The defeat of Germany in the Second World War, and the subsequent birth of the United Nations in 1945 ushered in the modern human rights regime. Prior to this post-war era, human rights was not a salient feature in the parlance of international law, and for good reason; nation-states were guided by the civility of the ‘good-neighbor,’ which meant that ‘good-neighbors’ do not interfere or unilaterally intervene in matters of purely domestic character outside their territorial competence. Formally, the ‘good-neighbor’ ethos came under the umbrella of state sovereignty, and to a large extent, continued to dictate how states dealt with one another even after the advent of the UN, and the consequence on human rights movement remained unchanged: States continued to regard human rights as domestic matters that should be dealt with domestically, any outside intervention was considered ‘bad form’ and an affront to the norm of state sovereignty. That was then!
Browsing: Development and Security Matters
Fleet of luxury cars including Ferraris and Lamborghinis worth more than $20m are sold at auction after Swiss authorities seized them from son of Equatorial Guinea’s president in money-laundering probe.
• Auction house in Switzerland sells off 25 luxury sports cars including rare Lamborghini Veneno roadster
• Vehicles were seized from son of Equatorial Guinea’s president of 40 years, Teodoro Obiang
Norway’s petroleum sector is its most important industry. The petroleum sector accounts for 21.5% of its GDP, and almost half (48.9%) of total exports. In 2013 Norway was ranked the 15th-largest oil producer, and the 11th-largest oil exporter in the world. It is also the biggest oil producer in western Europe.
Unprecedented protests against police brutality have spun into deadly clashes in several major Nigerian cities. There is no accurate toll yet, but as of 23 October, the government had reported 69 people killed, including civilians, police officers and soldiers, some murdered in the most gruesome circumstances.
Sub-Saharan Africa has the dubious distinction of having the lowest electricity generation capability, and its inhabitants suffer the most debilitating energy poverty in the world. Of the over one billion residents of the sub-continent, an estimated 631 million of them are without reliable access to electricity;
European governments are knowingly complicit in the torture and abuse of tens of thousands of refugees and migrants detained by Libyan immigration authorities in appalling conditions in Libya, said Amnesty International in a report published today in the wake of global outrage over the sale of migrants in Libya.
By most standards, Ezekiel is living the middle-class Nigerian dream. At 41, he works as a senior manager at a Lagos-based media company where he earns a healthy salary. He also runs a successful side business importing and selling American used cars and has enough money to fund his wife and two children on annual holidays in the United States.
“The world is flat,” Thomas Friedman has famously declared. His claim is that in this modern age of globalization, when capital can cross national borders so easily, when investment funds can be pulled from one country to another instantaneously to respond to new business opportunities, economic development is attainable in the most surprising of places.
A trio of White House strategies have heralded the return of strategic competition between the United States and its adversaries, China and Russia, in sub-Saharan Africa. In the National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, and President Trump’s Africa
Dan Banik and Nikolai Hegertun. How much are acts of generosity worth in international relations? For affluent countries, foreign aid…