Good Reads: Was 2011 a banner year for human rights?
(Read article summary)From the downfall of North African regimes to the humanitarian interventions in Ivory Coast and Libya, 2011 appears to have been the year when citizens and leaders took a stand on human rights.
Scan the headlines and you might feel like the world is going down the tubes. War, famine, power struggles, economic collapse, climate change – none of these problems seem to be going away, and some problems seem to be getting worse by the day.
But in at least one area – human rights – there seems to be some major progress, both because of citizen activism from below and political leadership from above.
Three major dictatorships have fallen across North Africa – in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya – at least partly at the hands of their own people. Citizen protests spread as far away as Bahrain and Yemen, Malawi and Swaziland, and while Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has held onto power through a brutal repression that has killed thousands of Syrians, it has come at the cost of his country’s economic and political isolation.
Page 1 of 4
