continuation of HIV aid on other, economic deals – a suggestion that the ambassador thought to be ‘disgusting.’ On that we certainly agree. Such conditionality, were it to be true, would be beyond disgusting. It would be evil; it would be treating the suffering of human beings in Zambia as means to earn money, rather than treating those people as ends of themselves. It would be one thing for America to cut funding because of a budgetary crisis, or because of the aid being stolen, or even because Zambia has not done enough to sustainably improve its own healthcare system. But to try to profit from the suffering of HIV-positive mothers and their babies is a wholly different matter.

Now, I personally have no idea whether ambassador Gonzales’s categorical denial of conditionality is true, nor whether his accusations against the Zambian government are true (although some of them strike me at least as plausible). What I can say is that a reporter who saw the draft State Department memo, and whom I corresponded with, did not find his denial to be credible.

I can also say that, in response to the ambassador’s remarkable speech, on 5 May the Zambian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued an equally remarkable statement in rebuttal, in which it takes the ‘greatest exception’ to the speech and attempts to answer it point by point. It, too, is well worth the read. But for our purposes, the most important point is that the Ministry expressly says that the US has, in fact, coupled the continuation of HIV-related assistance with a minerals deal:

For clarity, the Zambian Government wishes to state unequivocally that the stalled negotiations on the Health MOU are as a consequence of the incorporation of terms that the Zambian Government considers unacceptable such as those relating to sharing of data in violation of our citizen’s right to privacy. These matters are the subject of litigation in the Zambian Courts and this must be respected, aside from these provisions being unconscionable from the perspective of the people of Zambia.

Similarly, the proposed critical minerals agreement and associated framework must reflect the will and aspirations of the people of Zambia and as such need to be carefully and diligently considered, contrary to the Outgoing Ambassador’s allegations of inertia on the part of the Zambian Government. Key among the reasons for Zambia’s reluctance to accept the terms of the proposed agreement is the insistence on preferential treatment of US companies over Zambia’s critical minerals. Rather, the Zambian Government rightfully takes the view, first and foremost, that Zambians must have a say on how her critical minerals are used, and second that no one strategic partner is to be treated preferentially to others.

A further concern by the Zambian Government is the coupling of the proposed agreements and frameworks to one another such that the conclusion of the critical minerals agreement is made conditional to the conclusion of the Health MOU, for instance. In this respect, the Zambian Government has been consistent that the agreements must be considered separately on their respective merits and in good faith. The statement by the outgoing Ambassador implying the contrary is therefore untrue and aimed at embellishing the real reasons for the stalled negotiations. (emphasis added)

In brief, the Zambian government is point-blank accusing the US ambassador of lying, and is saying that the conditionality is in fact there. (Note also the point about problematic one-way data sharing with the US, which the US has also insisted on in agreements with other states – I will not be discussing this here any further).

On 7 May, the New York Times published a follow-up story recounting the whole diplomatic kerfuffle. It contains further comments from the State Department, which partly disavow the ambassador’s speech, but also seemingly reinforce his point that there is no conditionality.

Now, again, I simply have no way of knowing which of these accounts is true. At least one of these states is lying – but it’s possible that both of them partly are. All I can say is that the conditionality is supported both by the account of the Zambian government and by otherwise reliable New York Times reporting, while this kind of transactional approach is very much in keeping with the Trump administration’s pattern of behaviour. It is certainly possible, maybe even likely, that the conditionality is there. I will proceed in my analysis on the assumption that it is, while acknowledging the possibility that this idea was mooted within the administration but was ultimately abandoned (see also this story from the Africa Report).

If the Trump administration conditions continuing HIV assistance on Zambia acceding to its demands regarding critical minerals, would this amount to intervention in Zambia’s internal affairs, a coercive interference with its reserved domain?

There is no question that Zambia’s reserved domain is interfered with – it has sovereignty over its natural resources, including critical minerals. It is not legally bound in any way to conclude a minerals exploitation agreement with any state, including the US. (I leave aside the allegations of possible preferential treatment given to China and whether that violates trade or investment law or some other international commitment, since this is not what the US has been arguing). The question, therefore, is whether the conditionality of HIV-related aid constitutes coercion, in particular coercion-as-extortion.

To my mind, the answer to this question would be clearly in the affirmative, but only if the third, severity-based approach to the coercion threshold that I explained above was to be regarded as valid. The key question here is not whether, in the abstract, the conditionality or withholding of aid regarding which there is otherwise no legal entitlement is coercive. It is coercive in this particular context, in which there is a decades-long relationship of dependence, one in which Zambia is structurally and financially incapable of replacing US assistance without some kind of long transition period. It is coercive because the inevitable effect of the US withholding aid would be (at a minimum) tens of thousands of people not being able to afford or access ARV medication, and tens of thousands of further HIV infections, including in newborns.

