Briefing Archive

An ogre of a giant looms to the east of Europe, occasionally in the shape of a country, other times in the shape of a company, the two often indistinguishable. Russia and Gazprom are poised to devour the whole of Europe and its Asian neighbors. OAO Gazprom’s influence has been underestimated and, astonishingly, often ignored. By far the largest owner of natural gas reserves and the largest supplier of gas in the world, six times as big as No. 2, Royal Dutch/Shell, the company currently provides over a quarter of Europe’s natural gas, and is aggressively looking to greatly increase […]

NAIROBI, Kenya — Since Sen. Barack Obama early last month secured the Democratic nomination for U.S. president, Obama fever, already widespread, has become an epidemic in this country where the senator’s father was born. “Everyone now claims that he or she is a cousin of the senator,” said Tom Ombaka, a businessman in Kisumu, the lakeside city where many of Obama’s relatives make their homes. “I have met more than 60 people since Obama won endorsement to run for the presidency . . . who claim they are the senator’s blood relatives.” Even Kenya’s Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, has hopped […]

Editor’s Note: Rights & Wrongs covers the world’s major human rights-related news and appears every week. Click here to browse past installments. NEW U.N. RIGHTS CHIEF TO BE NAMED — United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon this week will name South African Judge Navanethem Pillay as the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, according to various press reports. Under apartheid, the Harvard-educated Pillay, who is an ethnic Tamil, was the first woman to establish an independent legal practice in South Africa’s Natal province in 1967. In post-apartheid South Africa, Pillay became the first woman named as a high court judge in […]

On July 15, Indonesian and East Timorese leaders jointly accepted the findings of the Commission of Truth and Friendship, established in 2005, which blamed Indonesian security forces for committing “gross human rights violations” in a failed attempt to prevent the succession of East Timor from Indonesia in 1999. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta and East Timor Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao issued a joint statement that expressed “deep regret to all parties and victims, who directly or indirectly suffered physical and psychological wounds” due to the affair, in which hundreds of people died. At a time […]

ALONG HIGHWAY 369, Brazil — It was the middle of the night when an officer waved the busload of smugglers off the highway at a checkpoint in Paraná state. A military policeman in a crisp khaki uniform and bullet-proof vest boarded the bus and began shining his flashlight at faces and overhead bins. Two men were ordered off the bus to unload their cargo from the compartment below. Soon, however, they were back to take a hurried cash collection. After a sufficient number of wallets were opened and relieved of bills, the bus was waved on. The passengers breathed a […]

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE . . . — That four-page biography of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi distributed to reporters traveling with President Bush to the G-8 summit in Japan earlier this month apparently wasn’t the only White House snafu in the background material compiled for the trip. As was reported, the specially prepared press kit described Italy as “a country known for governmental corruption and vice,” and called Berlusconi an opportunist who bought his way to political power. An Italian correspondent covering the summit read it and immediately telephoned an Italian official who, in turn, took it up with […]

It isn’t shocking that, all else being equal, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would prefer to have American troops out of his country. But all else isn’t equal. After Maliki caused a stir last week by calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops, other members of his government immediately began qualifying the statement. The ambivalence is understandable; it reflects the ambivalence of Iraqis in general. Most are deeply suspicious of American motives and want U.S. troops out of their country. At the same time, in towns across Iraq and neighborhoods around Baghdad, U.S. soldiers and Marines are […]

During the past week, representatives of civil liberty groups and the U.S. government have feuded over how many people were on the watch list of individuals suspected of being potential terrorists. The American Civil Liberties Union held a recent news conference to publicize their calculation that the database now includes more than 1 million names, whereas homeland security officials claimed that “only” 400,000 people were included. Caroline Fredrickson, the ACLU’s Washington legislative director, called the growth in the size of the terrorist watch list “unfair to travelers, unfair to law-abiding Americans and unfair to the security screeners who have to […]

MEXICO CITY — The now-infamous June 20 nightclub raid was supposed to be a crowning moment, a public relations coup, for Mexico City’s newest police force. Police vans waited nearby, ready to haul off up to hundreds of offenders — drug users, drug dealers, minors drinking booze, and club staff taking kickbacks to ignore these crimes. Even some members of the media were given front row seats to watch the cops from Unipol — the recently launched cooperative unit comprised of beat cops and investigative police — send its team up the stairs of the dingy antro, as such clubs […]

