Human Rights

Is Morocco’s promising progress on renewable energy reliant on repression & human rights abuses in Western Sahara ?

What can a public tribunal do – such as the Monsanto one – to hold global corporations accountable?

There is a kind of nationalism in Europe that is not only progressive, but has the potential to reinforce European integration.

It would be an illusion to believe that irregular migration will come to an end as a result of the legally dubious deal agreed between EU leaders and Turkey on 18 March 2016. Instead, we should recognise that migration is a natural human phenomenon, which has to be managed as such, and reform the dysfunctional EU framework on asylum and migration.

Before we can tell whether multiculturalism is strengthening or weakening solidarity between the people of a particular society, we need to acknowledge that there were deficits of trust and solidarity long before multicultural policies were adopted. Such policies are potential tools for overcoming the historic deficits in trust and solidarity.

For Turkish citizens, entering and traveling within the EU can be a frustrating struggle, with many bureaucratic hurdles to overcome. Although this state of affairs seems a great injustice, the prospect of easier access for Turks to countries within Schengen seems fraught with difficulties – both linked to Turkey’s turbulent domestic politics as well as the increasingly uncertain state of the EU’s internal borders.

National borders are a reality – and for most people, they are something that is taken for granted and indeed necessary.

The influx of refugees to the shores of Greek islands has generally been met with overwhelming support from locals, eager to provide much needed aid to the refugees.

The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a coalition of Left-wing, Kurdish and progressive parties, was founded in in 2012 in order to help smaller parties amplify their voices and gain access to the Turkish Parliament, where the electoral system stacks the odds strongly against them. In both the 2014 and subsequently recalled 2015 parliamentary elections, the party succeeded in winning over 10% of the vote, the necessary threshold for entering Parliament.

In 2013, Rui Tavares, then Portuguese Member of the European Parliament among the Greens-EFA group, put forward a report that investigated the threats to fundamental rights that Orban’s government had given rise to in Hungary since 2010, and proposed mechanisms for a common European response to such actions, both in Hungary and potential future similar cases.