Tribunal Community

The former governor of the Mexican state of Puebla Mario Marín was arrested this Wednesday in Acapulco (Guerrero) by the Attorney General’s Office (FGR). Marín had been a fugitive from justice for two years due to an arrest warrant issued by a Quintana Roo judge.

The politician is accused of ordering the torture and illegal arrest of journalist Lydia Cacho in 2005, when he was ruling in Puebla (2005-2011). Cacho had denounced in his book Los demonios del edén a network of child sexual exploitation in which he mentioned the businessmen Jean Succar Kuri and Kamel Nacif as responsible.

The journalist was arrested and tortured by the Puebla Prosecutor’s Office accused of defamation, in an action ordered by the then governor.

15 years ago, Mexico heard a phone call between Nacif and Marín in which the then governor of Puebla promised to “give the journalist his slap” for bothering the businessman. Cacho was transferred from Quintana Roo, where she lived, to Puebla, in a journey of more than 20 hours by road in which she was threatened with death and tortured by ministerial agents.

Since then, the journalist has denounced the abuse of power that the politician of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) maintained in Puebla and his participation in the events of 2005. The audio, published in February 2006 by the newspaper La Jornada , revealed the level influence of businessmen with the PRI government:

“What happened, my precious góber, my fucking hero,” Nacif commented to the politician.

“No, you are the hero of this movie, Dad.” Yesterday I finished giving this old bitch a fucking slap. I told him that the law is respected here in Puebla.

Marín only took the nickname of ‘precious góber’ from the publication of the call, but he was never investigated for his participation in Cacho’s arrest until 2019. Then, the United Nations (UN) recognized that the journalist’s rights they had been violated and demanded that the Mexican government begin legal proceedings against those responsible.

The Andrés Manuel López Obrador Administration apologized to Cacho for the abuses and guaranteed that it would punish Marín and Nacif. A few months later, a court issued his arrest warrant and sent the information about the former governor to Interpol. The arrests of Nacif and the former head of the Puebla Judicial Police Adolfo Karam are pending.

The ⁦ @FGRMexico ⁩ warned me about the former governor arrested #MarioMarin hidden in Acapulco. I have been seeking justice for 14 years for having been tortured by this accomplice of the # PornografíaInfantil Vamos por todos. 🙏🏼 pic.twitter.com/LJX0qXZY8v

Cacho has written a brief message on his Twitter account announcing the arrest of Marín, accompanied by a photo, presumably from the time of the former governor’s arrest. “I have been seeking justice for 14 years for having been tortured by this accomplice of the # Child Pornography networks .

Let’s go for everyone, ”he wrote. The current governor of Puebla, Miguel Barbosa, has celebrated the arrest on his social networks and has asked “that justice be rigorously applied.”

The journalist has lived the last 15 years under strict security measures, even leaving Mexico in some seasons , after receiving various death threats. “I want to live to sentence them; It is the only way to set precedents on the networks of trafficking of girls and boys that end in torture of witnesses and murders of journalists and human rights defenders, ”Cacho told this newspaper in 2019.

There is a whole security device around it that has been reinforced since the ex-governor’s escape. “I am the main witness of these trials and I will be there to ratify everything necessary. This is not my hunger for justice, it is that of a whole country tired of being given war and fear to eat every day, “he added.

Almost 10 years ago, Mario Draghi (Rome, 73 years old) emerged as the savior of the euro : he spoke three magic words – whatever it takes , whatever it takes – and speculators fled like rabbits.

That seemed the culminating point of his career until just a few hours ago: the most difficult still consists of saving Italy, an industrial power in decline, in permanent political crisis, incapable of making reforms, with an economy that has not grown for 20 years and in debt up to the eyebrows.

Draghi’s life journey has been marked by fire since its inception. The son of a former employee of the Italian central bank, Draghi lost his parents in adolescence, just before that May 68 that marked his generation: “I grew my hair long, but not very long, I had no parents to rebel against ”.

He studied in the Jesuits; Luca di Montezemolo, a Fiat expatriate who shared a desk with him, says that even then he was the best of his class. He settled on economics and ended up earning a doctorate from the prestigious MIT, in a batch of some of the best economists of his generation, from Ben Bernanke to Olivier Blanchard.

His doctoral thesis, Essays on economic theory, dates from 1976. There he analyzes the difficulties in applying stabilization policies in the short term and combining them with long-term reforms: more or less the challenge that he now has at hand.

