Human Rights

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.

An interview with Isabelle Durant. Great upheavals have occurred and are still occurring in the Middle East: the successive revolutions and counter-revolutions of the Arab spring, the lightning emergence of ISIS, the agonies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the stagnating civil war in Syria. How do the Greens analyse the situation?

It was not until the late 2000s that environmental migration and displacement stepped into climate change negotiations. Now that they have however, are the EU and UN doing enough to deal with this growing issue? In the run up to the Paris 2015 negotiations, Esmeralda Colombo explores the debate.

In an unprecedented step towards direct democracy, Finland adopted a national Citizens’ Initiative law in March 2012. Although it has succeeded in opening debates in the national parliament on a number of issues, serious questions remain over whether citizens really have the power to effect change through the tool.

An interview with Austrian Green MEP Ulrike Lunacek, who addresses LGBT issues and EU enlargement to the Eastern European countries.

France’s experience with immigration teaches us that unless we provide real equality, including political and social rights, we will always struggle as a society to cope with our changing demographics. For this to happen, we need to step out of our national context and see this as an issue that needs European level and global attention. This includes looking at environmental and social problems from a global perspective.