Freedom House’s annual review of the world’s most-repressive societies is a fixture among human rights advocates as a gauge of where the most work needs to be done. This year’s list features a set of countries that also represents major engagement challenges. Burma, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan all ranked as the world’s most-restrictive countries on political and civil liberties in Freedom House’s report (.pdf), “The Worst of the Worst of 2010: The World’s Most Repressive Societies.” Belarus, Chad, China, Cuba, Guinea, Laos, Saudi Arabia, and Syria fared only slightly better. “In this report, [...]
Back in January, everyone expected 2010 to be a watershed year for the European Union. It certainly has been that, but not for the reasons people expected at the time. The advent of the long-awaited post-Lisbon union, with its new offices of president of the European Council and foreign policy chief, turned out to be an anti-climactic non-event. Instead, the lingering legacy of the pre-Lisbon union — cooked books and hidden debt, along with fundamental political and cultural differences on fiscal and monetary policy — has brought the EU to its knees, just when it was expected to soar. This [...]
In late-May, Iraq sent its first ambassador to Kuwait since the outbreak of the First Gulf War. In an e-mail interview, Ahmed Ali, a research associate at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, discusses the historical context and current state of Iraq-Kuwait relations. WPR: What are some of the unresolved issues in Iraq-Kuwait relations? Ahmed Ali: There are two sets of unresolved issues between Iraq and Kuwait — tangible and intangible. They are closely related and are sources of continuous friction between the two countries. Additionally, they have the ability to feed off of each other and as a [...]