After passing through the university, he began his brilliant career as a high official. It helped prepare Italy to join the euro zone with tough economic policies. He went through the Treasury, through the Bank of Italy and forged a well-deserved fame as one of the honorary members of the elite of the Italian civil service, a handful of technocrats capable of occupying the most relevant positions in the European institutions and making it work the country despite the perpetual instability of its governments.

At one point he decided to go to the other side: he was vice president of the US investment bank Goldman Sachs during the years in which the “vampire squid” – in the happy definition of the writer Matt Taibi – helped to make up the accounts of Greece. Draghi has never clarified what he did there.

But neither his time at Goldman nor his Italian passport – which aroused misgivings in Berlin – prevented him from reaching the presidency of the ECB to replace Jean-Claude Trichet. The French had just screwed up, with untimely interest rate hikes and his refusal to activate extraordinary monetary policies for extraordinary times.

Draghi’s pulse did not tremble: the first day he lowered interest rates and put a hose on liquidity in the bank . Then he convinced Chancellor Angela Merkel that she should enter the stormy waters of buying public debt and, in short, the mythical whatever it takes that saved the euro from burning was removed from the hat .

Draghi’s black legend is not limited to Goldman. In August 2011 he signed an ultimatum from Trichet to Berlusconi: a letter in which the ECB, together with the Bank of Italy that he led, forced them to carry out harsh reforms without any democratic legitimacy to do so.

Later, in Frankfurt, he subjected several countries to enormous pressure and practically forced several governments – Mariano Rajoy’s among them – to ask for a ransom that no one wanted because it was associated with draconian cuts. With Greece he went even further and gave the country a corralito. “Tragic despot”, called the minister Yanis Varoufakis, who discovered firsthand that when the ECB wants something, it knows how to get it.

Draghi had left the Great Recession more or less on track when he left the ECB, in which he added to his technical brilliance an immense talent for communication and a keen political instinct: that baggage is going to be well needed in his new adventure. Since he packed his things in Frankfurt and returned to Rome in October 2019, he had moved behind the scenes.

Shy and very jealous of his privacy — he is married with two children, Federica and Giacomo — he became, despite himself, the center of political circles whenever things went wrong. Especially after an article in which he encouraged spending and invited not to worry about the debt to get out of the crisis generated by the covid, a position with which he won the favor of former detractors such as the 5 Star Movement, who continued to see him suspiciously about his time at Goldman.

The euro crisis took him to Frankfurt; the pandemic, to the Chigi Palace. During the covid, he has been retired for long periods at his home in Città della Pieve, in Umbria. From there he had been exchanging calls with President Mattarella for days; In recent months he has maintained contacts with other politicians, such as Giancarlo Giorgetti —inspirator of the centrist wing of the League—, Matteo Renzi or Gianni Letta, Silvio Berlusconi’s court consultant.

They say that Renzi put Italian politics in the shaker so that Draghi could not refuse, after a couple of weeks of drama, to assume the leadership of the Government.

In his first appearance he was excited and smiling, as comfortable as ever before the cameras. He has some very intense months ahead, in which he will have to assert his gravitas . Technocratic governments usually enjoy a positive initial retribution, but later the parties look again for their own interests and things usually end up like the rosary of dawn.

Draghi has an advantage over the last technocratic Executive: Mario Montihe had to apply harsh adjustments, while he has plenty of European money to spend. The funds, yes, have a trick: in return you have to make reforms, and that has been impossible in Italy for decades. It’s Draghi’s challenge. If he is successful, no one will be able to deny him the possibility of being President of the Republic, his great objective.

Former Ugandan child soldier and former commander of the Christian extremist organization Lord’s Resistance Army, Dominic Ongwen , has been found guilty of 61 war crimes and crimes against humanity committed between 2002 and 2005 in camps for displaced persons in Uganda.

The ruling, released on Thursday by the International Criminal Court (ICC) after five years of trial, considers it proven that he captured children to fight, looted, tortured and murdered civilians, including babies. It also turned the girls into sexual slaves and forced them into marriage and subsequent pregnancy, charges the latter qualified for the first time by the Court of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The amount of the sentence will be announced in a few weeks, as indicated by the Court. Ongwen was kidnapped as a child by militiamen belonging to Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) , which aims to impose a theocratic regime in the country, and became a lieutenant.

