During the presidential elections in Ukraine on March 31, 2 690 violations of the electoral law were reported to the police. The Central Electoral Commission received over 130 complaints. But the appeals, complaints and their effectiveness haven’t necessarily made the headlines in the view of the actual election results. The type of complaints, however, coupled […]
No one could have missed the recent escalated Russian aggression against Ukraine. While the daily casualties in Donbas (reportedly over 1300 ceasefire violations per day) tend to receive less media coverage, the declared martial law covering ten regions of Ukraine came as a reality check of sorts. Possible limitations on individual rights and freedoms remain […]
Over 40 per cent of all intrastate conflicts have a link to natural resources and, while it is not new evidence as such, less than a quarter of peace negotiations actually aim to resolve conflicts by addressing resource management mechanisms. By the same token, links to natural resources are rarely included in the design of […]
I take public sector reform challenges in the post-Soviet space quite personally, with many first-hand Kafkaesque experiences from growing up in the ‘east’. So when the opportunity came about to work for the FBA on improving service delivery from a rights-based perspective in Ukraine, I struggled to think of alternatives to the complicated procedures people […]
Starting off as a research initiative, FBA’s work on exploring linkages between the rule of law and public administration in peacebuilding and development gradually scaled up to one of the largest projects that the agency is implementing bilaterally, the project on local self-government and rule of law in Ukraine. Within the span of several years […]
Growing up in a post-soviet environment, you see how lengthy and cumbersome service delivery is when you deal with government authorities. You see that mechanisms for appeal are hardly a threat to bureaucracies. And you tolerate it, because the demand for accountability is typically low and it’s not like your rights and entitlement to fair […]
We finished counting the votes in the historical presidential poll in Moldova close to midnight. Although no long queues were expected at the Moldovan Embassy in Stockholm – the only designated voting section for Sweden, Norway and Finland – we were pleasantly surprised with the turnout of the roughly 550 registered Moldovans in the three […]