Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko today asked the US for military support, in the form of both lethal and non-lethal equipment, to fight separatists in eastern Ukraine. But any support the Obama administration gives needs to include urging Ukraine’s leadership to stop human rights violations by Ukrainian forces.
Bahrain freed rights activist Maryam al-Khawaja from detention, but she’s still facing trial. Khawaja, who has joint Bahraini and Danish citizenship, was detained when she landed at Bahrain’s airport.
Saudi Arabia’s failure to include women on its team to compete in the Asian Games in South Korea in September 2014 is a backward step for women’s participation in sport.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, a large number of Afghans fled to the Netherlands to escape the dire situation in their own country. But Afghani war criminals also sought asylum there. This led the Dutch government to create a special unit within its immigration service to identify people responsible for serious international crimes. Bulgarian border police have in the past month forced Syrian asylum seekers back to Turkey and beaten some of them. The EU should press Sofia to keep its borders open to Syrians and other asylum seekers and to put an end to these abusive practices.
