The second half of Switzerland's chairpersonship of OSCE, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, has begun. OSCE expert Walter Kemp, a Canadian based in Vienna, assesses the state of play. He does not exclude that the prospect of a military conflict...
Football – the world sport, not the American exception – and politics go forever together: Switzerland’s victory against Grossdeutschland on Jun 9, 1938, rang a bell of resistance. Germany’s World Cup championship on July 4, 1954, was the spiritual birth of the...
Sima Samar is a medical doctor who works on empowering women in Afghanistan since the 80s. In exile in Pakistan, she founded the NGO Shuhada for the improvement of medical services and education opportunities. After the fall of the Taliban regime in the course of the US invasion after the attacks of 9/11, she became Minister for Women’s Affairs and Vice-President in the interim government of Hamid Karzai from December 2001 to July 2002. Her opposition against Islamic laws resulted in death threats and her resignation. From July 2002 to July 2019, Sima Samar was Chairperson of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, and from 2005 to 2009 she served as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Sudan. Currently, she is a visiting scholar at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in the USA and engaged in the Afghanistan Human Rights Center in New Haven, CT.
Her autobiography is“Outspoken: My Fight for Freedom and Human Rights in Afghanistan» (Random House Canada, 2024).
In some areas, diplomacy is sidelined because the big powers are at loggerheads. Others fade away because no one is interested any longer. One of these cases is the situation of human rights and the extreme discrimination of women in Afghanistan – a «cooperating partner» of the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE). Former minister for women’s affairs Sima Samar – in exile since 2021 – suggests that the Swiss chair «organize some opportunity for a real person from Afghanistan to speak to the public of Europe».
Is the Caudillo limping? There is a current in the punditry – all the stronger, the further away from the empire the opining takes place – that President Trump is losing grip on his flock, but in our homegrown circle of Trumpists no fissures are apparent. Criticism of...