Read on the Swedish pages of the 5th July Foundation about:

• Belgium’s third attempt to introduce data retention, which could be a European blueprint (see also EDRi in English)
• The extended FRA law in Sweden

Read in Kronen Zeitung (in German) about the draft of the new legislation in Austria. This is, like many other measures in Europe, completely against Resolution 2361 of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which we have reported about before. In Austria, strikes are planned in the beginning of December as a protest.

The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance writes:

The world is becoming more authoritarian as non-democratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression and many democratic governments suffer from backsliding by adopting their tactics of restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law, exacerbated by what threatens to become a “new normal” of Covid-19 restrictions. For the fifth consecutive year, the number of countries moving in an authoritarian direction exceeds the number of countries moving in a democratic direction. In fact, the number moving in the direction of authoritarianism is three times the number moving towards democracy.

In their new global report, we can inter alia read that:

Some of the most worrying examples of backsliding are found in some of the world’s largest countries (Brazil, India). The United States and three members of the European Union (EU) (Hungary, Poland and Slovenia, which holds the chair of the EU in 2021) have also seen concerning democratic declines.

Although some statements in their reports can be questioned, the general trend of undemocratic development is alarming.

Download the global report or see regional reports on https://www.idea.int/gsod/

Read The Intercept‘s recent article

One lost his son, another his mother, another his brother, another his best friend. Twenty years later, these four men and their families live with the knowledge that they were not told the truth about the murder of their loved ones on September 11, 2001. In the face of overwhelming resistance, they continue to fight for the justice they deserve.

In Colorado, you can be denid transplantation because of your vaccine status – where will this end?

Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right underpinning all civil liberties. But in reality, we seem to have lost it in many parts of the world. Ban Ki-moon writes:

Some journalists risk intimidation, detention and even their lives, simply for exercising their right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas

This goes not only for journalists, apparently. Even expressions of art are affected. Recently, cartoonist Michael Leunig in Australia lost his job because he published a cartoon on Instagram. The cartoon was critical against mandatory vaccination. Now the cartoon seems to have been removed from Instagram too, but you can still see it elsewhere.

Watch a clip from TV4 (in Swedish). Some say that the only “proof” against him is that he was a friend of Julian Assange (link to article in Swedish, where the main part is behind paywall).

The Belmarsh Tribunal in London is a people’s trial on the “War On Terror”. Read about it on Assange Defense. Julian Assange is still in the maximum security prison Belmarsh, also called “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay”, and and will face another extradition hearing on 27-28 October.

Read the debate article in Swedish, which claims that vaccine passports are unconstitutional