Comment archive

Thursday, 8 Dec 2022
Civil Society Faces an Uphill Struggle to Defend Democracy

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize jointly to Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski, the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, and the Russian human rights organization Memorial for their promotion of “the right to criticize power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens.” This year’s prize constitutes ...

Sunday, 9 Oct 2022
Nobel Peace Prize Honors Courage and Dignity

The Norwegian Nobel Committee had to make an exceedingly difficult decision this year. At a time of war raging in Europe, was the proposition of a peace prize even relevant? Ukraine is certainly fighting a just war and deserves every measure of support that the global West can muster, but ...

Tuesday, 7 Jun 2022
‘May peace not cost us our lives’: Reading Colombia’s peace process as hegemonic crisis

The Colombian government and the guerrilla group FARC-EP envisioned to make history when they sealed the 2016 Peace Agreement, which ended one of the longest standing armed confrontations in human history and promised the cessation of protracted violence. In post-accord Colombia, however, this promise has been eclipsed by setbacks in ...

Wednesday, 2 Jun 2021
Book review: Protecting Human Rights Defenders at Risk

edited by Alice M. Nah, London: Routledge, 2021. 212p. ISBN 9781138392618 ”‘Seguridad’ refers to all the conditions necessary to make human and political life flourish. These are conditions of dignity. But security [to the government] is reduced to a military or police perspective…. People have been sold the idea that ...

Tuesday, 7 Jul 2020
Children in Lockdown: Children’s Rights, Covid-19 and the Case of Norway

“The lost generation of the Covid-19 pandemic is not those at risk over 65, but our children and youth, particularly at present here in Larvik municipality. We communicate with children subjected to violence by siblings, threats, mothers who cry all day, children with mentally ill parents, parents with drug and ...

Friday, 5 Jun 2020
Coronavirus and the (Wannabe) Dictators

In December of last year, the Chinese state jailed a physician in the city of Wuhan. His crime? Attempting to warn authorities against the occurrence of a potentially contagious and deadly new virus. The physician, Dr. Li Wenliang, has since died from the same disease whose spread he tried to ...

Friday, 21 Feb 2020
Teaching transitional justice after conflict and terror: Cases of Kosovo and Norway

Kristin Bergtora Sandvik and Kjersti Lohne ask: How can education help to realize the multiple goals and visions of transitional justice, and how can transnational justice be adapted to new educational objectives? This is the first post in an occasional series on the legal, bureaucratic and political aftermaths of the July ...

Monday, 18 Nov 2019
Protecting Children’s Digital Bodies Through Rights

Children are becoming the objects of a multitude of monitoring devices—what are the possible negative ramifications in low resource contexts and fragile settings? The recent incident of a UNHCR official tweeting a photo of an Iraqi refugee girl holding a piece of paper with all her personal data, including family ...

Tuesday, 5 Nov 2019
Peace with a Human Rights Perspective: Asbjørn Eide Interviewed by Helge Øystein Pharo

Asbjørn Eide, interviewed by Helge Øystein Pharo.

Tuesday, 29 May 2018
Norway – The Colonial Power

Imagine this. Close to a small lake, there is a little building. It has stood there for 120 years – ever since your ancestors, who lived off fishing and foraging, built it. Your grandmother brings you to this place to pass your people’s traditions on to you. You go there ...

Thursday, 9 Nov 2017
Europe’s Quiet Offensive Against People Helping Refugees

A look back on three years since the end of Operation Mare Nostrum. Three years ago today, pressure by the European Union on Italy forced the end of one of the EU’s most successful humanitarian missions, Mare Nostrum, a search-and-rescue operation that in just one year brought 130,000 refugees safely ...