Human Rights

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.

With bans on social media and recent arrests of journalists, press freedom seems to be under more pressure than ever in Turkey. The recent case of Frederike Geerdnik illustrates the precarious situation of those working in the media.

It’s election time in an unstable Turkey. The people in Turkey go to the polls on 1st November despite a series of violent attacks targeting the HDP. How can free and fair elections be expected to take place in a political climate where parties cannot campaign without fearing for their safety?

The use of military force is a sensitive issue for the Dutch Greens.

After the end of the Cold War and the renaissance of nationalism and of the concomitant abuses of human rights of the worst kind, the pacifism that had been one of the German Greens’ founding principles came into increasing conflict with its active defence of human rights.

While the spectrum of ideas defining a Green foreign policy remains wide, several overarching tenets have emerged over the past decades.