Society

Luckily, the world community in Paris was not as unrealistic as the German Federal Government. The climate treaty expressly allows for the equalization and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Now it\'s up to politicians to align national and international ambitions with the realism of social development and actual climate dynamics.

The purely staff-related nature of the reforms and the statements by Law and Justice\'s politicians leave no doubts that the media fight has one objective: undermining the public media’s ability to scrutinise the actions of the government. The attempt to turn the Polish media into a propaganda tool of the government has already been noticed abroad.

Europe has chosen to define itself as an open society. This allows for individual freedom. But it also gives enemies the opportunity to destroy open spaces, guaranteed by the state, intentionally and with the aim of causing maximum harm. However, it is not only terrorists who are putting the European model at risk.

The sequence of events in Poland might sound familiar to many of you. Hungary experienced quite a similar scenario. Clearly, Poland is not an isolated case. Political radicalisation and anti-democratic backtracking might be contagious.

President Andrzej Duda has just signed the act passed recently by both the Polish parliament (o, hail, the parliamentary majority of Law and Justice!) and the Senate (yay! another session held at 3am!) that is to alter the way in which Constitutional Tribunal operates. So now instead of 5 independent judges we\'ll have 15 (thus 13 will be necessary to make a binding decision) judges of somewhat dubious background while all claims will be scrutinized according to the chronological order in which they have been filed. Sounds sound, but is it really?

On November 18 in Budapest, the Free Market Foundation together with the Uninvited Network and the Civic Platform organized a conference on education. Teachers, students, parents, recruiters and education policy experts worked together during the event to identify the issues of the education system and to formulate responses and solutions.

Last month one of the greatest and most extraordinary economists of our time – Douglass North (1920–2015) – departed. He left enormous inheritance of insights that will be considered and re-considered for a long time, and its entire meaning is yet to be discovered and realized.

Today we celebrate the Human Rights Day. Although it, technically, commemorates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we think the Human Freedom Index and its definition of freedom – the absence of coercive constraint – can assist us in thinking more carefully about the state of freedom around the world.

Following the tragic attacks in Paris and subsequent events in Africa, the debate on multiculturalism and immigration has been given a brand new flame. Both camps have thrown in their big guns.

From a total of 34 OECD countries, 29 of them have a minister for regulatory reform – Slovakia is not one of them. 33 OECD countries have a permanent institution for overseeing regulatory policy – Slovakia is not one of them.