The judges have not considered the biography of the convicted person as a defense, a debate that has flown over the case. On the contrary, they emphasize that he is responsible for crimes committed when he is of legal age and in full use of his mental faculties.

According to the ruling, Ongwen was appreciated by his subordinates and his bosses praised his work. “He was not a [Joseph Kony] wimp, but he took the initiative and even discussed the orders received. He had the possibility of leaving the LRA, as did other of his comrades. Instead, he was promoted in the military and also committed private crimes.

There is no defense and he is responsible for his actions ”, said Bertram Schmitt, president of the chamber. The sentence emphasizes the reports of the psychologists who have examined him, and that they did not observe any disorder, as well as the statements of witnesses, in particular the women who were enslaved.

After the serial abduction of civilians in different open camps for displaced people in Uganda, Ongwen “forced several women to become his wives and servants and told the rest that the minors would be trained as child soldiers.” The girls were given as sex slaves to the militiamen, and if they did not fulfill their duties they were beaten; sometimes to death, explains the failure.

Due to this, the Court has added the crime of marriage and pregnancy by force as war crimes and crimes against humanity: “Marriage is a state that is acquired voluntarily and that has social, religious and personal effects that affect the the privacy of the person. If the victim is tied in an illegitimate way, this leads to social stigma and loss of dignity ”.

The terror of the girls forced to have sex with their captors has echoed in the room. Those who refused or made mistakes in serving their owners could be beaten to death or forced to beat others to death. In her testimony, one of those victims said: “I didn’t want to lie with an older man and like this.

I was afraid to refuse to be his wife by force, but in the face of certain death, what would you choose? Ongwen had several children with seven of them under these conditions.

It is also the first time that the Court has tried a case related to crimes perpetrated by the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army, and Ongwen has been sentenced in his capacity as commander of the Sinia brigade, one of the four that made up the militia.

He perpetrated or ordered the crimes, and the account of the attacks on camps of civilians displaced from their homes as a result of the clashes between the Army and the rebels of Joseph Kony, in a way summed up his own past.

As a child Ongwen saw the horrors that he later ordered: kidnapping of children and the shooting and machete deaths of the elderly; the terror of the forced marches to the LRA camps in which babies were torn from their mothers’ arms and left in the forest because they bothered with their crying; the weak beaten to death; looting and destruction.

All this has been heard in the courtroom, while Ongwen listened with his mask on, due to the security measures imposed by the pandemic. The sentence has not only described atrocious events, but the names of the victims have been read aloud because, according to Judge Schmitt, “they have the right not to have their suffering forgotten.”

Ongwen’s family has related that he was kidnapped in 1990 at the age of 10 by the Kony rebels when he was going to school, according to Human Rights Watch. Child soldiers’ training methods include instilling terror into them and forcing them to kill adults, and other minors in the same situation who have disobeyed and tried to flee.

The ICC considers the forced recruitment of minors a war crime and he has been the only former child soldier tried to date by its judges. As in the rest of its cases, the Court has allowed the participation of the victims to express their opinion apart from the witnesses.

It is a unique characteristic in international justice, and this time the intervention of 4,000 people has been collected and recognized, who, given the inability to travel to the Court, have been represented through seven testimonies.

As Ongwen himself explained during the trial, he deserted the LRA in 2015 when he was in the Central African Republic, and was guarded at the US military base in Obbo, in the southeast of the country, until the authorities handed him over to the Court.

Since 2005, an international arrest warrant has been weighing on him, and the Government of Uganda, which is a member of the Court, has asked its prosecution to take up the case. In the same situation were three other LRA commanders, who are presumed dead, and Joseph Kony himself, who has fled. The Court lacks a police force and relies on the international community to arrest suspects, not always adequate cooperation.

The LRA is one of the most violent rebel militias in Africa, and Joseph Kony is a kind of spiritual leader who aims to overthrow President Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1986. Once in office, his plans are to rule the country of according to the 10 commandments.

Between 2010 and 2017, the United States carried out an operation aimed at eradicating the group or arresting its members, which ended due to its cost and because the LRA lost steam. According to Human Rights Watch, Kony is located in Kafia Kingi, an area on the border between Sudan and South Sudan.

A cell for eight people occupied by 28 inmates, so close together that they have to take turns sleeping. Beds without mattresses. Useless bathrooms. With thousands of detainees in the protests in support of the opposition Alexéi Navalniin recent weeks, Moscow’s temporary detention centers are full.

