Just days ahead of the country’s October 1 parliamentary vote, televised images of the brutal treatment of detainees at Georgia’s Prison No. 8 are stoking one of the most serious political crises ever encountered by President Mikheil Saakashvili’s administration. The scandal has quickly scrambled assumptions about the upcoming election.
The June 29 death of an army doctor after a brutal beating by guards at a Yerevan restaurant has sparked an emotional outcry in Armenia against the use of private bodyguards.
With Eurovision now a thing of the past, Azerbaijan’s Sing for Democracy civil rights activists are expressing concern about how to keep the country’s spotty civil-rights record in the international spotlight. As media attention moves on to other countries, they say, government crackdowns could resume against outspokenly critical human rights activists and journalists.
President Lee Myung-bak’s administration in South Korea is making a risky bet on Uzbekistan. Seoul is ramping up its investments in the Central Asian state, but given that Uzbekistan is home to one of the most world’s most repressive and arbitrary regimes, South Korean deals stand a higher than usual chance of souring.
This election year, Americans are reminded and fatigued at how the campaign season drives rifts between various groups in the country. Wouldn’t you love instead to live in a nation where the President is so universally beloved, he is elected with a 97 percent majority? How about a country that celebrates an annual “Week of Happiness” to foster good health and high spirits?
There's a side of Azerbaijan that the ruling regime wants the world to see as the country prepares to host the most extravagant Eurovision in the contest's five-decade history.
It's the side that features a multimillion-dollar venue, bespangled performers, and all the frothy pop that audiences have come to expect of the world's most celebrated song competition.
The opening act for this year’s Eurovision song contest is a war of words. State-controlled media outlets in the host country, Azerbaijan, are assailing Germany, complaining that Berlin is behind a “large-scale aggressive campaign” to politicize the Eurovision event and discredit Baku.
If there is one thing to be learned from recent United Nations Human Rights Committee hearings on Turkmenistan it is that Turkmen officials do not make very good actors.
No matter how hard they tried to convince the outside world that they care about human rights, Turkmen representatives appearing before the committee failed to deliver convincing performances.
Wrapped in a quilted robe, a thick file of papers about his case resting on the table in front of him, Azimjan Askarov is unequivocal when it comes to assigning blame for his imprisonment.
“People would often ask me, ‘Aren’t you afraid of the police?’ And I’d say, ‘Why? I work on the basis of the law. What’s there to be afraid of?’ But in the end they did what they wanted,” he said.
The mystery over why the brother of a prominent Uzbek opposition figure was not released from prison as scheduled has been solved -- he is serving an additional five-year term.
