What does a cereal bowl, some topless women & Youssou N’Dour have in common? They’re all in the round-up of this week’s international news you may not have heard of.
For your read-this-and-catch-up-on-some-international-news-so-you-can-impress-your-boss-or-your-friends pleasure, here are the following stories:
- How a cereal bowl helped people get the sack in Edinburgh
- Why is a judge being judged in Spain
- What made well-known quiet man, UN’s Ban-Ki Moon, become very vocal
- What made three Ukranian women go naked in Switzerland in near-freezing temperatures
- Who is running in the Senegal presidential elections (an update)
- When is the EU finally going to make a move on Hungary’s anti-democratic constitutional moves (an update)
Scotland: Cleaners were sacked after their names were drawn from a cereal bowl
When it comes to getting fired, it’s not not surprising to hear of consultants auditing a company to see where the redundancies should come from, of heavy tome of reports outlining the cost-benefit analysis or of long protracted negotiations between unions and employers. The use of a cereal bowl however – that was a new one for me.
Street cleaners in Scotland discovered that the high tech analysis deployed by Edinburgh Council was an item found in the kitchen. The Council had to decide which seven out of the thirteen agency workers they had but found the decision tough. Four were found “through a performance-related decision” according to the BBC, but as for the final three, they found it really tough. So what else were they to do, but whip out a bowl, pop everyone’s name into it and draw.
Couple of things about this story once you get past the initial hilarity of the decision:
- from the BBC report, this action had the support of the staff, which does make it sound like horrific
- it shows that they were all doing a seriously good job (or an equally awful job but let’s go for the positive option), that they could not decide between the team
- wonder why they did not go the full hog on this… Sure they are making reality shows out of everything now. How about ‘borrowing’ the lottery wheel, and popping the names on that. They could have sold tickets and everything. As they say, never waste a crisis go to waste…
Spain: Contraversal judge on trial for opening up history
Who shall judge the judges? Well in Spain they are going to be finding that very thing out this week.
Baltasar Garzon, a high-profile judge in Spain who was the guy who ordered Pinochet’s arrest, is set to go on trial this week. The accusation? Well, two right-wing organisations have accused him of ‘over-stepping the mark’ by trying to prosecute crimes that happened during the Franco era. May not sound so controversial but in Spain, it most certainly is.
As you may know from a previous post (skip down to ‘a bit about the king’ if you fancy rereading about Spain’s history), Spain made the transition from dictatorship to democracy in 1975. In 1977, to help the country making the move to democracy, the country decided to have an amnesty on all crimes committed during Franco’s rule. And with that amnesty, that chapter of Spain’s history was closed.
But a decision made by Garzon in 2008 has put this amnesty into the spotlight again after he ruled that there should be an investigation into the thousands that disappeared during Franco’s era which involves the excavation of a number of mass graves. His argument is that these actions were in fact crimes against humanity and therefore are not subject to a simple amnesty. To his critics, he is a left-wing attention-seeking nut while to the relatives of the estimated 114,000 disappeared during Franco’s time, he is seen as the ‘Superjudge’ and their one hope to finally get answers. In fact, there were a series of protests over the weekend in support of Garzon and this case.
And not just this case because in an unprecedented situation for any judge, he does not just have one case against him. In fact, he’s got a hat trick – last week he was in court denying that he had illegally authorised the police to bug conversations between lawyers and their clients, and he will be facing a trial regarding whether he took bribes (which is also denies). Guess this is somewhat comes with the territory of being such a high-profile judge. Come to think of it, I thought it quite incredible that a judge is so well-known in a country. Hell, name four of our judges (barristers and solicitors are excluded from entering this…).
And at the heart of this story is how does a country deal with its past – do you let it lie or do you put it all out in the open. This is something that Ireland is no stranger to, on a range of issues.
Ethopia: The African Union has opened with the UN asking them to respect gay people
Ban-Ki Moon is known for being a quiet man, but this week he sent a loud statement to the members of the African Union, when in his opening address he reminded the countries present that they must respect people who are gay and transgender, reminding them of the details of the UN Declaration on Human Rights. You can watch him say it here.
Being gay in Africa is a difficult thing to be – ‘homosexual acts’ are illegal in most African countries, including Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and Botswana and South Africa has had a complex relationship with this area despite their recognition of LGBT in their constitution, with a key Zulu leader currently under investigation for allegedly calling gay people ‘rotten‘. And in response to Ban-Ki Moon, it was noted at the opening of the AU conference that “being gay is un-African”.
This is an issue that has been growing in promience in the international arena. Most recently, Hilary Clinton made her speech to the UN in Geneva last month a very memorable one by concentrating on the rights of gay people as the single point in her speech – while also noting that her country has a way to go too. Interestingly according to the BBC, both the US and UK have recently warned they would use foreign aid to push for homosexuality to be decriminalised on the socially conservative continent. Watch this international space.
Switzerland: Hear about the naked protest at Davos?
While we were all watching what Enda was saying inside the Davos meeting, there were others who were more interested in what three women were wearing outside the World Economic Forum event.
Three women from the Ukranian organisation FEMEN braved the near freezing temperatures to strip to the waist and protest about the global economic crisis. Holding signs saying “We are poor because of you” the women were arrested when they tried to scale a fence – all of which you can check out here in this video if you are interested.
This is not the first time that FEMEN have used this technique – they protested topless outside of Tymoshenko’s trial in Ukraine, outside Strauss-Kahn’s legal proceedings in America and for various protests against sex tourism and women’s rights. As we all know, sex sells. And it definitely did its job here – the three women got the vast majority of the attention out of the other 40-odd protestors that were outside the building.
(UPDATE) Hungary: “The EU is not stupid” says parliament speaker
As you know, Hungary has taken our interest here at Plain Talking over the last number of weeks. A quick update – the European Commission has started proceedings against Hungary questioning some of the democratic independence of its institutions since the introduction of their new constitution on 1 January 2012. And according to The Economist, it looks like Hungary’s government could be willing to back down notably as they are in negotiations at the moment with the EU and IMF regarding some ‘supporting loans’ they might need.
The new President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz put it best this week when he told Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban he should not think EU leaders “are stupid”. Probably a good idea. They might be a bit slow off the mark and all that, but dumb they are not.
(UPDATE) Senegal: Court makes two major rules regarding the Presidency
Another quick update, this time about Senegal. You may remember a few weeks ago, Youssou N’Dour, musician and Senegal’s most famous export, announced he was ‘throwing his hat into the ring’ for his country’s top position of President. If you recall this then you may also remember that there was some ambuigity about whether the current President would be able to run a third time as there was some questions about the legality of such a move.
Well the highest court in Senegal has decided that he can run for another go – though as you’ll read, there are a number of people not so happy with this decision including Youssou N’Dour who has been banned from running. This could be a campaign to watch with jaw-dropping ‘is that really democratic?’ interest.
More articles are available at www.plaintalking.ie.