N’DJAMENA, Chad — They usually come at night, to the sprawling refugee camps in eastern Chad along the border with Sudan. Recruiters for Chad-based rebel groups, which are locked in bloody combat with Khartoum and its militia proxies in Sudan’s Darfur region, sometimes simply show up at the camps and new recruits, many of them still boys, come to them voluntarily. But when there’s a shortage of volunteers, the recruiters might resort to force, according to aid workers in eastern Chad. The aid workers, who spoke to World Politics Review on conditions of anonymity owing to the sensitivity of the […]

MEXICO CITY — President Felipe Calderón spent the week leading up to the second anniversary of his narrow election victory July 2 touring Southeastern Mexico, where he promoted the main tenets of his administration: security; structural reforms; and social programs. While inaugurating a baseball stadium in Cancún that was built with funds from a public security program, he spoke of the Mexican military destroying a “world record” amount of cocaine and seizing more than 16,000 weapons over the past year. The president also got his hands dirty mixing cement in a Campeche home as he promoted “Piso Firme,” a program […]

INTERNATIONAL BAR REPORT ON SINGAPORE — Singapore has achieved phenomenal economic development but still fails to meet international standards on freedom of assembly and expression, and an independent judiciary, the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute said in a report released July 8. “As one of the world’s most successful economies, Singapore should be a leader in human rights and the rule of law, and should now have the confidence and maturity to recognize that this would be complementary, not contradictory, to its future prosperity,” institute Executive Director Mark Ellis said at its release. Singaporean authorities continue to restrict media […]

On Friday, July 11, senior British and American leaders denounced China and Russia for vetoing a U.N. Security Council (UNSC) resolution that would have imposed sanctions against Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and his closest supporters for using violence and other manipulations during last month’s presidential elections. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, criticized Moscow and Beijing for having sided “with Mugabe against the people of Zimbabwe.” In his remarks to the council after the vote, Khalilzad observed that, “The u-turn in the Russian position is particularly surprising and disturbing.” Khalilzad then made the stinging comment that, “The […]

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — The United States has joined a chorus of international condemnation and offered FBI assistance after a prominent Cambodian journalist was shot dead just two weeks ahead of national elections. Khim Sambo, 47, and his 21-year-old son Khat Sarinpheata were riding on a motorbike near Phnom Penh’s Olympic Stadium when gunmen opened fire, ending a period of unusual calm amid the electioneering. Campaigning had focused on the economy and a border dispute between Cambodia and Thailand that involved possession of the Preah Vihear temple in Cambodia’s remote northwest. The temple was recently listed by UNESCO as a […]

Some of the most important moments in modern diplomacy live on in photography. That’s why this weekend French President Nicolas Sarkozy — in the presence of news photographers — made sure to simultaneously grab the hands of the Israeli Prime Minister and the Palestinian Authority President and triumphantly stand as the link between the two. The image, symbolizing the power of diplomacy to bring enemies together could have made history, except that we had seen it countless times before. That was just one of the problems with Sarkozy’s weekend summit of Mediterranean nations, a gathering filled with potential, but light […]

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and his Colombian counterpart, Álvaro Uribe, have agreed to restore relations and strengthen bilateral trade between their two countries, bringing an end to months of bitter feuds between the two leaders. “As of now, a new era begins with Colombia. We decided to completely turn the page. The storm has passed,” Chávez told reporters Friday, after hosting a private one-day meeting with Uribe at one of the world’s largest oil refineries in Punto Fijo, Venezuela. “We will relaunch our ties, starting on a personal level and then moving on to political, social and […]

American voters are not the only ones who experience U.S. political theater. Nearly every major newspaper in the world covers developments in the 2008 presidential election pitting Republican Sen. John McCain against Democratic Sen. Barack Obama. Perhaps no other story is covered as frequently around the globe. A close second, however, may be the story of Iran, and international efforts to prevent the Iranian regime from developing nuclear weapons. In fact, both of these story lines regularly overlap, as both U.S. presidential candidates pronounce on policy toward Iran. On domestic policy matters, the policy pronouncements of candidates do not themselves […]