May 24, 2020
A country exists where the Covid-19 pandemic is considered a “worldwide psychosis” by its leader, the latest dictator of Europe, the Corona-skeptic Aleksandre Loukachenko. It is Belarus. Schools are open, sports events continue, and commemorations follow, one after the other. Yet the virus is ravaging hospitals there. In the absence of government actions, the citizens are organizing their own and society’s pro...
May 3, 2020
We asked François Croquette, the French Ambassador for Human Rights, to share his observations and thoughts on dissidence in this era of Covid-19 and the way in which the handling of the health crisis affects the situation of dissidents in authoritarian countries, hit by the pandemic.
Are authoritarian regimes profiting from the focus of the world’s attention on Covid-19 to crack down harder on dissidents and o...
April 9, 2020
“How to manage staying at home without going crazy”
Film and theater director Kirill Serebrennikov, manager of the “Centre-Gogol” theater in Moscow, is known worldwide for his dissident liberal opinions and his very critical stance on the powers in Russia. In 2017, he was accused of financial fraud in his management of the Centre-Gogol. As far as the international community is concerned, it was a political trial...
April 5, 2020
We know that under the control of the drives of domination, predation, exploitation, destruction and extermination that homo sapiens exercises on everything around him - nature, living beings and even his peers - he risks this destructive insanity turning against him, by creating the conditions of his own extinction. It could be that Homo Sapiens, with an uppercase H and an uppercase S, who takes himself for th...
March 21, 2020
Dear friends,
While we are all sharing in this rare and strange experience of confinement to our homes, the menace of the pandemic not far, it seems essential to continue to inform you of the situation of citizens, including researchers, writers, artists and journalists, who defend fundamental liberties in the world. It seems that the situations of these dissidents and whistle-blowers are heavily entangled with the defensive st...
February 2, 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...
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...