The saturation is such that some of those arrested have remained in police vans for hours, sometimes overnight, waiting their turn to unload. Several detainees, their families and civil rights organizations denounce overcrowded conditions, poor care and health risk in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

The images of the interior of the centers and the vans have caused great indignation in the Russian independent media, but the Interior Ministry assures that everything has been “taken out of context”. Meanwhile, the Navalni allies that are still free have withdrawn and are studying the way forward. They have announced that they will not call new demonstrations “in the short term.”

Masha Ugolkova spent the whole night and part of Wednesday morning in a police van, surrounded by people and with the ground wet. “We can only fit all of us if someone is standing. This is impossible, ”he said in Twitter messages.

She was arrested on Tuesday, when she was protesting with a group of friends in central Moscow over the conviction of Navalni, who will have to serve two years and eight months in prison for violating the probation she has been on since 2014, when she was sentenced. for fraud in a controversial case that was declared “arbitrary and unfair” by the European Court of Human Rights. This court ruled that the opponent should be compensated.

“There came a time when it was desperate. We started singing inside the van so as not to go crazy, ”said activist Ugolkova. Not long after, he posted a message on his social networks: “We are in Sajárovo, they are taking our phones away.”

There are more than 11,000 detainees throughout Russia since the massive march on January 23 to demand the freedom of the opponent, arrested just after returning to Moscow from Germany, where he traveled to deal with the poison attack suffered this summer in Siberia. And another 4,600 in the Russian capital, according to the organization Ovd-Info, which monitors the situation of detention centers and provides legal assistance to those arrested.

That, explains lawyer Ilya Novikov, who has worked on numerous human rights cases, has caused them to exceed their capacity and begin to transfer people, for example, to migrant detention centers. Like the one in Sajárovo, in the Moscow region, whose images have brought out its terrible conditions.

“There are three times more people than beds, we are seeing that they have had to sleep sitting or leaning against each other using pillow coats.”

Egor Hlopovskiy, 21, was arrested on January 23, in the first mass protest in support of Navalni. He says he was near the jail where the opponent is being held when they pushed him on the snow and arrested him. Since then he has gone from police station to police station, to the court that sentenced him to 10 days of administrative arrest and several centers, all saturated.

Until finishing, like Ugolkova, in Sajárovo. This Thursday just came out. He says that his cell was not saturated, but that it was far from complying with sanitary standards. “They gave us food and a cup of water per person three times a day. They did not give us hygiene products and the cells were extremely hot.

It was impossible to be there and we have even seen bedbugs, ”Hlopovskiy says by phone. He is an assistant in a store, but he is sure that as soon as he returns they will fire him for participating in the protests. He has no regrets: “I went out to the demonstration because I have lived with Putin all my life and I don’t see any change. Justice, which must be independent and in Russia belongs to the State ”.

Also in Sakharovo is Sergei Smirnov, director of the independent online media MediaZona , arrested while walking with his five-year-old son on the street, accused of inciting protests. Smirnov had not even been there. He only retweeted a joke about the mobilizations.

He will have to serve 25 days of administrative arrest in yet another case that symbolizes the repression of social mobilizations and independent media. The images that the journalist sent to his wife, who posted them on social networks, show a cell overflowing with a ramshackle appearance, with a series of bunk beds without mattresses in which two or three men crowd each one.

The photographs that Smirnov took and his case – which has elicited solidarity from other media, including the largest business newspapers, towards Mediazona , founded by the Pussy Riot movement and focused on human rights and criminal justice – have raised harsh critics.

Not only because of the conditions of the detainees, but because of the irony that Navalni’s allies are being sentenced to house arrest for violating the sanitary regulations of the pandemic during the protests and, later, the authorities crowd them in the corridors of the police stations and in centers without conditions without worrying about the health crisis.

All this has provoked a response from the authorities, who this Thursday have begun to try to distribute to the inmates. And they even gave them grooming supplies, Tatiana, Smirnov’s wife, wrote on her Telegram channel.

However, they also took away mobile phones from most of those who still had them. At the gates of Sajárovo, a hundred relatives waited this Thursday at noon to deliver food and health products to their relatives.

Faced with criticism, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov has blamed the detainees for saturating the system. “The number of arrests is greater than detention centers can handle, greater than could be quickly processed. This situation was not caused by the forces of order, but by the participants in the unauthorized demonstrations ”, he concluded.

