by John Q on October 26, 2006
Reading recent posts, it’s clear nearly everyone here knows more about Eastern Europe than me I do, so probably others won’t be surprised as I was, by the information in this Washington Post story that Russia, as a member of the Council of Europe, is subject to the European Court of Justice Human Rights, and that
Russians now file more complaints with the court — 10,583 in 2005 — than people from any of the 46 countries that make up the Council of Europe, according to court statistics
Among other stats, the Court has issued 362 rulings on Russia, all but 10 going against the government.
[click to continue…]
by Chris Bertram on October 26, 2006
Shorter Oliver Kamm (for the benefit of those who don’t want to wade through “5000 words of Kamm’s unique prose”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/in_defence_of_t.html ):
bq. Many thousands of people have died, Iraq is a mess, and the war was completely mismanaged. Some other war supporters have therefore changed their minds about whether it was a good idea in the first place. Not me! Thanks to the war we in the West no longer have to worry about Saddam having WMDs. So the war was justified.
by Chris Bertram on October 26, 2006
Lately, I’ve been getting less and less from reading blogs and, more generally, stuff on the internet. But there have been some exceptions, and one of the most exceptional has been “exile.ru”:http://www.exile.ru/ , the paper put out by various exapts in Russia (where they are beyond libel and defamation laws). Notable in the most recent issue is “the kicking that Mark Ames gives to the American journalistic profession as a whole”:http://www.exile.ru/2006-October-20/where_is_americas_politkovskaya.html , and Anne Applebaum in particular, in the light of their reaction to the Politkovskaya assassination. I’ve also become a regular reader of Gary “war nerd”:http://www.exile.ru/archive/by_column/war_nerd.html Brecher and of “John Dolan’s book reviews”:http://www.exile.ru/archive/by_author/john_dolan.html . You should go there too. They’re good, if nasty.