Member of the European Parliament for Bulgaria
2007 - 2009
(first direct EP elections in Bulgaria);
LEED to OECD partner (Nanotech)
Nous venons de signer cette lettre ouverte pour demander aux chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement de faire de l’école gratuite pour tous les enfants un droit humain universel.
Three Kurdish women found shot to death in Paris
This information is with reference to the Kurdish issue and is dedicated by youparle.eu to the three Kurdish women found shot to death in Paris early Thursday morning (January 10, 2013).
Kurd*, member of an ethnic and linguistic group living in the Taurus Mountains of eastern Anatolia, the Zagros Mountains of western Iran, portions of northern Iraq, Syria, and Armenia, and other adjacent areas. Most of the Kurds live in contiguous areas of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey—a somewhat loosely defined geographic region generally referred to as Kurdistan (“Land of the Kurds”). The name has different connotations in Iran and Iraq, which officially recognize internal entities by this name: Iran’s northwestern province of Kordestān and Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region. A sizable noncontiguous Kurdish population also exists in the Khorāsān region, situated in Iran’s northeast.
The Kurdish language and traditional way of life
The Kurdish language is a West Iranian language related to Persian and Pashto. The Kurds are thought to number from 20 million to 25 million, including communities in Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Syria, and Europe, but sources for this information differ widely because of differing criteria of ethnicity, religion, and language; statistics may also be manipulated for political purposes.
The traditional Kurdish way of life was nomadic, revolving around sheep and goat herding throughout the Mesopotamian plains and the highlands of Turkey and Iran. Most Kurds practiced only marginal agriculture. The enforcement of national boundaries beginning after World War I (1914–18) impeded the seasonal migrations of the flocks, forcing most of the Kurds to abandon their traditional ways for village life and settled farming; others entered nontraditional employment.
History
The prehistory of the Kurds is poorly known, but their ancestors seem to have inhabited the same upland region for millennia. The records of the early empires of Mesopotamia contain frequent references to mountain tribes with names resembling “Kurd.” The Kardouchoi whom the Greek historian Xenophon speaks of in Anabasis (they attacked the “Ten Thousand” near modern Zākhū, Iraq, in 401 bce) may have been Kurds, but some scholars dispute this claim. The name Kurd can be dated with certainty to the time of the tribes’ conversion to Islam in the 7th century ce. Most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, and among them are many who practice Sufism and other mystical sects.
Despite their long-standing occupation of a particular region of the world, the Kurds never achieved nation-state status.
The first Kurdish newspaper appeared in 1897 and was published at intervals until 1902. It was revived at Istanbul in 1908 (when the first Kurdish political club, with an affiliated cultural society, was also founded) and again in Cairo during World War I. The Treaty of Sèvres, drawn up in 1920, provided for an autonomous Kurdistan but was never ratified; the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which replaced the Treaty of Sèvres, made no mention of Kurdistan or of the Kurds. Thus the opportunity to unify the Kurds in a nation of their own was lost.
*excerpts from Encyclopaedia Britannica
In Syria, the beginning of the year has been marked by more bloody events
Daily News Digest – European Commission
In Syria, the beginning of the year has been marked by more bloody events. The bombing of a petrol station by government jets killed dozens of people in eastern Damascus yesterday, while 12 people – mostly children – were killed by an airstrike in southern Damascus. More than 60,000 people have died since the beginning of the conflict in March 2011, according to a UN report published yesterday.
How the provisions of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights are implemented
Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights concludes forty-ninth session
ROUNDUP
Adopts Concluding Observations on Tanzania, Ecuador, Mauritania, Bulgaria and Iceland and Observations on Equatorial Guinea and Republic of Congo
30 November 2012
The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights to the United Nations today concluded its forty-ninth session after adopting its concluding observations on the reports of Tanzania, Ecuador, Mauritania, Bulgaria and Iceland on how these countries implement the provisions of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
The concluding observations will be available at the following link at the end of the day on Monday, 3 December.
source: United Nations Human Rights
Human rights at the turn of the 21st century
Whatever the current attitudes and policies of governments, the reality of popular demands for human rights, including both greater economic justice and greater political freedom, is beyond debate. A deepening and widening concern for the promotion and protection of human rights on all fronts, hastened by the ideal of self-determination in a postcolonial era, is now unmistakably woven into the fabric of contemporary world affairs.
Substantially responsible for this progressive development has been the work of the UN, its allied agencies, and such regional organizations as the Council of Europe, the OAS, and the AU. Also contributing to this development, particularly since the 1970s and ’80s, have been five other salient factors: (1) the public advocacy of human rights as a key aspect of national foreign policies, made initially legitimate by the example of U.S. President Jimmy Carter, (2) the emergence and spread of civil society on a transnational basis, primarily in the form of activist nongovernmental human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Interights, and Human Rights Watch, the International Commission of Jurists, and diverse faith-based and professional groups, (3) a worldwide profusion of teaching and research devoted to the study of human rights in both formal and informal settings, (4) the proliferation of large UN conferences in areas such as children’s rights, population, social development, women’s rights, human settlements, and food production and distribution, and (5) a mounting feminist intellectual and political challenge regarding not only the rights of women worldwide, but also what feminists consider the paternalistic myths and myth structures that purport to define humane governance generally.
To be sure, because the application of international human rights law depends for the most part on the voluntary consent of nations, formidable obstacles attend the endeavours of human rights policy makers, activists, and scholars. Human rights conventions continue to be undermined by the failure of states to ratify them and by emasculating reservations and derogations, by self-serving reporting systems that outnumber objective complaint procedures, and by poor financing for the implementation of human rights prescriptions. In short, the mechanisms for the enforcement of human rights are still in their infancy. Nevertheless, it is certain that, out of necessity no less than out of realism, a palpable concern for the advancement of human rights is here to stay.
*Excerpts from Burns H. Weston’s article (Bessie Dutton Murray Distinguished Professor of Law; Associate Dean for International and Comparative Legal Studies, University of Iowa, Iowa City. Coauthor of Human Rights in the World Community and others.)
