To be fair, I think the organisers are mostly to blame here.

The linked article states "certain invited speakers and participants remain subject to pending administrative and security clearances, which have not yet been concluded".

I have friends who organise conferences as a $dayjob, including in countries where political and government clearances are required for conferences attended by speakers and participants from external countries.

These clearances are typically required for BOTH the event AND each foreigner individually (and the foreigner will often be unable to even apply for, let alone obtain their visa until they have the clearance).

Lets just say that organising a Human Rights Conference in such a country would probably not be the smartest idea in the world.

Even for an uncontroversial conference, the clearance process is excruciatingly painful. I dread to think what it would entail for a Human Rights conference !

They took the risk. It didn't pay off.

Hope they had solid events insurance to cover all the costs.

▲ partomniscient 20 hours ago | parent [-]

One also has to wonder how much local and non-local political interference was involved as well, considering most speakers were unlikely to support the 'status quo'.

	▲	traceroute66 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> One also has to wonder how much local and non-local political interference was involved as well Most likely very little. To clearly re-iterate the point I made above ... `1. this is a country which requires political and government clearance for events; and 2. they wanted to host a Human Rights conference` 1 + 2 = They were lining themselves up for failure from Day Zero. It was merely a case of when, not if. If there was any "interference", that would merely be icing on the cake. With a conference topic like that, both they and their international speakers would have been enduring tons of perfectly standard bureaucracy and paperwork whilst government departments trawled through people's LinkedIns and social media ... all standard stuff, none of which would be related to "interference". The bottom-line reality is they should have hosted it in a country that did not require clearance.