February 14, 2020
Asli Erdogan is one of Turkey's most important writers. Her present international renown is due no doubt to her talent, but also to the persecution she has suffered over the last three and a half years. In August 2016, a few weeks after the attempted coup d’état, Asli Erdogan was arrested and jailed for her collaboration with the daily newspaper, Özgür Günden, which is noted for supporting Kurdish claims. After four months of...
January 31, 2020
We hear it regularly spoken about: the social credit system that has been in place in China since 2014. If you haven't paid your fines, if you've run a red light or smoked in a train, 400 million cameras that track you, supported by visual recognition programs and surveillance software nestled in your smartphone, make it possible for you to be penalized by a drop in your "credit rating." And its consequences? In 2018, 17.5 mil...
January 26, 2020
Philippe Ollé-Laprune, former cultural advisor to the French Embassy in the Honduras, co-Founder and co-Director of the agency, Ad'Hoc for Cultural Development, and Director of the Book Office of the French Embassy in Mexico. For a year, he has been developing the ICORN network in Latin America, a network of cities offering shelter to artists in danger.
Would you please explain precisely what the ICORN network...
December 2, 2019
Last November 4th, to our greatest joy, we learned that Turkish journalist and writer Ahmet Altan, incarcerated since 2016 and condemned to life imprisonment in 2018, was freed and placed under judicial supervision. Timour Muhidine, a specialist in modern Turkish literature, director of the series, "Lettres turques” at Actes Sud and a lecturer at l’INALCO, goes over this liberation.
Over a period of a few...
December 2, 2019
Last October 27th, a 76-year-old man died from cardiac arrest in a Cambridge hospital. This event didn’t make the headlines. However this man was a giant, a man of the stature of Nelson Mandela, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel. Vladimir Boukovski was, among Soviet dissidents, one of the most flamboyant.
Born in 1942, he very quickly became conscious of the lies in Soviet propaganda. From th...
November 22, 2019
Marie Holzman, a translator and expert in Chinese culture, especially in contemporary China and Chinese dissidence, has been refused a Chinese visa for several decades. President of the association, Solidarité Chine, she actively supports the diffusion of Liao Yiwu’s works, which expose the reality behind the massacres in Tianmen Square.
How would you explain the amplitude of the Hong Kong demonstrations a...
November 13, 2019
Human rights are in crisis. Disregarded everywhere, they are contested, regarded as hypocritical, ineffective and too abstract to incorporate into society. And this repudiation isn’t reserved to authoritarian regimes. We observe it even in our democracies. To understand why this tendency against human rights is dangerous, read Monique Chemillier-Gandreau’s book, Régression de la démocratie et déchaînement de la...
October 17, 2019
Andrzej Kompa, 39 years old, is part of the history and philosophy faculty of the University of Łódź in Poland, giving classes on ancient civilizations such as the Byzantine Empire. Since 2015, he has been denouncing the attacks on the Constitution committed by the current government. A year ago, he publicly renounced a bronze medal of service, awarded by Andrzei Duda, the Polish president, at the request of Ł...
October 9, 2019
This week, we share with you the memoirs of Edward Snowden, released simultaneously throughout the world in mid-September. It is a book that makes for fascinating reading. Its succinct narrative recounts the life of Snowden, the brilliant and intellectual computer expert who was first trained by the CIA and employed as a "global systems administrator" (a hacker, according to Snowden), then eventually went to wo...
October 9, 2019
Oleg Sentsov has chosen not to retreat. Freed at the end of August, he is going to alert the world hereafter about the situation of the Ukrainians still held in Russia. There are 86 of them. They are less known than Oleg Sentsov. Although a good number of them are Crimean Tatars, they are considered to be Russian by the authorities.
The filmmaker met Emmanuel Macron in Strasbourg last Tuesday. At a time when the...