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How former Austrian Chancellor Kurz tripped over his own ego
Sebastian Kurz was on a path to go down in history as the chancellor who managed the COVID-19 pandemic well and and safely steered his country through the crisis. That he and his team were capable of that has been proven by their reaction to the first COVID wave. But things were meant to go down a different path.
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Is this really a contradiction?
When discussing the future, and most importantly debating on how to shape the future and build a better world, there are basically two groups in this conversation: On one side, you have the utopians, who favor great visions and like to construct comprehensive models of society in order to make the world a better place. On the other side are those who call themselves pragmatists and who prefer very modest, often merely cosmetic approaches, as in their opinion, real change is not possible anyway. But maybe the utopian and the pragmatic view are not as opposed to each other as it may seem at first glimpse. Here, I try connecting the two.
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Why extradition would mean a human rights violation.
For over a decade now, WikiLeaks publisher, journalist and whistleblower Julian Assange has been subject to persecution. He is currently in detention in the United Kingdom, possibly facing extradition to the United States, where he has been indicted on charges of espionage. In reality, Assange’s work has been that of a journalist and not that of a spy. Assange has been exercising his right to freedom of expression by exposing crime and wrongdoing at the highest level in both the political and the economic sphere. In this article, I seek to lay out why Julian Assange’s right to freedom of expression under the European Charter on Human Rights (ECHR) was and is being violated and why it would be in violation of international human rights law to extradite him or to keep him in custody any further.
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Freedom for one does not mean freedom for everyone
It seems like many people still hold the belief that it is a good idea to deregeulate markets and the economy, to abolish the vast amount of laws that we have and to let corporate leaders freely choose what's best for them. This would result in economic growth and thus to a raise in standard of living for everyone. Fewer rules always mean more freedom, right?
This view is fundamentally flawed. Though deregulation leads to fewer rules which in turn may seem like it leads to more freedom, we need to raise the question: Whose freedom?