The severity of the harm is simply such that I can’t see how the existence of coercion can be in doubt, just like there is no doubt that the withdrawal of aid would cause these effects – the Times reporting cited above already documents the effect that partial disruption in aid has already had. Therefore, if the allegations of conditionality are true, if the provision of lifesaving aid is being conditioned on access to critical minerals, then the US is extorting Zambia in a way that it is not only disgusting, to quote ambassador Gonzales, not only unspeakably immoral, but also illegal, a violation of the prohibition of intervention (and likely also as a violation of human rights, which I will discuss more below).

Has China coerced Zambia?

This brings us to China and the cancellation of RightsCon. On 1 May, Access Now released a statement detailing how the government communicated their decision to ‘postpone’ the event and their reasons for this. Access Now ‘believe foreign interference is the reason RightsCon 2026 won’t proceed in Zambia or online,’  and explained that they ‘were told that diplomats from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were putting pressure on the Government of Zambia because Taiwanese civil society participants were planning to join us in person.’ The eventual letter from the Zambian government justifying their reasons for the postponement was nebulous, stating that this was ‘necessitated by the need for comprehensive disclosure of critical information relating to key thematic issues proposed for discussion [ which would be] essential to ensure full alignment with Zambia’s national values and broader public interest considerations.’

Numerous other experts and organisations have supported the assessment that China was behind the event’s cancellation. For example, Amnesty International labelled China’s conduct as yet another instance of transnational repression, and noted that:

This did not happen in a vacuum. In Zambia, China’s leverage is reinforced through debt and major infrastructure investments including renovations to Mulungushi International Convention Center, which was slated to host RightsCon. This influence also extends into key economic sectors with Chinese companies playing a significant role in copper mining and amplified by Zambia’s roughly US$ 5 billion debt to China.

I’ve quoted this passage because it reveals something important about China’s coercion, in Zambia or elsewhere: it tends to be done confidentially, with at least plausible deniability. Unlike with Trump, China’s demands and threats are not trumpeted to the world. This means we necessarily have to rely on inference to establish what happened, at least for the time being. Pointing to China’s leverage against Zambia, as Amnesty have done, is perfectly sensible in that regard. So is pointing to the fact that on 25 April Zambia and China signed a development agreement, or to the fact that on 30 April China unilaterally scrapped tariffs for all African states but one – Eswatini – due to it having diplomatic relations with Taiwan. (Incidentally, the Taiwanese president visited Eswatini just days later).

So, I feel confident in saying that China must have demanded of Zambia to prevent the presence of Taiwanese activists at RightsCon, or had even demanded the cancellation of the event altogether, and that China must have threatened Zambia with substantial economic harm were this not to happen. Can I prove this for a fact? No. Is it more likely than not that this is what happened? Yes. Is it nonetheless possible that China made no threats, and was on the influence side of the spectrum? Sure – but that seems unlikely.

Even if one were to broadly accept the legitimacy of China’s sovereignty claim over Taiwan, the demands directed at cancelling a human rights conference are wholly illegitimate, and were an unjustified intrusion into Zambia’s reserved domain. Taiwanese human rights activists have the right to freedom of expression, as do the thousands of others who were due to speak at or attend the meeting, virtually or in person. While we don’t have the exact details of China’s threatened harms, and while these harms were likely substantially lower in magnitude than the US withdrawal of HIV assistance, the impacts were likely severe enough to qualify as a coercion. The whole episode to my mind strongly suggests that the prohibition of intervention has been violated.

Three states and their human rights violations

The example of the twice-coerced Zambia also shows how intervention and human rights violations go hand in hand. It shows, too, how Zambia can simultaneously be the victim of coercion and the perpetrator of human rights violations. The US and China are, on the facts as assumed above, also responsible for such violations, although with the added complications of extraterritoriality and non-ratification of the relevant treaties.

Starting with Zambia, if even half of the claims in ambassador Gonzales’s speech are true – if US aid was stolen, if corruption meant that there was no resilience to domestic health systems, if the Zambian government hushed up a major report about the health consequences of the 2025 disaster at the Chinese-operated copper mine – then, at a minimum, Zambia is responsible for failing to comply with its positive, due diligence duties of protection and fulfilment of the right to life, under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the right to health, under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. (Zambia has been a party to both treaties since 1984). There seems to be no plausible way for Zambia to argue that it has done all it could have done to protect and fulfil these rights, even taking its limited resources into account. I would note, in that regard, that in its 2025 UNRWA advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice endorsed the Human Rights Committee’s broad understanding of the right to life as including determinants of a life lived in dignity, including ensuring access to essential health care (para 154).

