The United States has detailed significant issues with freedoms in Hong Kong as part of its warning that human rights around the world are moving in the wrong direction.

Arbitrary arrests and alleged police brutality on Hong Kong protesters and detainees are mentioned in the U.S. Department of State’s latest annual human rights review, alongside deteriorating conditions in China, Myanmar and Russia.

Chinese security organs, such as the Office of Safeguarding National Security, came in for criticism. These bodies were established with sweeping powers and negligible public oversight under Hong Kong’s national security law and ultimately reported to the central Chinese government, with mainland security personnel reportedly embedded in some of them, the state department said.

“Security forces are suspected to have committed some abuses and, after the imposition of the national security law, have devoted increasing attention to political cases, including those involving nonviolent protesters, opposition politicians, and activists,” the department said in its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2020, released on Tuesday covering almost 200 nations.

“The ability of Hong Kong’s civilian authorities to maintain effective control over the security office was no longer clear.”

Washington criticized limited steps taken by the Hong Kong government to prosecute and punish officials who committed human rights abuses and its refusal of a widespread call to establish an independent commission that would examine claims of police brutality during protests in 2019.

Political motivations were behind arrests and prosecutions used to restrict people from leaving Hong Kong, as were reprisals against individuals located outside the city, the report said. It also mentioned the inability of residents to change their government peacefully through free and fair elections, controls on political participation, and human trafficking.

There were serious limits on free expression, the press and the internet, and substantial interference with the rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of association in the city.

On China, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken agreed with his predecessor, Michael Pompeo, that authorities were committing genocide in Xinjiang. More than a million Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities were being detained in extrajudicial camps, while another two million were forced to attend “daytime reeducation training,” he said.

“The trend lines on human rights continue to move in the wrong direction,” Blinken told reporters. He added that some governments had used the coronavirus crisis as a pretext to restrict rights and consolidate authoritarian rule.

“We see evidence of that in every region of the world. We see it in the genocide being committed against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang.”

The report highlighted the disappearance of four journalists who had looked into the COVID-19 outbreak in China. Academics in mainland China faced harassment, censorship and in some cases intervention by universities and the police as they deviated from the official line, the department said.

In the case of Myanmar, Blinken condemned in the strongest terms the military’s crackdown on protesters demanding a restoration of democracy.

For Russia, the report highlighted lawyer and opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was poisoned with a nerve agent and had to be treated in a German hospital, and was then jailed in February after returning from Germany. The department said that “credible reports” indicated officers from Russia’s Federal Security Service had poisoned Navalny.

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