On the eve of the meeting of the High Representative for Foreign Policy of the European Union, Josep Borrell, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Peskov stressed that Russia would not listen to Western criticism about the Navalni condemnation or the repression of the protests , which have not stopped happening.

He also assured that, if Borrell had requested to visit Navalni, it would only be up to the prison authorities and the courts to consider the request.

With their leader behind bars and their main allies in solitary confinement , Navalni supporters analyze their perspectives. Leonid Volkov, who was Navalni’s campaign manager and who is out of Russia, announced this Thursday that they do not plan to call new demonstrations until probably spring and that while preparing new actions and investigations. However, groups in some cities, such as Kazan, are trying to mobilize for a protest against political repression.

Still, the approval rating among young people for Russian President Vladimir Putin has plummeted. 46% of those surveyed between 18 and 24 years old have declared that they do not approve of Putin and his management, according to a January poll by the Levada Center, the only independent center in the country.

In January 2018, only 18% of that age group claimed to suspend the Russian leader, who has an overall popularity of 63%, according to the poll; a high figure by Western standards, but his lowest mark since he came to power more than two decades ago.

Putin began by losing support among the youngest, who accumulated discontent, due to the pandemic. To that, Denis Volkov, deputy director of Levada, explains the outrage at Navalni’s arrest and his report on Putin’s alleged billionaire palace.

The YouTube video, which has 100 million views, has been viewed by 3.4 million people in Russia in its entirety. Although it has been the memes and alternative videos generated that have ended up making it viral.

The military junta that seized full power in Myanmar (formerly Burma) in a coup on Monday ordered this Thursday the blocking of Facebook, the most popular social network in the country, given the multiplication of calls for disobedience civil.

The blockade will continue until February 7, as indicated in a letter by the Ministry of Communications and Information in which it expresses the “concern” of the military about the situation, “with people who are threatening the stability of the country, who spread hoaxes and misinformation, causing misunderstandings among people through the use of Facebook ”.

The NetBlocks portal, which monitors access to computer communications in the world, has confirmed that the MPT operator, controlled by the Government, has restricted access to that platform and other related applications, such as WhatsApp or Instagram. The Norwegian telephone company Telenor, which operates in the country, also registers a decrease in access to the social network.

On Tuesday, the ministry had already publicly warned against spreading “rumors” on the Internet that could incite unrest or social instability. Several Internet users in Burma have denounced that since Thursday they cannot access their accounts on that social network or its associates.

Facebook is extremely popular in Myanmar, which has 54 million inhabitants. More than 22 million people maintain accounts in it to keep in touch with friends and family, receive news or manage business.

Since Monday, when the military forced the declaration of a state of emergency and took power, thousands of Burmese netizens have taken to protesting the coup on social media. An account under the name Movement for Civil Disobedience and created the next day accumulates about 200,000 followers.

In a statement collected by Efe, Telenor indicates that “although the order has a legal basis in Burmese law, it does not believe that the request is based on necessity and proportionality, in accordance with international human rights law.” However, it underlines that it will comply with the directive while expressing “its grave concern about the violation of human rights.”

The incipient campaign of civil resistance called for by this movement has begun to spread throughout the country.

The main city of Myanmar, Yangon, where economic activity and most of the population are concentrated, has staged two consecutive nights of intense caceroladas, between shouts of “Long live mother Suu!” Aung San Suu Kyi , the de facto head of the civilian government and Nobel Peace Prize winner, has been detained since the beginning of the coup. She faces three years in prison after being charged by the military authorities for violating import laws, after radio frequency tracking devices were found to be illegally brought into the country.

In the city of Mandalay, the second in the country, videos circulating on social networks show what appears to be a small demonstration outside a hospital against the military junta and to demand the release of the detained leaders. On Wednesday, armored vehicles of the Burmese Army had patrolled its streets amid rumors of protests.

The strike of health workers in about 70 hospitals across the country, which began on Wednesday, has spread to other medical centers, according to the independent Burmese digital Frontier Myanmar . Teachers in public schools and engineers from the military-owned telephone company Mytel have also begun to join, according to this outlet.

The military junta has promised to call elections within a year and hand over control of the country to the winner. The Armed Forces have justified the declaration of the state of emergency, and their seizure of power, with the argument – rejected by the electoral commission and international observers – that there was a “massive fraud” in the elections on November 8.

