The Václav Havel Human Rights Prize is awarded each year by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in partnership with the Václav Havel Library and the Charta 77 Foundation to reward outstanding civil society action in the …

Russians are “now observing the end of an epoch that began with Gorbachev’s perestroika,” says a prominent analyst.

“These are simply the last remnants of freedom, freedom of scholarship and freedom of information,” said Lev D. Gudkov (above), the director …

Central and East European democrats with direct experience of democratic transitions are better qualified to offer advice on democratization, according to the head of the new European Endowment for Democracy. The EED is “inspired” by the example of the US-based …

Democracy, wrote Donald Kagan in “Pericles of Athens” (1991), is “one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience.”

Democratic governance relies on “free, autonomous and self-reliant” citizens and “extraordinary leadership” to flourish, even …

A prominent human rights and democracy advocate has been appointed as Italy’s new Foreign Minister.

Former European Commissioner Emma Bonino (right) joins the “grand coalition” government headed by the center left Democratic Party’s Enrico Letta as prime minister, but which …

The global democratic regression has stalled and some of the world’s most authoritarian regions have registered significant gains over the past year, but “the overall pace of democratic change remained stagnant” during 2012, according to a new survey.

The democracy …

Since ending decades of Communist rule and isolation in 1991, Albania has made substantial progress toward Euro-Atlantic integration, joining NATO in 2009 and receiving conditional EU candidate status in 2012.

Progress on consolidating Albania’s democratic institutions, however, has been uneven. …

Robie M.H. “Mark” Palmer—diplomat, speechwriter, entrepreneur, and uncompromising fighter for democracy—was remembered yesterday as “a visionary who could put his vision to action” at a memorial service celebrating his extraordinary life, writes David Lowe.

A sizeable audience of friends, …

“An army of human-rights defenders are risking their lives to protect the freedoms of others, but who is defending them?” asks Rebecca Grant at VentureBeat.

Stockholm’s Civil Rights Defenders handed out the first five of the group’s new …

The familiar cliché about Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to lead a major Western democracy, is that she changed the way Britons thought about themselves and the way the world thought about Britain.

Her death today attracted somber tributes …