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 …

With global attention focused on North Korea’s threat to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack, the UN Human Rights Council vote to establish a commission of inquiry into “crimes against humanity” in the repressive totalitarian state went largely unnoticed, say …

…. asks the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl.

He considers why the Spanish government and other Western democracies have ignored Angel Carromero’s revelation that the car in which he was driving leading Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá (left) was rammed from behind last …

For a fleeting moment this month, the separate human rights movements of the Han Chinese and Tibetans met at a point of solidarity, say Tenzin Palkyi and Louisa Greve. But such significant instances which build mutual trust are still …

There are extraordinary human beings who of right ought never to die for their very existence is a ray of hope in the tragedy of life, writes Iranian activist and historian Ladan Boroumand (right). 

This thought came to my outraged …

Cuba’s cautiously incremental economic reforms are prompting a new debate over the U.S. embargo which challenges “the longstanding logic that broad sanctions are necessary to suffocate the totalitarian government of Fidel and Raul Castro,” The New York Times reports.…

“After the shooting stopped in 1945, thousands of children and teenagers in Berlin’s ruins were left to their own devices. One in five schoolchildren had lost a parent. Despair gripped the adults in the capital, all of which was still …

At a time of democratic regression, even in supposedly consolidated democracies, an important new book on the ‘Sovietization’ of eastern Europe explains the allure of the ‘totalitarian temptation’ and describes the techniques with which authoritarian rule is imposed, not …

“Members of the Memorial human rights society, relatives of victims and others come here once a year to stand near the Solovetsky Stone, brought from the White Sea island where the Soviets organized their first prison camp in 1923, …

Is China’s ruling Communist party about to enter a decade of systemic crisis that will undermine the durability of one-party rule?

Single-party regimes have the option of pursuing the Soviet route to self-destruction or the Taiwan-Mexican option of “self-renewal and …