5 Oct 2010 | Uncategorized
On 18 August 1936, poet and playwright Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) was killed by General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist Civil Guard on a mountainside in Andalucia.
Now a short film set in Barranco de Viznar, near the site where hundreds — if not thousands — of people, including Lorca, were murdered and thought to have been buried in a mass grave at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, is part of an exhibition in London paying tribute to Spain’s most treasured writer.
Muerto de Amor, on until 9 October at the MP Birla Millennium Art Gallery, in West Kensington, brings together the work of 11 artists, working in a range of mediums, including painting, ceramics and installations.
Artist Carlos Espana, who also curated the exhibition, transcribed and engraved 120 Lorca quotations on ceramic earthenware plaques and hung them from trees, using them as the emotional focus of the film, which, Espana says, honours the memory of Lorca and the other innocent victims who died there.
Under the Franco dictatorship, discussion of the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War was restricted. But over the last two decades, there has been a call for the country to come to terms with their harrowing past.
In 2009, historians and archaeologists excavated the site where the murder of Lorca and so many others were thought to have taken place, but, after two months, no human remains were found. The facts of the writer’s death remain shrouded in mystery.
13 Apr 2010 | Index Index, minipost, Uncategorized
The Spanish National Court has acquitted five executives of a now-defunct Basque-language newspaper, including its former editor-in-chief Martxelo Otamendi, of belonging to the separatist group ETA. The court said the prosecution had not provided enough evidence to support its case, which centred on economic ties between the daily Egunkaria and the proscribed terrorist organisation. The paper was shut down on a judge’s order in 2003 on the grounds that it assisted ETA. Following the closure of Egin in 1998, Egunkaria was the world’s only Basque-language newspaper.
2 Jun 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, Hungary, News and features, Newsletters
The European Convention on Human Rights was set up in the aftermath of World War Two to protect the rights of people in the Council of Europe’s 47 member states. Enshrined within it are fundamental obligations around free speech, including the right to free expression and the right to protest. It was intended to act as a blueprint for democracy and a rules-based order – but certain member states are tearing up this rulebook, none more so than Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, and seemingly getting away with it.
In recent years, Orbán has intensified his crackdown on democratic principles, including eroding academic freedoms and increasing hostility towards the media. In April, Orbán even decided to withdraw Hungary from the International Criminal Court – a pan-global organisation set up to uphold the rule of law and hold those charged with the gravest war crimes accountable.
The LGBTQ+ community has been particularly targeted in Hungary, with laws passed abolishing the legal recognition of transgender people in 2020 and banning the depiction of homosexuality to under-18s in 2021. A recent escalation is a law banning Pride marches, introduced in March, under the guise that such gatherings are harmful to children. At the time, Orbán said: “We won’t let woke ideology endanger our kids.”
Hungary’s parliament has since passed a series of other amendments tightening the government’s grip on those seeking to attend Pride, which will allow authorities to use facial recognition technology to identify people at events, and potentially fine them up to 200,000 Hungarian forint (HUF), the equivalent of $560. Protests have erupted across Hungary since the law was passed, and thousands are expected to turn out in defiance at Budapest Pride on 28 June.
Meanwhile, other draft legislation is making its way through parliament that is reminiscent of Russia’s “foreign agent” law – the Transparency of Public Life bill, if passed, would allow the government to penalise and ban dissenting voices and critics deemed detrimental to Hungary’s national interests, including the press and NGOs.
Hungary’s recent actions not only contravene the ECHR, but also the European Union’s (EU) policies around democracy and human rights, as laid out in its treaties and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, of which its 27 member states are meant to abide by.
But the political tide appears to be turning. Hungary is clearly moving further and further away from the fundamental values of the EU, and many member countries are growing frustrated with the Central European state, and with the European Commission for not taking strong enough action.
This week, 17 EU countries, including France, Germany, Ireland and Spain, signed a declaration expressing their concerns and dismay over Hungary’s anti-Pride law. They have called on Orbán to revise it, and have asked the European Commission to take legal action against Hungary if it does not do so.
