Category Archives: government

reconciliation on the Balkans

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Serbia’s Brand of Reconciliation: Embracing Old War Criminals

MATTHEW BRUNWASSER datetime=”2017-11-24T14:53:57-05:00″>NOV. 23, 2017

Observers also note the return of the political language of the 1990s by some senior Serbian government officials as they attack dissenters as traitors, spies and enemies.

The European Union warned against letting a war criminal give a lecture to the academy, but the general received high praise from the defense minister, Mr. Vulin, a former close political ally of Mr. Milosevic’s widow, Mirjana Markovic.

The public support for a war criminal appalled human rights activists and Western officials.

The American ambassador to Serbia, Kyle Scott, posted on Twitter in Serbian: “Unfortunately, months of work on improving Serbia’s image in the U.S. can be undermined with just one statement.”

Russian propaganda had influenced how the Serbian government portrays the difficult democratic reforms required by the bloc: they are cast as “pressure” from Brussels, enabling Serbian politicians to present resistance as patriotism.

Poland and immigrants

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Klaus, W. (2017). Security First: The New Right-Wing Government in Poland and its Policy towards Immigrants and Refugees. Surveillance & Society, 15(3/4), 523–528.

https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/6627

The so called refugee crisis in 2015 coincided with the Polish parliamentary electoral campaign. The effect of it was – for the first time in Poland – the introduction of migration policy to the political agenda of the right-wing and populist political parties on a massive scale. They presented migration as an issue of security – both national and cultural, direct and symbolic.

he new government and its authoritarian style of governing has introduced a number of initiatives designed to deprive individuals of immigrant rights (like in the new so-called Antiterrorist Act from the mid of 2016, based on which every foreign citizen could be put under surveillance without any court control) or to stop refugee influx on the Polish territory in any way – directly from their country of origins

The Banality of Crimes against Migrants

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The Banality of Crimes against Migrants

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/editorial-on-crimes-against-migrants-a-1175239.html

 and  October 28, 2017

Around the world, migrants are locked up in camps, abused and often driven to the brink of starvation. Many die as a result. These crimes should finally be punished, by the International Criminal Court.

Agnes Callamard, UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, and Arbitrary Executions, presented animportant new report to the UN General Assembly on Friday. The report is on “Unlawful Death of Refugees and Migrants”

Militarized borders have soon been deployed against migrants on the fault lines between the “developed” and the “developing” worlds.

Australia has introduced windowless and allegedly un-drownable rafts to push refugees back to foreign shores. In 2015, European countries sought and obtained a UN Security Council Resolution to use force against smugglers in the Mediterranean, a extraordinary measure clearly signaling the unprecedented militarization of border controls.

Australia has struck agreements with Nauru and Papua New Guinea and used private corporations like G4S and Ferrovial to host and run camps of indefinite and inhumane detention. The EU has used Turkey and, most lately, Libyan militia to ensure migrants don’t make it across the Mediterranean.

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) is increasingly accused of ‘torture-like’ practices in support of the Government’s deportation imperatives. Some of its detention facilities are also privately run.

 

Immigration modernization

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Immigration modernization a work in progress

By Mark Rockwell  Mar 16, 2017

https://fcw.com/articles/2017/03/16/uscis-systems-rockwell.aspx

Bringing paper-based systems at CIS into the digital world “remains a substantial work in progress,” said Lori Scialabba, CIS acting director at a House Homeland Security Oversight.

Using agile processes, Roth said, requires some technical expertise on the part of the agency. That technical expertise at CIS, he said, was thin. Also communications to top agency officials about potential problems weren’t efficient, which left those officials in the dark.

“If you put it out and it breaks, then pull it back, that’s not agile,” Roth said.