Diplomacy & Crisis News

The country’s deputy prime minister takes aim at Beijing’s actions.

A deputy speaker in the State Duma floated the idea of restricting entry to Russia for citizens of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

Sam Rainsy cancels his return trip to Phnom Penh where he risks being jailed in an ongoing crackdown on dissent.

With the G20 leaders focused on terrorism after the attacks in Paris, China wants help in its fight against ETIM.

What would a U.S. Navy without the F/A-18 Super Hornet look like?

Welcoming the recent elections in Myanmar as ‘a new chapter in the country’s history,’ United Nations Special Rapporteur Yanghee Lee today reaffirmed her commitment to work with all parties in the country to improve the human rights situation there, saying "the people have expressed the will for change. There is no turning back now."

While recognizing Israel’s “serious security challenges,” a senior United Nations official today called its punitive demolition of the homes of alleged attackers “inherently unjust” and against international law, noting that 20 Palestinians, eight of them children, were made homeless in the past three days.

The U.S. says it is defending freedom of navigation; really it just wants to limit China's power in the South China Sea.

Photos from The Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq – CYCI has now made insulated warm jackets for men, women, and children after several of our liberations and spending time on the ground, our team realized that these individuals were not equipped for the cold temperatures.

A heated debate has emerged regarding the Syrian refugee crisis and security in Europe and the rest of the Western world. It was found that at least one of the Paris attackers was found to have come with a wave of refugees from Syria or another country outside of the EU in October 2015. With the mass migration of Syrians and other refugees to Europe, the monitoring and identifying of refugee claimants has been overwhelmed or simply ignored. The security risk was always present even before direct threats from terrorist groups, but with the latest attacks in Paris, there has to be accountability by governments to monitor who they allow into their countries.

After the recent attack, the two month old policy put forth by the new Canadian government to accept 25,000 Syrian refugees before Christmas 2015 was said to continue, despite new security concerns. Critics of the plan cite security reasons, referring to the incident in France as a realistic scenario. Additional concerns are the short time frame to monitor and register the refugees. Despite the fact that all the refugees to be taken are already located in safe countries, the commitment seems to give little benefit with many costs. Despite the new minister of Public Safety assuring Canadians that there will be no major security concerns, the approach the new government has taken seems to neglect some appropriate criticisms of the plan.

The acceptance of refugees should account for some factors that may have been ignored in the European example. Most, if not all of the refugees that are being accepted by European countries as well as the Canada 25,000 are already located in safe countries. While they are legally defined as refugees in those countries, the obligation for 3rd party countries to take in refugees from the host countries is not a matter of direct urgency. It would help Syria’s refugees if Western nations would take those directly from Syria who are in immediate danger. This does not mean that relieving Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon of the overwhelming amount of refugees is not a priority, but help should be given to those who are in immediate danger first.

Such groups inside or outside of Syria should be considered as those at greatest risk of threat, notably children, women, disabled and elderly people. Ethnic and religious minorities in the region that are the subject of repression by both sides of the conflict should be given special consideration as host countries may not treat them equally due to historical prejudices. Ethnic and religious minorities have their problems compounded as they may not have a safe place to go even if they are able to get out of Syria and Iraq. They are the ones who are directly affected by ISIS, and should be focused on if the refugee policy claimed by the EU and Western nations is one that claims to directly protect those refugees fleeing ISIS.

I have discussed the issue of the refugee crisis with friends from Syria, and tackling any issues there must consider the reality that there are thousands of different interest groups fighting to take over the government in Syria. Many of the refugees in Jordan came from escaping conflict with the government, and were in Jordan before ISIS became a major player in the conflict. The assumption that all refugees from Syria were created by fleeing from ISIS ignores the reality and factionalism that has fueled the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015.

As a touchstone of experience in the matter, I used to work defending the rights of refugee claimants in Canada directly, including many Syrians and Iraqis. During a normal period of refugee re-settlement, our efforts in Toronto, Canada with a normal level of staff found it difficult to keep up with the number of claimants at the time. To bring in 25,000 in a period of a month and a half in the middle of a Canadian winter is simply irresponsible. We also would never have an individual inserted into Canadian society without ensuring their identity. Rarely we would fail in this objective, as even in countries with conflicts taking place, there are always ways to find identity documents for individuals. In the event we could not prove their identity for release, they would remain in a detention facility until their identity documents were obtained, or they were sent to a hearing where the merits of their case and situation in their country of origin were measured.

It was well known that identifying someone was the only way to have them gain access to the general society, and it was a fair and responsible process that took time, skill and trained individuals to accomplish. This was, and should be the bare minimum a government owes to the people who elected them. While it is not a guarantee that such a process did not take place in France, nor could have stopped an attack, assuming responsibility for safety and security is an obligation no government should be allowed to disengage themselves from at any point for any reason. This is to the benefit of the general public, refugee claimants and those vulnerable groups that find they no longer have a place for a peaceful life in their traditional lands.

How will Myanmar's new government affect relations between it and China?

India’s defense minister officially inducted eight Boeing P-8I Poseidon aircraft into the Indian Navy last week.