Michael McGrath, the EU commissioner responsible for democracy, said this week the “willingness is there” to take action against Hungary, and that a “comprehensive analysis of the relevant legislation is underway now”.
But so far, retribution for Hungary’s actions has been negligible. The European Council has discussed Hungary’s rule of law violations seven times in the European Parliament since 2018, but has never taken the next step in the process, which would allow member states to vote on sanctions against Hungary.
There have been some financial penalties, but relations between the EU and Hungary are likely complicated by the need for cooperation against Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In December 2022, the European Commission froze €30 billion ($34 billion) in funds to Hungary, after the country’s failure to address concerns around democracy and the rule of law; a year later, a third of these funds were unfrozen, with speculation that Orbán was threatening to impede the EU’s actions in supporting Ukraine.
Patience with Hungary amongst EU nations appears to be wearing thin. The question is: how long will Orbán’s impunity be allowed to continue, and what example does this set for other EU countries wishing to replicate his methods?
29 Nov 2024 | News and features, Venezuela
As thoughts turn to the festive season, Americans will have the chance to ponder what the New Year and a Donald Trump presidency will mean. But this is not the only significant election in the continent to have happened this year.
This weekend Venezuelans will take to the streets to demonstrate against President Nicolás Maduro’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat in elections on 28 July. The opposition candidate, 75-year-old Edmundo González Urrutia, has pledged to return to the country from exile in Spain to take office on 10 January 2025, ten days before the Trump inauguration. His victory has been recognised by the international community, including the White House.
International human rights groups have raised concerns about the increasing authoritarianism of the Maduro government with widespread surveillance of its citizens and arbitrary detention of political opponents. According to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country as of May 2024, which accounts for roughly 20% of the entire population.
González, who has never stood for office before, took the place of the original opposition candidate Maria Corina Machado, when she was banned from standing by the government and forced into hiding. Machado now faces charges from the Venezuelan federal prosecutor, which accuses her of supporting American sanctions against her country.
Machado has joined fellow opposition figure Magalli Meda in calling for protestors around the world to paint their hands red as a symbol of the suffering of the Venezuelan people as they take to the streets around the world. The UN reported that at least 23 protesters were killed at anti-government demonstrations in the weeks after the election and approximately 2,400 were arrested.
Despite the desperate situation for Venezuela as it sinks further into economic crisis and international isolation, this year’s elections have provided a model of democratic activism. Voters were shocked when the government announced that Maduro had gained a convenient 51 per cent of the vote but failed to provide numbers. This in a country whose election system was described by the Carter Center, set up by the former US President Jimmy Carter, as “the best in the world”.
In this context, readers of this newsletter would be advised to listen to the latest episode of the This American Life podcast, which includes a report on Venezuela by Nancy Updike. A transcript is also available.
Updike tells the story of the movement, led by citizens, to document the country’s entire voting record, precisely in case that Maduro’s ruling party tried to fix the vote. The movement was called Seiscientos Kah, which means 600k, and was so named because of the number of volunteers needed to make the checks. The organiser is now in hiding.
Every voting machine in Venezuela prints out a tally of votes for each candidate on election day. Each candidate is allowed a witness at every one of the 30,000 machines stationed around the country. 600k was set up as a giant relay race with the witnesses at the start and activists collecting the results and taking them to monitoring centres at secret locations. Here, using a laptop, a scanner, and a portable generator, the results were then uploaded to a website and the original copies taken to a separate secret location.
This extraordinary process meant that when polling closed, opposition supporters across the country uploaded videos of people reading out the results, which had come directly from the voting machines.
The situation in Venezuela remains grim. Updike quotes from a UN report on the protests against Maduro after the election. Those charged with terrorism and incitement to hatred included: “opposition political leaders, individuals who simply participated in the protests, persons who sympathised with the opposition or criticised the government, journalists who covered the protests, lawyers for those detained, human rights defenders, and members of the academic community”.
A statement from a member of the UN fact-finding mission said that many of those detained: “were subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, as well as sexual violence, which was perpetrated against women and girls, but also against men”.
Maduro has called the actions of the 600k movement a “coup”. In fact, it may provide a blueprint for the fight against election-rigging by authoritarian governments around the world.
