Today’s sentencing of Russian oligarch-turned-dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky provides the latest confirmation that while we celebrate the holiday season, authoritarian regimes take calculated advantage of the festivities to commit human rights abuses or consolidate their rule.
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan …
Russian oligarch-turned-dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky today had his prison sentence extended until 2017 following a trial widely condemned as politically motivated.
The sentence is the latest example of authoritarians taking advantage of the holiday season to violate human rights.
Moscow judge Viktor …
India should stop playing chicken to China’s raging dragon and promote the democratic alternative to Beijing’s authoritarianism, says Gautam Adhikari.
“A prickly nationalism has replaced communism as the driving ideology of the party-controlled Chinese state,” he writes in The …
Iraq’s parliament has approved Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s new government, ending nine months of constitutional paralysis.
The leading political blocs finally resolved fierce disputes over control of government ministries, but Maliki was unable to fill the key security …
The crackdown in Belarus has ominously familiar overtones, according to this report from The New York Times:
It was the middle of the night when security services stormed the headquarters of Charter 97, an opposition Web site that …
More than 600 activists have been arrested and five presidential candidates jailed in Belarus in a violent crackdown on dissent following Sunday’s disputed re-election of Alyaksandr Lukashenka as president.
Video footage posted on YouTube and similar websites by opposition activists …
The violent crackdown on opposition groups following Sunday’s disputed re-election in Belarus effectively ends the European Union’s attempt to engage Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s regime.
The EU hoped to seduce Minsk away from Moscow and promote a long-term strategy of liberalization by …
At her 2009 Senate confirmation hearing, then-Secretary of State nominee Hillary Clinton stressed the importance of focusing on the 3 Ds she considered critical to U.S. foreign policy.
But the Obama administration’s stress on diplomacy, development and defense as the …
The head of the African Union Commission has arrived in the Ivory Coast in an effort to end the current stalemate and prevent a repeat of this week’s violent clashes between rival political factions.
Forces loyal to incumbent president Laurent …
The world’s most dynamic capitalist economy still officially reveres the twentieth century’s most murderous Communist, writes Pankaj Mishra in this must-read review in The New Yorker.
Modernizing autocrats elsewhere in Asia—Turkey’s Atatürk, Iran’s Reza Shah Pahlavi, and Taiwan’s Chiang …