Human rights activists and democracy advocates have criticized French president Francois Hollande for receiving Cuban leader Raul Castro – with full honors – as nearly 200 peaceful dissidents were being… Read more »
An unknown assailant threw a grenade at the house of the governor of Moldova’s central bank overnight, RFE/RL reports: Bank chief Dorin Dragutanu and his family were asleep when the… Read more »
Over the last five years, the European Council on Foreign Relations’ annual Scorecard has tracked the European Union’s diminishing ability to influence its neighbors. In 2015, the story became one… Read more »
The fifth anniversary of Egypt‘s 2011 uprising has produced an oddly structuralist set of reflections in which the failure of its democratic transition has taken on an almost foreordained quality, notes… Read more »
Russian President Vladimir Putin and the extremist Islamic State group are both engaged in efforts at state building that share two qualities: each seeks to create a political alternative to… Read more »
More than 15 African countries held national elections in 2015–including Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and Tanzania–and a similar number is set to do so in 2016, notably the… Read more »
Iran has excluded Hassan Khomeini, grandson of the founder of the Islamic republic and a cleric with ties to reformist politicians, from contesting elections to the country’s powerful Assembly of… Read more »
After a tense year marked by widely-criticized elections in which Ethiopia’s ruling party won 100 percent of parliamentary seats, 2015 concluded with yet more repression in the East African nation,… Read more »
Three months after it voted for change, Poland is wracked by crisis. Just 38 per cent handed a victory to Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s national conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) and, for the… Read more »
The politics of fear led to a global roll-back of human rights and a great civil society choke-out during 2015, according to the 659-page World Report 2016 from Human… Read more »