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Showing posts from May, 2010

Peacemaking, how about solving Conflicts too?

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“ The only way to solve a conflict at any level of society is to sit down face to face and talk about it.” ( John W. McDonald) A new peace mediation study , that states Finland’s accomplishment in the field of mediation and conflict prevention, was released on Thursday, May 6, 2010 by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The study recommends strengthening Finland’s peace mediation capacity. Finland has some evidence of peace mediation to show and former President Ahtisaari even got Nobelprize for his efforts on the field.“The peace mediation initiative is a starting shot; the aim is to make Finland a great power in peace mediation,” Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb said and revealed two of his dreams at the event. “It would be great if Finland established a peace mediation fund from which money could be withdrawn in a pinch. The second dream would be a peace mediation institute where Finnish or international peace mediators could be trained.” I am in favour of both opening of the deba...

Freedom 2010 in Balkans and Eastwards

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"Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown.” ( Prince Peter Kropotkin ) diagram by David Nolan Different aspects of freedom are globally fundamental value of human rights, civil liberties or human development in general. Human development has been described in UNDP as “a process of enlarging people’s choices”. This in turn requires the freedom of people to make their choices and the opportunities to realize them. Rankings or ratings are one kind of (process) benchmarking in which organizations or in this case states evaluate various aspects of their processes in relation to best practice. In this article I make a short update about political rights and civil liberties, freedom of press and some economical aspects in mostly Balkans and Black Sea reg...