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Medical groups and human rights campaigners around the world have condemned the sentencing of imprisonment for 11 members of the Turkish Medical Association (TMA) for speaking out against a Turkish military offensive in the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in northern Syria last year. At an Ankara criminal court on May 3, the TMA members were sentenced to 20 months in prison for “inciting hatred and hostility”, and one member was given a further 19 months for “terrorist propaganda” over social media postings, the association said in a statement. Since a failed military coup in 2016, thousands of professionals, including health-care workers, lawyers, and teachers have been sacked or arrested and more than 77 000 jailed pending trial, on charges of supporting the alleged coup backers and terrorism. “According to our sources, the current conditions in prisons, in particular the deteriorating health-care system, do not allow adequate follow-up by physicians of prisoners on hunger strikes.

The 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections were characterised by a novel element in European Union (EU) politics. For the first time, the major European party families put forward top candidates for President of the European Commission, the so-called Spitzenkandidaten. This paper tests whether this innovation had the potential to—at least partially—alleviate the alleged accountability deficit. We rely on original survey data to assess citizens’ preferences for each of the main Spitzenkandidaten: Jean-Claude Juncker, Martin Schulz, and Guy Verhofstadt. Our research is guided by three questions: what explains whether citizens formulate a preference for a certain Spitzenkandidat? Which factors are responsible for variations in such preferences? And, are these explanations moderated by citizens’ political awareness? We show that three factors enable citizens to formulate a preference for the Spitzenkandidaten: news exposure, general EU political information, and campaign-specific information about the Spitzenkandidaten. Furthermore, we demonstrate that only the most knowledgeable citizens are able to use party cues in their evaluations of the Spitzenkandidaten. The implications of our findings are discussed with reference to the EU’s democratic deficit debate.

A letter by former European leaders on US plan for Israeli-Palestinian conflict is presented.

This paper investigates the shifts in the international balance of power, that we attribute both to the weakening status of the US globally and to the rise of regional powers. The hypothesis of the study is that the world is currently experiencing a short stage of unimultipolarity, characterised by high instability, which is generated by the rise of new regional hegemons, the changes at the top of power hierarchies, the diminishing gap between the only superpower of the moment, the US, and the rising powers. We point to the tensions caused by a shift in power and status from the global hegemon to the regional hegemons, discussing its consequences in terms of: ideological allegiances, institutions and treaties evolution, development models legitimacy. The following decade will probably confirm the tendency for a return to a new type of bipolar order. Our analysis of the current stage of international relations reveals that we are now witnessing a double bipolarity: an American-Chinese economic bipolarity and an American-Russian military bipolarity.

This paper deals with the study of the electoral system of the Belgian House of Representatives and its electoral reforms. Belgium was the first European country to adopt an electoral system of proportional representation and, since then, its main elements have exhibited extraordinary stability. However, with the turn of the century, the coalition government headed by the liberal Guy Verhofstadt put the debate on institutional reforms at the center of the political agenda. This led to an electoral reform that involved several novelties: the «provincialization» of the electoral map, the establishment of a 5 percent threshold and the reduction of the list vote weight by half. In 2012, there was the last electoral reform, which consisted of the division of the controversial constituency of Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde. This last episode shows the complexity of the Belgian federal model, consociational, bipolar and with centrifugal dynamics.