Articles

A year ago, Russia announced its withdrawal from the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. That withdrawal became official and final on Nov. 2, 2026. That day, as the news spread around…

National Unity Day on 4 November has, in this year of 2026 – declared the Year of Unity of the Peoples of Russia – been stretched out like an accordion: at the beginning of November, and every year from now…

Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the author of the well-known autobiographical novel Night, wrote that “only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was; the rest will never know.” As Wiesel saw it, “the witness knew…

August 2 is recognized as Roma Holocaust Memorial Day (sometimes referred to as the “Roma and Sinti Holocaust Memorial Day,” and occasionally as the “Gypsy Holocaust Memorial Day”). On the night of August 2–3, 1944, 4,300 Roma, prisoners of the so-called…

At the end of April, New York annually hosts sessions of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, an advisory expert body affiliated with the UN Economic and Social Council. The Forum has operated since 2000, and this year…

There is, oddly enough, a kind of blunt honesty in the decision of the Chelyabinsk Central Court to ban an Oscar-winning film about the militarisation of schoolchildren in the town of Karabash. The prosecutor’s complaint was disarmingly direct: the film…