Making Sense of Armenia’s Crisis
Armenian authorities have arbitrarily detained dozens of people linked to the ongoing, largely peaceful, protests and beaten many of them, Human Rights Watch said. The authorities also have pressed… Read more »
Category: Civil Society
China’s sham show trials ‘like a theater of the absurd’
Human rights groups and observers say China’s latest wave of “sham trials” against legal advocates, arrested amid an orchestrated crackdown last July, is mostly a political charade, and to some… Read more »
Inclusive voices challenge MidEast’s sectarian spiral
Violent conflicts pitting Sunni against Shiite and vehement rhetoric from Syria to the Gulf have led many to view the Middle East as inescapably sectarian, notes Bassel F. Salloukh, an… Read more »
Tunisia: In Sun and Shadow
The United States will guarantee a bond issue by the Tunisian government worth half a billion dollars in order to help Tunis implement democratic and economic reforms, the Department… Read more »
China: TV Trials ‘Signal New Phase in Attack on Rights’
Chinese lawyers and rights activists appeared in televised trials throughout this week in what seemed to be a new, more public phase of President Xi Jinping’s campaign to cleanse the… Read more »
Venezuela – ‘a nation with no future’?
About 20 percent of Venezuela’s children face problems of malnutrition, and the number of children admitted to hospitals for severe malnutrition has spiked, The Miami Herald reports: A survey carried… Read more »
Zhou Shifeng sentence highlights China’s crackdown on dissent
A court in China jailed a prominent human rights lawyer for seven years on Thursday for subverting the government, state media said, the latest in a string of convictions… Read more »
Tunisian Democratic Transition in Comparative Perspective
Tunisia’s fledgling democracy has weathered a parliamentary-prompted transfer of power. On Saturday, the parliament passed an unprecedented vote of no confidence in former Prime Minister Habib Essid, disbanding his government…. Read more »
Post-putsch Turkish democracy still vulnerable
In a dispute between NATO allies, Turkey is demanding that the United States extradite Fethullah Gulen (left), a Pennsylvania-based Turkish cleric, to face charges of engineering a coup attempt. But… Read more »
Enough is Enough: Iranian Kurds Running Out of Patience
Two decades after a ceasefire, Kurdish fighters have resumed armed action in Iran, The London Times reports (subscription required). The result has been scores of deaths, cross-border artillery barrages into… Read more »