The National League for Democracy (NLD, for its acronym in English) of Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint – also detained – obtained a landslide victory in that appointment, in which he won 346 seats, for only 33 for the parties who support the Army.

The confession of Luis Bárcenas , the former treasury of the PP sentenced to 29 years in prison for corruption in the Gürtel case, together with the imminent start of the trial for the illegal financing of conservative training, they once again place at the center of public debate one of the darkest political circumstances of the recent Spanish democratic stage.

Bárcenas has sent a letter to the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office, which has been investigating his affairs for 11 years and forced his entry into prison for the first time, in which he affirms that during the last seven years he has not said everything he knows about how it was financed your party.

In his new confession, Bárcenas maintains that the PP had used since 1982 the system of accepting donations in black money and paying the party leadership with that fund; that this system was known to all leaders – including Mariano Rajoy, who according to the story destroyed the compromising papers with a shredder; and points,

It is up to justice to verify the veracity of these allegations. The trial that begins on Monday will analyze the existence of a box b in the PP that worked for at least 19 years – and that this newspaper announced in 2013-.

But in this process it will only be judged if in one of those years, 2008, the PP paid with money b a part of the reform works of its headquarters, and if the money used for that payment should have been declared in the corporate tax to the have an illegal origin.

Only Bárcenas and former PP manager Cristóbal Páez will sit on the bench. The two of them managed box b, but the party and some of its leaders were the main beneficiaries. Therefore, it will not be judged whether the PP leadership from 1990 to 2009 collected succulent quarterly bonuses that they never declared to the Treasury because they came from box b.

Nor the performance of the businessmen in question. Even so, the trial will have great symbolic force and the squad of witnesses will be filled with suspects, Rajoy and Aznar among others.

Legal action, of course, is fundamental, but the political dimension of the matter is no less so. The PP has renewed its leadership and the leaders of that dark time are no longer on the command bridge. This is a necessary but not sufficient step.

In the absence of the completion of the judicial journey in all its aspects, there are already enough proven elements – even in a final judgment of the Supreme Court – that reveal the structural nature of the corruption that gnawed at the PP.

Pablo Casado seeks to maintain a distance from that unacceptable past, but he will not achieve it in the proper way as long as he avoids recognizing that it was not a matter of some bad apples, but a systemic rot.

For the good of his own party, and no doubt of Spanish democracy, Married and the new leadership of the PP must at some point have the moral height to assume the transcendental gravity of what happened and condemn it in all its dimensions. The sooner the better.

The complex agreement that, in the context of Brexit, seeks to keep the two parts of Ireland without a tangible border is suffering serious turbulence. The immediate cause is an unfortunate mistake by the European Commission.

In full tension due to the supply problems of the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca , last Friday, the president of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, approved a regulation restricting the export of vaccineswhich activated, without consulting with Belfast, London or Dublin, the safeguard clause of the Protocol to impose border controls between the two parts of Ireland.

The immediate reaction of the Irish Government led Von der Leyen to amend the regulations within hours and the unfortunate incident was resolved on Friday. The mistake is so glaring that, had it occurred in a body subjected to greater pressure and political scrutiny, it would probably have led to resignations or dismissals.

Following this episode, in response to certain threats of violence, the British Government has suspended port controls(on food and animal products) to be carried out in the trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the solution found to avoid the hard border between Ulster and the Republic.

Furthermore, London is now seeking to take advantage of the situation to blame the EU for the uncomfortable reality of a Brexit that the Northern Irish have begun to uncover and force a renegotiation of the pact. Johnson says Von der Leyen’s mistake has triggered tension in Northern Ireland.

And it threatens again to legislate to suspend the Protocol – as it did last summer – if Brussels does not accept to relax the border controls that since January 1 (end of the transitional period of Brexit) separate from the commercial point of view the Northern Irishmen from the rest of the British.

Last summer’s attempt, a move by Johnson for bargaining advantages, met with strong pushback from the EU. In this circumstance, the Twenty-Seven will have to respond to reasonable requests to fix a specific problem, but the system cannot be changed either because of the threats on the ground or because of Johnson’s pulse.

The Commission made a mistake. He quickly rectified. It can be discussed whether an assumption of responsibilities is necessary. But this cannot serve as an excuse for a blackmail that tries to hide the reality of Brexit from the Northern Irish and the rest of the British for a few more months.

