About three months ago, the Belarusian officials grounded the flight of Ryanair airlines with the activist Raman Pratasevich and his girlfriend on board. Their subsequent arrest in Minsk has provoked international outrage. Why did it happen and how is the story unfolding?
Effective regulation of emerging and disruptive technologies is among the chief legislative challenges of contemporary policy-makers, including (perhaps especially) those concerned with internationally binding regulation. The EU is particularly sensitive to such challenges. Its freshly unveiled Artificial Intelligence Act is an ambitious proposal to regulate AI technologies in a human-centric way.
It has been more than half a year since hostilities broke out in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. The humanitarian situation in the region is worsening every day and there is an increasing number of reports of war crimes committed by both sides of the conflict. Despite its large-scale consequences, the conflict remains relatively unknown to the public.
Who deserves priority over a life-saving vaccine when everyone has a morally equal worth? The COVAX initiative is a path from vaccine nationalism to vaccine equity, but rich countries pay lip service to the initiative while hoarding doses. These same countries also refuse to support a waiver of intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines thus denying their moral and legal obligations.
On 12 September 2020, the Iranian wrestler Navid Afkari was secretly executed. Afkari had been charged and convicted of stabbing police officers during anti-government protests. However, the evidence of his guilt is disputable. Afkari himself claimed that he had been tortured to confess, and his confession was the key evidence for his death sentence.
Despite being busy dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, the Korean peninsula may not be as stabilized as it seems. What is the likely scenario of the recent development in North Korea and what should we, and the US in particular, be aware of?
When it comes to North Korea, the most serious security concern is certainly its pursuit of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Although nuclear negotiations between the United States and North Korea have been going on for more than thirty-five years, they have not come to a long-lasting agreement.
The international NGO, University Women of Europe, brought a claim before the European Committee of Social Rights that 15 European states have failed to enforce the right to work and the right to fair remuneration by not making any measurable progress in decreasing the gender pay gap. The NGO equally pointed out that only a small number of women occupy decision-making positions within private companies. In reaction to the first collective complaint ever filed against all state parties to the European Social Charter, the Committee declared that 14 states have violated at least one of their obligations.
Gender equality is an idea that the feminist movement has been trying to achieve for centuries. Human rights treaties and their enforcement mechanisms are one of the means of reaching this goal. Non-discrimination clauses and aspiration to the idea of equality can be found in the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as in Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights. There are also specific treaties which were adopted solely for the purpose of combating gender inequality, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979) or the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (2011).
