Democracy
NEW YORK, Jun 4 2020 (IPS) - The United States has been a story of broken dreams and broken glass this past week.
Once again, an unarmed black man died at the hands of a white police officer, with George Floyd being pinned to the ground under a lawman’s knee in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as stunned passersby made cell-phone videos of the incident to post on social media.
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Mar 3 2020 (IPS) - The great American impeachment show has ended not with a bang, but with a whimper. The dirt was washed away from President Trump, the perfect Teflon Guy. Maybe his invulnerability comes from the fact that he appears to be more of a brand than a real person, adapted to a frame of mind that increasingly dominates social media – cheap entertainment, shallowness, vulgarity, invectives, and catchy phrases without support in well-founded facts. Trump is all and nothing, a shape shifting trickster pretending to be the role model for voiceless masses.
DENVER, Colorado, Dec 20 2019 (IPS) - When I decided to become a US citizen in 1990s, it was a deliberate decision to spend my life fighting for preserving and deepening democratic freedoms at a place where I have spent all my adult life. Having struggled against a brutal military dictatorship while I was a teenager, I knew that democracy is something you have to fight hard for. Therefore, when I became a citizen, for the swearing in event I took with me key documents of US democratic heritage. These included the constitution, the federalist papers and related documents from the 1780s. Since that ceremony I have tried to learn as much as I could about the crucial idea of democratic checks and balances among the executive, legislative and judiciary branches of our government. I have come to realize how prescient some of the revolutionaries from the 1770s and 1780s were in identifying the potential sources of tyranny and corruption of democracy. I have always looked at the impeachment provisions in this light.
ROME, Oct 7 2019 (IPS) - It is very likely that the idea of impeaching Donald Trump will be a boomerang. Trump fans are listening to a furious campaign which smacks of coup d’etat and call his accusers traitors who deserve to go to jail.
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 26 2019 (IPS) - Speaking in New York during the United Nations General Assembly’s opening day, United States President Donald Trump continued to float the idea that he should be awarded a Nobel Prize, but that would never happen because the system was rigged.
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 25 2019 (IPS) - The United Nations is an institution which promotes multilateralism and preaches some of the basic tenets of multiparty democracy and liberalism, including the rule of law, universal human rights, free speech, civil liberties, the rights of refugees and freedom of the press.
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 9 2019 (IPS) - The international community must extend protections for Venezuelans in light of a growing humanitarian crisis with no end in sight.
Human Rights Watch has urged governments in the Americas to provide temporary protection to the millions of Venezuelans fleeing a severe humanitarian crisis.
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 24 2018 (IPS) - The United Nation’s Department of Public Information (DPI) last week withdrew UN press credentials from Matthew Lee, a longstanding journalist who reported for his blog, Inner City Press (ICP).
David Kaye is the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression for the United Nations and Edison Lanza is Special Rapporteur for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
GENEVA / WASHINGTON, Aug 3 2018 (IPS) - U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on the free press are strategic, designed to undermine confidence in reporting and raise doubts about verifiable facts.
The President has labelled the media as being the “enemy of the American people” “very dishonest” or “fake news,” and accused the press of “distorting democracy” or spreading “conspiracy theories and blind hatred”.
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 7 2018 (IPS)
World leaders must commit to ending child migrant detention during United Nations negotiations next week, a human rights group said.
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