Since Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won the 2015 elections, Myanmar (the former Burma) had become one of Southeast Asia’s hopes for democratic opening.

The recent coup in this country has not only broken them , but has also highlighted a more general trend in this region: the increase in restrictions on freedoms and the oppression of minorities, favored by measures against the pandemic. and the perception of a decline in the western liberal model, in addition to the rise of China as a regional power.

The return of the generals to the Government of Myanmar – although they never left completely – has turned upside down a region in which democratic references were already scarce.

The power struggle between Suu Kyi’s NLD and the Tatmadaw – as the Burmese Army is known – broke out when, after the overwhelming victory of the Nobel Peace Prize in the elections last November , the Armed Forces found that very they would probably never succeed in winning at the polls through the pro-military Union Solidarity and Development Party, which did poorly.

“When we say that Myanmar returns to the path of authoritarianism, we are assuming that Aung San Suu Kyi was a perfect icon of democracy, and she is not. Unfortunately, perhaps it is a sad reality, but Southeast Asia may not be as politically progressive as we would like to believe, ”says Yun Sun, director for China of the think tank Stimson Center.

Although the mandate of Suu Kyi in Myanmar was full of shadows, especially for its inaction against the accusations of genocide against the Muslim minority Rohingya by the Tatmadaw , there was still some optimism around to give a twist rudder. With that option canceled for the moment, Myanmar joins the long list of neighboring countries that either have maintained autocratic regimes for years, such as Cambodia, Laos or Vietnam, or are heading down shady paths.

“The state of democracy in Southeast Asia is chronically fragile. In this sense, what has happened in Myanmar should not be considered a surprise ”, considers Michael Vatikiotis, author of the essay Blood and silk, power and conflict in modern Southeast Asia.

The region experienced a period of renewed democratic expectations between the eighties and the end of the nineties, due to events such as the fall of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986, or the resignation of Suharto in Indonesia in 1998.

Since then There have been ups and downs: the Freedom House organization considers that between 2014 and 2019 there was a stagnation and the Intelligence Unit of the weekly The Economist indicates a setback from 2016.

Among the many reasons is the greater influx of the Chinese authoritarian model as an alternative to what is perceived as a West in decline, given the rise of populism and events such as Brexit. As a finishing touch, the coronavirus has offered the perfect excuse to some leaders to undermine freedoms in pursuit of the control of infections. “The pandemic has generally stifled dissent in the region, as people have put their health and income before the political struggle,” adds Vatikiotis.

Malaysia, for example, has declared a state of emergency from January to August to, in principle, control the increase in cases, although many suspect that there may be underlying political motivations. Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, who is in office for one year in March after a controversial internal coup, could take advantage of it to win support and avoid being removed if he loses his weak parliamentary majority, since the Constitution does not provide for the resignation of a leader during the state of emergency.

In the Philippines, which has imposed one of the longest lockdowns on the planet, the pandemic has given its president, Rodrigo Duterte, license to increase his control, while pushing constitutional changes that may be aimed at extending his term beyond 2022.

According to the NGO Human Rights Watch, between last April and July, murders in the framework of Duterte’s war on drugs increased 50% compared to the same period of the previous year. In Thailand, pandemic measures have been used to restrict protests that have been taking place for a yearagainst the monarchy and its prime minister, General Prayut Chan-ocha. Singapore, governed by the People’s Action Party since its independence, uses contagion-tracking apps for criminal investigations, sparking criticism from activists and human rights organizations.

To the suppression of freedoms under the pretext of the coronavirus are added the own national circumstances; Indonesia, one of the paradigms of democracy in the region, has fallen into a spiral of Islamization that keeps religious and ethnic minorities in grip, as is also the case in the Muslim Malaysia.

Other countries, such as Cambodia, where Hun Sen has ruled since 1985, have bluntly suppressed the opposition in recent years, increasingly putting themselves in Beijing’s orbit of influence.

Alliances with China, the largest trading partner in the region, have gained strength in the face of the apparent lack of interest in this area shown by the other great Pacific power, the United States, during the term of Donald Trump.

Some also expect more from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN, made up of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and Brunei) in the face of crises such as the one in Myanmar.

