Reverence and veneration of the national flag has long been profound in the United States, possibly more so than in many other countries. This reverence has led many state legislatures as well as the federal Congress to pass legislation banning the burning of the flag. Such legislation generally...
On 15th March 2012, Mohammed Merah killed two soldiers of the French army and left a third in a coma. A few days later, on 19th March, Merah attacked a Jewish school in Toulouse shooting at point blank range a teacher and three children. It...
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is a multinational media corporation with interests in books, cable and satellite television, films, magazines, newspapers and websites. It is influential around the world and in its portfolio News Corporation includes very influential channels and...
The case: (Not) reporting homosexuality in the Middle East
Homosexuality is a taboo subject mainstream Arabic news outlets regularly avoid. If reported at all, stories typically address homosexuality as a foreign phenomenon or loathsome disease unique to the west. Journalist Brian...
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission[1] held that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects freedom of speech, prohibited the government from putting restrictions on independent...
The US supreme court's decision on Citizens United raises a vital issue: should corporations have the same free speech rights as individuals? Brian Pellot discusses the case.
Religion is largely ignored from foreign policy and from literature about how foreign policy should be determined. Religious freedom is likewise for the most part ignored and sidelined. Most countries where religion is a factor in foreign policy are promoting a particular religion rather than...
Should Yale University refuse to operate in Singapore where human rights and free expression face significant restrictions? Katie Engelhart weighs the arguments for and against.
Freedom of speech is often considered to be one of the most basic tenets of democracy. As a fundamental right it is enshrined in documents such as the Bill of Rights in the United States, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights: Congress shall...
Journalist Anat Kamm was sentenced to four and a half years in October 2011 for leaking 2,000 classified military documents obtained during her service with the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). The documents, which were leaked to Haaretz reporter Uri Blau...
On April 11 2012, Tennessee passed a law that will protect teachers who choose to explore the merits of creationism alongside theories of evolution in public school science classes. Governor Bill Haslam claimed that the legislation would not...
This debate will in large part be focused in the UK. At the time of writing, press freedom in the United Kingdom has become a significant issue as a result of the phone tapping scandal and the subsequent...
The Case: Pussy Riot, Putin's Russia and the Orthodox Church
Was punk band Pussy Riot’s anti-Putin performance in a Moscow church 'religious hatred hooliganism' or an artistic form of political dissent? Olga Shvarova considers the case.
The case: The Mexican journalist and the "alcoholic" president
Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui was fired for publicly calling on President Felipe Calderón to clarify rumours that he suffered from alcoholism, writes Felipe Correa.
To mark the 70th anniversary of the death of the Turkish Republic’s founder, Kemal Atatürk, in November 2008, journalist and documentary filmmaker Can Dündar set out to produce, “The complete story of Atatürk [which] has been told neither to...
The case: The Japanese New History Textbook controversy
A textbook entitled New History Textbook (Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho) was published by a committee consisting of conservative scholars in 2000, and was approved as a social science textbook for junior high schools by the ministry of...
In May 2012, South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, turned to the courts to ban a painting, which showed him fully clothed but with his genitals exposed. The case was brought against ...
The case: Is pro-terrorist speech a crime? Massachusetts says so
Tarek Mehanna is a 29-year-old American citizen and pharmacologist who was raised in Sudbury, a quiet suburb of Boston, Massachusetts in the US. Trouble began for Mehanna in 2004, when he travelled to Yemen. Mehanna insists...
Salman Rushdie, the Booker prize-winning author of Midnight’s Children as well and The Satanic Verses, which is banned in many countries including India, was slated to attend the Jaipur...
Blasphemy is the act of showing contempt or speaking offensively about a deity or of persons and symbols regarded as sacred by the followers of a specific religion. The concept of blasphemy is mostly associated with the Abrahamic...
BBC television’s broadcast of Jerry Springer: The Opera in January 2005 was met with protests by Christian groups. Speaking to the BBC, one protester said, “There...
In June 2009, Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman and mother-of-five from a village in the Sheikhupura district in Pakistan, got into an argument with fellow villagers who accused her of polluting the water in a well by touching it as a non-...
Repressive governments, here defined as governments that are anti-democratic, that do not afford general civil rights to their citizens, and that do...
Single-sex schools are schools that only admit those of one specific gender, believing that the educational environment fostered by a single gender is more conducive to learning than a co-educational school. Studies conducted have shown that boys gain more academically from studying in co-education schools, but that girls find segregated schools more conducive to achievement.
In this debate testing should be defined as all testing including, medical research, cosmetics, toxicology, and psychology research where animals are used in any part of an experiment. An animal could sensibly be defined as vertebrates.
In many countries children are required by law to attend school up to a specific age. When children reach this required age they then often have the choice to remain in education or leave in search of employment opportunities.
Internet censorship has been growing precipitously in countries around the world. Freedom House finds that 20 of 47 countries examined have increased their restrictions on internet freedom in 2011 and 2012 against only 14 with increasing freedom.[1] At the same time the methods of control have been becoming more restrictive.
Government transparency, the idea that government should be open about what it is doing with its citizens, has been around since the enlightenment when parliaments began to be more powerful than kings. We usually consider that governmental transparency is a part of good governance in a democracy.
