By Joshua Miguel Makalintal (FYEG, Junge Grüne) Austrian law dictates that the country’s federal asylum agency has six months to finalize an asylum application. But in the alpine province of Tyrol, the operation remains idle and refugees are desperately waiting for any result that will determine their future. This has made them create the “Freedomseekers”…
Category: Peace & Conflicts
The NATO protests show the need for an ‘Activist Plan B’
Protesters packed their bags last Friday in Wales. The NATO summit hadn’t ended yet, but the activists headed home nonetheless. There weren’t the numbers needed to sustain the camp. It seems odd – anti-NATO demonstrations at an ebb at a time when the West is rallying for war, whether launching a new offensive in Iraq…
A Bosnian Spring?
A Bosnian Spring? Twenty years after the Dayton Agreement, there is something going wrong in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Despite the implementation of a remarkable reconstruction and development program after the war until today, corrupt and incompetent political elites rein the country. Unemployment rate is at minimum 40 per cent and young people and rural…
Responsibility To Protect: An Introduction
April 6, 1994. A plane carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana is shot down over the skies of Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, acting as a catalyst for the murder of around 800,000 people over just 100 days. These events should require little extrapolation here. Skip forward 7 years, past civil war in Sierra Leone, war in Congo, and…
When Intervention Becomes Necessary
In 1994 about 800 000 people were brutally killed in Rwanda during a period of just one hundred days. After this episode the UN officials, heads of state and civil society all agreed that we could never let this happen again. But it did. In 2003 a humanitarian emergency developed in Darfur in western Sudan…
Responsibility to Protect: The problem with neglecting its political dimension
Seeing children dying at the horn of Africa makes us feel guilty, seeing the piles of dead bodies in the streets of Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda as well makes us feel that we just bluntly have to do something against it. That we have the moral obligation to act and prevent this horror…
Making the police “Green” from the inside – home affairs with a difference!
In the last thirty years since the Green Party was founded, many justice and home affairs experts have thought about what a Green policing policy would be like. However, these thoughts were never really conclusive. The interior ministries were in the hands of conservative and sometimes social democratic parties. These, on the one hand, easily…
Tunisian Revolution In The Eyes Of A Tunisian Citizen
Hello my friends, I’m Mouna Hamrita, a Tunisian citizen working in the field of youth, member in AJMEC (Association des Jeunes Mediterranées pour les Echanges Culturels) organization. I would like to share my feelings about the Tunisian revolution with you.
Another Look At Victimhood: UNSC Resolution 1820 And Victims Of Sexual Violence In Armed Conflicts
In 2008, the UN Security Council passed the resolution 1820, which condemns the use of sexual violence against civilians as a tactical weapon in armed conflicts. The particular emphasis of the resolution is on female civilians as victims of sexual violence and their special need for protection. The prevention of conflict-related sexual violence has once…
Duisburg Love Parade – countdown for Sauerland's office
Some will say it was the ransom of excess : an event growing bigger by the year (up to 1 million people in 2010, as the organizers and the local authorities, among which the mayor, had told the press), a large proportion of participants making use of hard psychotropic substances, turning some weak minds into worse…