“ASEAN should dialogue with China and Russia to put pressure on Myanmar,” urged the president of the ASEAN group for human rights, the Malaysian Charles Santiago, last Tuesday at a press conference. Vatikiotis anticipates that the pandemic recess will bring “new protests throughout the region, motivated in part by the serious economic impact of covid-19.”

Former ECB president Mario Draghi has become in the last hours that boatman of the riddle who had to cross the river with a hen, a fox and a sack of corn. He wants all the parties on board his new government, but many of them would rather drown than share a boat.

The identity of formations such as Forza Italia or the 5-Star Movement – the former banker will recall these days after eight years in Frankfurt – is the daughter of their mutual animosity.

The man who rescued the euro has also set out to save his country at 73. But for this, he will have to convince the greatest number of parties to form the Executive of unity he wants. The idea is to expand the majority perimeter of the previous government. Also adding to formations of the center-right, which this Thursday began to crack due to the Draghi effect.

The main obstacle, however, remains the 5 Star Movement (M5S). A formation in the middle of a civil war and without a leader. This Thursday , former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte took a step forward after more than a week of silence and relaxed the situation.

The doors of the Chigi Palace opened after one in the afternoon and the resigned prime minister appeared somewhat taciturn. There are no more pompous messages, baroque salons and direct on Facebook at ten o’clock at night for Conte.

The great loser of this crisis settled down in front of a sordid metal table planted in the middle of the street —the cruel Roman memes compared him to a street vendor— to pronounce the words awaited by those who are trying to build a new Executive at this time: “I will not be an obstacle ”.

Conte’s role will be crucial in the next few hours to convince the M5S. The former prime minister hinted that he does not think, even remotely, to return to the classroom and implicitly offered to lead the “friends” grillinos . In addition, he conditioned his support to the character that the new Executive may have.

“A solid political government with sufficient cohesion to make political decisions”, since it considers that “the urgencies of the country require political elections that cannot be entrusted to technical teams.” Conte, the law professor who became prime minister because he was not a politician. “Obviously that is their intention. And that he is trying to mediate so that Draghi agrees to make a hybrid Executive that includes important positions from the grillinos”, Indicate sources of his surroundings.

Draghi has set a schedule of meetings with the matches that will end tomorrow with the two most important appointments: the M5S and Matteo Salvini’s League . Both parties are debating, with a high risk of fracture, between giving their support or proposing an abstention.

Something that would allow in any case the election of Draghi, but that could complicate the governance of the country in the near future. Until that day, the former banker may now begin to notice the pressure from the parties to avoid the temptation of a technical device and make all the formations happy (with charges, of course). “If he endured those of the Bundesbank for so many years, I do not think he has a problem with the threats of Salvini or 5 Stars,” they ironically in Italia Viva, the main promoter of this Executive.

The leader of the most centrist wing of the League, the historic Giancarlo Giorgetti – he was Salvini’s chief of staff during his government adventure – made no secret of his crush on Draghi. “He is a serious person, like our political line. An out of series like Ronaldo and cannot be on the bench ”.

Also the employers’ association, who greeted the former head of the ECB with energetic enthusiasm and put all its machinery to work in northern Italy to convince Salvini of the convenience of supporting him. But the right-wing coalition (Liga, Forza Italia and Hermanos de Italia), which has not yet decided whether it will have a unitary position on this decision, could also break down with the arrival of Draghi.

Silvio Berlusconi is the only one who has no doubts. He gives so much importance to the situation that he has decided to lead his party’s meeting this Friday at 5:30 p.m. with Draghi despite his delicate health. Forza Italia and all the small center parties that emerged from the various splits caused by the character of the Mediaset owner want this government to prosper.

“We will go separate [from the League and Brothers of Italy] and with a clear inclination for yes,” explains deputy Renato Brunetta. “It is a yes to the figure, to this phase. And if the conditions are met, it should be a political government, with high political personalities who can come from many places. Of course, also from Forza Italia ”.

Meanwhile, Matteo Renzi, the mastermind behind this crisis and Draghi’s arrival in Roman salons, relaxes by giving interviews in English and watching his old rivals skin each other. “Draghi is on the table ” (Draghi is on the table), released this Thursday to the interviewer while she twisted her face.

A table on which also rests the plan that he designed two months ago and that has been fulfilled point by point. Today, Renzi will meet the man he always wanted at the Chigi Palace to negotiate. But this Thursday he already took for granted that the Executive will be formed. It would be the first time he was wrong since the crisis began.