When it comes to the cancellation of RightsCon, Zambia’s violation of the freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly is even more manifest. This is because the ‘postponement’ of the event just days before it was supposed to take place was clearly motivated by the fact that Zambia (as China’s proxy) wanted to supress certain speakers because of their identities or things they had to say regarding Taiwan. In other words, Zambia’s conduct, which also likely lacks any clear domestic legal basis, simply did not pursue any legitimate aim that could justify a restriction on these rights. The government’s nebulous invocation of ‘Zambia’s national values and broader public interest considerations’ would even on its own fail to satisfy the legitimacy prong of the justification test, let alone when combined with plausible information about Chinese coercion. The question of the necessity and proportionality of the event’s cancellation therefore does not even arise. (See, in particular, HRC General Comment No 34, paras 22 & 42; General Comment No 37, paras 23, 32, 41, 48).

This brings us to the United States and China. As noted above, two preliminary problems arise here. The first is that the US is not a party to the ICESCR, while it is a party to the ICCPR, whereas China is a party to the ICESCR but not the ICCPR. That is, in coercing Zambia the US cannot be violating the right to health in the ICESCR, while it could be violating the right to life in the ICCPR, whereas China’s transnational repression of RightsCon-via-coercion cannot violate the ICCPR. In both cases, however, the rights in question are undoubtedly protected by customary international law (note, in that regard, the two references to customary human rights in the UNRWA AO, paras 146 & 151).

The second problem is that of extraterritorial application of human rights. In the UNRWA AO, at para 150, the ICJ held that the same principles that govern the application of human rights treaties that contain clauses referring to state jurisdiction should also govern the application of treaties that do not have such clauses. Arguably the same should go for customary IHRL, although arguments have been made in the literature that the extraterritorial application of customary law should be even more expansive. That said, there are no directly comparable cases before any UN or regional human rights body dealing with scenarios such as those posed by the US and China’s conduct.

China’s conduct is a classical example of transnational repression (see more here, here and here), with the added point of it being done by coercing a third state, which then directly committed the violation. Yet, even so, China’s conduct is a clear example of an action interfering with negative duties, in which all the state had to do was to abstain from doing something, and in which the extraterritoriality question tends to be resolved more easily (e.g. by arguing that by coercing Zambia, China exercised authority and control, and thus jurisdiction, over all of the persons attending RightsCon; or by arguing that China exercised jurisdiction in a functional sense, by having control over the exercise of the RightsCon persons’ rights; or by arguing that no jurisdiction threshold applies to negative duties).

The US conditionality of aid is different, in that it relates to possible positive obligations, which tend to be much more difficult to analyse (see, e.g., here). But to address this situation one does not need to adopt a maximalist position on extraterritorial application, under which the United States would, for example, have a duty towards individuals all over the world to protect and fulfil the right to health, in an epidemic or otherwise. The longstanding US-Zambia relationship, the fact that US funding was specifically tailored for HIV treatment and prevention, and the dependencies that have been created over time are, to my mind at least, sufficient to argue that HIV-positive individuals in Zambia are within the jurisdiction of both the US and Zambia when it comes to the protection and fulfilment of their rights to life and health.

The extraterritoriality problem in these scenarios is deserving of a more thorough treatment than the one I can give it here. But even so, the right answer, I submit, is that China and the US both had obligations under human rights law towards those people whom their conduct, consisting of actions or omissions, has affected. If that is the case, the question whether their human rights obligations were violated  becomes straightforward, again due to the absence of any legitimate reason that could justify the conduct of these two states. China’s suppression of free speech and assembly because it does not like the speakers or their speech manifestly fails the legitimacy prong of the justification test. As for the US, the withdrawal of aid could, potentially, have been justified if the US was suffering a financial crisis, or wanted to curb corruption or create more resilience in Zambia. But it simply cannot be justified, in human rights terms, for the reason of the US wanting to grab more Zambian minerals than China.

Conclusion

The example of the twice-coerced Zambia is instructive. It raises important questions regarding our understanding of coercion as an element of prohibited intervention, in particular as to the intensity of the harm required in the extortion model of coercion. It must be acknowledged that there is still some uncertainty about all of the relevant facts. But, on the most plausible understanding of the facts as we know then, I would argue that both the United States and China have coercively interfered in Zambia’s internal affairs, and have thus violated the prohibition of intervention. While the magnitude of the harms that China threatened Zambia with is unclear, the putative US withholding of life-saving aid for the sake of securing minerals is clearly coercive under a severity-based approach to the coercion threshold. A good comparison point would be Trump’s attempts to coerce Ukraine last year by withholding military aid in order to secure a critical minerals deal.

It is also I think reasonably clear (with some caveats regarding extraterritoriality set out above) that all three states have violated human rights law through their conduct. With respect to both non-intervention and human rights, we have seen how the reasons for which state act matter; the same conduct could at least arguably justified in some other circumstances, if the state concerned acted for other reasons. Here, however, no such reasons plausibly exist. In particular, the fact that Zambia was being coerced by both the US and China does not excuse its own human rights violations. I would note, too, that Zambia is not only a party to the ICCPR but has accepted the jurisdiction of the Human Rights Committee to examine individual communications. It is therefore possible that at least some of the issues discussed in this essay could eventually be litigated before the Committee.