Both Finland and Sweden signed so called Host Nation Support Agreements with NATO during 2014.

In Finland, Antero Jyränki (professor emeritus of law and long time expert in the constitutional law committee) questions this and says “the defence policy has run over the fundamental law“.

This seems to be true for Sweden also, where the agreement is awaiting an expected approval by the parliament later this year. The Swedish lawyer Per Åberg has pointed out that if the agreement is activated (that is, Sweden invites NATO to conduct operations on Swedish territory), NATO can simply take over. Also, agreement details can be changed out of democratic control. We think that such an agreement, as well as the already existing hidden influence related to NATO, is not compatible with the preamble of Sweden’s fundamental law, which says that all public power in Sweden emanates from the people. The Swedish “No to NATO” network has launched a petition against the agreement, which can be signed on their website.

However, it is obvious that the chance of stopping such agreements is at this time close to zero, because FInland and Sweden – together with most other European countries – appear to have been puppets of Washington for a long time. Paul Craig Roberts is one of many US experts, who has warned for the risk that this is leading to war.

Since Giulio Regeni was found dead in the outskirts of Cairo in the beginning of February, a number of public statements and petitions have been launched. One of them is an invitation to academics to sign an open letter to the Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who might be considered morally responsible together with most Western countries for de facto supporting the Egyptian regime.

Egypt’s interior minister Maj. Gen. Magdi Abdel-Ghaffar has dismissed any suggestion that the police were responsible for the death and said that “the Egyptian police are known for integrity and transparency.”

The minister has a problem with credibility, to say the least. Many of the articles about Giulio Regeni remind us of the other horrible acts carried out by the Egyptian regime lately, including alleged child molestation and the killings of Mexican tourists that Egypt has banned news coverage of. The fear that there will be no real justice is well founded, but we cannot accept that.

As Yezid Sayigh has identified, the problem of impunity is a key issue also for democracy:

If you also want to do more to protest against the wide-spread impunity, you are welcome to contact us on info@accoun.org

UK Government drops investigations into Iraq war crimes, according to a recent article

Read the article in The Guardian. More information is available (for example) from Human Rights Watch.

See the film Die dunkle Seite der Wikipedia about the information warfare on Wikipedia, where government agencies appear to be very active, and a related petition for transparency (both links to content in German).

As several countries around the world are pushing hard to undermine encryption, we need to be reminded about the speech by Jacob Appelbaum: We need more, not less democracy. He speaks from personal experience of government harassment.

In Indonesia, president Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has expressed a commitment to resolve a number of past human rights violations by the end of this year. Read the article in The Jakarta Post and see Stop Impunity in Indonesia.

Investigative journalist Allan Nairn says that

for Guatemala, this is kind of the beginning of a Nuremberg trial-type process, except it’s not being done by a foreign, occupying power that just won a war, the way the Nuremberg trials were done. This is being done by the local justice system.

Read more in Democracy Now!

While we are still waiting for accountability in many western countries for those responsible for secret prisons (sometimes called black sites) and the apparent corruption involved, information has emerged about secret prisons also in Sri Lanka. Read more on ReliefWeb.

In the YouTube video below, listen to what Lawrence Wilkerson has to say about corruption inside the establishment.