Thousands of Portuguese nurses marched through Lisbon earlier this month to call for higher wages and better working conditions, as the main nurses’ unions negotiate with the government following a recent three-week strike that paralyzed the country’s health sector. Other public sector unions have taken similar actions, putting intense pressure on Prime Minister Antonio Costa, who survived a no-confidence motion last month. In an interview with WPR, Jorge Fernandes, a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, points out that this turmoil is largely a result of behind-the-scenes politicking by Portugal’s major political parties ahead of legislative elections [...]
For the first time since it was founded in 2006, the United Nations Human Rights Council earlier this month rebuked Saudi Arabia for its human rights record. In a rare show of unity, the council’s statement, which condemned the kingdom’s “continuing arrests and arbitrary detentions of human rights defenders,” was co-signed by all 28 members of the European Union. But that move coincided with another unanimous decision by EU member states: to prevent Saudi Arabia from being added to an EU blacklist of countries with insufficient controls on money laundering and terrorism financing. In an interview with WPR, Julien Barnes-Dacey, [...]
In late February, Canada’s former justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, testified before a parliamentary committee that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other high-ranking aides had pressured her to intervene on behalf of the engineering firm SNC-Lavalin in a criminal case being pursued against the company. Trudeau now faces his biggest political crisis since taking office, with general elections looming in October. In an email interview, Christopher Sands, director of the Center for Canadian Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, explains the background of the SNC-Lavalin scandal and its implications for Trudeau and Canada’s political landscape. World Politics [...]