As Raheel Sharif visits the United States, it's worth taking stock of how little has changed in U.S.-Pakistan relations.

via Sites at Penn State.

Over a quarter of a century since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the scars of central and eastern Europe’s post-communist legacy are still visible.

Lacking the institutional infrastructure and regulatory oversight, the collapse of communism in the USSR created a void across the former Soviet bloc. This void offered fertile ground for wealthy individuals and institutions to exploit the absence of effective regulatory oversight and plunder the countries’ resources.

This “rise of the oligarchs” in Russia itself is well documented, with the likes of oil-tycoon turned Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich, and media tycoon Boris Berezovsky etched into the public’s minds. Less well known, however, is the similar exploitation that took place in central and eastern Europe and other former Soviet states, such as Romania and Bulgaria.

The lure of European Union membership and the introduction of reforms to ensure effective free-market oversight has done much to mitigate the rise and influence of oligarchs in Eastern Europe, but the media, unlike other sectors, has survived relatively unscathed from the reform agenda. The absence of effective media pluralism is still indicative across a number of central & eastern European countries.

In 2013, the European Parliament earmarked a budget for a pilot program to assess the risks to media pluralism in various member states. Responsibility for carrying out the ‘Media Pluralism Monitor’ (MPM) was subsequently awarded to the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom (CMPF), which selected Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy and the UK as test cases for the pilot study.

The study explored a range of different aspects of the media, including the pluralism of media ownership and control and the level of political interference in the media market.When assessing regulatory safeguards for fair, balanced and impartial political reporting in television broadcast media, Bulgaria and Hungary were both deemed to be “high-risk.”When examining regulatory safeguards against high concentration of ownership or control in the media, Hungary was the only country to be deemed to be high-risk.Most concerning was the study’s assessment of editorial independence, where both Hungary and Italy were deemed to be at high risk of editorial interference.

A separate study by the Centre for Media Transparency (CMT), titled: “the men who bit the (watch) dogs”, looks specifically at media ownership in Romania. More detailed than the CMPF study, the CMT report explores some of the key individuals involved in shaping Romania’s media industry in the wake of the country’s independence from Russia.

Ronald Lauder, former US ambassador to Austria and son of the cosmetics tycoon Estée Lauder, is particularly notable. Quick to identify the significant opportunities presented by the nascent media industry in eastern Europe, in 1994 Lauder founded the Central Media Enterprise (CME). By 1997, the news and entertainment company owned TV stations in Slovenia, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine.

Today, CME has operations in six central and eastern European markets with 34 television channels broadcasting to approximately 50 million people. Often, to gain access to domestic markets, CME was required to engage with local representatives. Access to the Romanian market came via Adrian Sârbu, a former media affairs minister in Romania’s first post-communist government.

Both Lauder and Sârbu have subsequently become subject to intense criticism. Likened to eastern Europe’s answer to Rupert Murdoch, Lauder was associated with nefarious local business partners in Ukraine, whom the FBI and European law enforcement agencies suspected of having ties to Russian organized crime. These connections culminated with Lauder facing a lawsuit seeking $750 million in damages filed by rival broadcaster Perekhid Media Enterprises Ltd. Then, in February 2014, Sârbu was charged with tax evasion, money laundering and embezzlement. Mired in scandal, Lauder resigned from the CME board in March 2014, while Sârbu sold his stake in the company later the same year. Time Warner subsequently bought pro TV.

In February this year, Sârbu was detained for 30 days after being charged with tax evasion, money laundering and embezzlement. He has since been released while awaiting trial. Sârbu’s arrest has elevated him to the esteemed ranks of Romania’s other leading media tycoons: Dan Voiculescu, Sorin Ovidiu Vântu and Dinu Patriciu—all of whom are currently under criminal investigation.

Unfortunately, the story of the Romanian media industry’s development is not unique. Instead, it is indicative of a broader trend of both domestic and foreign capital exploiting the regulatory and institutional vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Alarmingly though, the European Union appears to be waking up only now to the implications this threat poses to the stability of the democratic process in these countries.

Despite the majority of the former eastern bloc joining the EU in 2004 (with Romania and Bulgaria joining three years later), it wasn’t until 2013 that the EU began allocating funding for the establishment of the Media Pluralism Monitor, which has yet to fully document and assess the degree of media plurality in the majority of former Eastern bloc members.

A free press is a core component to the effective functioning of any democratic country. If the EU is to continue to act as an institution committed to promoting democracy and freedom of expression throughout its member states then it must be more rigorous in assessing threats and challenges to these core values.

A recent multi-country survey revealed that people are confused about the rising threat of antibiotic resistance to public health and are unclear about how to prevent it from growing, World Health Organization (WHO) said today at the launch of a global campaign at the initiation of the first World Antibiotic Awareness Week.

When it comes to seeking refuge, Afghans often get the short end of the stick in Europe.

With the exception of an approximate delivery date, details of the Sino-Russian weapons deal remain murky.

Both sides will reportedly ink an agreement in principle on military technology.

Reports from human rights groups paint a dark picture of the use of torture in China's legal system.

Beijing and Vientiane seal a much-awaited deal.