“We are living through a period of global backsliding of democracy and autocratic assault on vital freedoms,” Yuri Dzhibladze told President Barack Obama last week.
The head of the Moscow-based Center for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, joined a delegation of human rights defenders from last week’s Human Rights Summit at a White House meeting with President Obama and National Security Council staff.
Dzhibladze, a member of the Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy, didn’t waste the opportunity to give the President a piece of his mind:
We have heard a message from you that engagement with non-democracies will be not happening at the cost of addressing human rights and democracy issues and American support to democratic activists and human rights defenders. However, so far it has not worked this way. Many autocrats have taken search for common interests and a more intelligent and discreet approach of the U.S. government for its weakness, and in fact quite a few of them have not delivered what they promised to the U.S. At the same time they successfully continue their anti-democratic practices and their attack on fundamental freedoms, putting in jail and murdering opposition members, silencing criticism and dispersing protests, rigging elections and manipulating courts.
[...] liberties are following an authoritarian trend and, unfortunately, the bulk of such leaders is growing and consolidating. What is much more surprising than the authoritarian entrenchment in Africa or Asia is the [...]