The 32 teams battling it out on South Africa’s soccer fields for a shot at glory aren’t the only contenders in this year’s World Cup. Amnesty International is also fielding a team of human rights defenders and joining other rights groups in examining the host country’s rights progress. Stand Up United’s 11 team members include representatives from China, Cameroon, Iran, Kenya, Pakistan, Serbia and South Africa. It’s a powerful roster of rights advocates working on issues ranging from war crimes and extrajudicial killings, to indigenous and migrant community rights. South Africa is expressing understandable pride over hosting the tournament for [...]
It’s easy to exagerrate the extent of Israel’s diplomatic isolation, and you can count on that to happen every time an incident like the Gaza flotilla occurs. But what is indisputable is that since at least the Lebanon War of 2006, the Israeli strategic braintrust has prioritized maintaining absolute liberty of action over massaging international opinion. The reason has to do with the logic upon which the state of Israel is based, namely that the Jewish people needed a state of its own because it could not count on the community of nations to protect it. In other words, the [...]
The European Commission finalized a draft of a banking data-sharing agreement with the U.S. today. The draft will now be presented to the European Parliament and the heads of state meeting for final approval before taking effect. A similar deal was torpedoed by the EU parliament in February due to concerns over privacy infringements. In a nod to parliamentarians’ concerns, the new agreement includes conditions to limit shared data to information related to ongoing terrorist investigations and to forbid data mining. This is the first significant example of the EU parliament’s expanded powers under the Lisbon Treaty. I remain convinced [...]
