Harsh suppression of opposition protests. A crackdown on foreign-funded NGOs. And a formal request to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to downgrade its Baku office.
Civil society workers in Russia say a bill proposing new restrictions on the country's corps of nongovernmental organizations will have far-reaching consequences for ordinary citizens.
The bill, which seeks to increase bureaucratic burdens on local NGOs that receive foreign funding, was passed on July 13 by Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma.
There’s actually a bright side to government dysfunction in Central Asia: when the state lacks funds to take care of basic necessities, citizens are learning to band together to tackle civic problems.
The December 26 trial of arrested Turkish journalists Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener has pushed a shadowy organization known as the Gülen movement to the forefront of public attention in Turkey. The group’s influence has long been an open secret. Now, its weight is being felt at a time when the country’s democratic credentials are increasingly being called into question.
With the recent arrest of a leading academic, concern is spreading among intellectuals in Turkey that they will have to think twice before voicing criticism of the government in the future.
With nine months to go before Baku hosts the Eurovision pop-music competition, transparency concerns are arising about Azerbaijani government expenditures on the event.
Facebook may be best known in Azerbaijan as a tool for mobilizing government critics, but a new generation of Azerbaijani civil society activists is relying on the social networking site for quite a different purpose -- promoting animal welfare.
In only six months, the Baku-based Helping Stray Animals group has grown from a few isolated animal activists to a group of thousands.
Like the Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia also suffers from poverty, corruption, heavy-handed governments, widespread unemployment, and scant opportunities for the young. All too aware of the similarities, governments there are already taking measures to prevent public upheaval of the kind that has shaken the Arab world.
Serzh Sarkisian on April 20 urged Armenia's law enforcement agencies to intensify their efforts to shed light on the circumstances surrounding the post-presidential election clashes in Yerevan on March 1-2, 2008 in which 10 people died . The clashes and the events that led up to them have been the subject of massive obfuscation.
