human rights

repression
Politics

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Transnational repression, as defined by a Freedom House report, describes how authoritarian states reach across national borders to silence dissent and critical voices among diaspora and exile communities. It is essentially an assortment of methods that a state can use to subdue its own citizens living outside of its territory. Freedom House first drew attention to this phenomenon in their 2021 report, “Out of Sight, Not Out of Reach.”

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In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus. In the same month, Bosnia and Herzegovina began implementing restrictive measures aimed at protecting the local population from the new virus. As in many other countries of the world, these measures were on the verge of not respecting human rights and caused numerous controversies.

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Today, the European Commission will publish its annual Rule of Law Report. The new report could now intensify the conflict between the EU and the two Central European member states. Given the continued undermining of democratic principles in Poland and Hungary, one would expect not only a retrospective analysis, but also concrete recommendations for action against violations of the rule of law. However, this does not seem to be the case.

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I wanted to expand on the idea that relatively novel platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok, are changing the way we see things. Everyone with a camera phone can make videos without any regards to aesthetic rules about composition, lighting, narrative structure and so forth. Those videos that are much more composed are regarded as too artificial, and are trying too hard, whereas realism gained in importance.

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Human rights enforcement at the international and at the regional level is difficult, since it is mostly up to individual states to decide which rules they implement within their boundaries. Furthermore, coming up with rights that are universal in nature is a difficult task, therefore, legal documents tend to be rather general when dealing with this topic.