World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

Hungary has passed a new law that states that “helping migrants legalize their status in Hungary by distributing information about the asylum process or providing them with financial assistance could result in a 12-month jail term.”  Additionally, according to Joshua Keating in Slate:  “The government also changed the constitution to make it illegal to ‘settle foreign populations’ in Hungary, a response to EU efforts to resettle refugees throughout the bloc’s member states.”  The law is specifically intended to stop the Open Society Foundation founded by George Soros.  Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, is determined to create what he calls an “illiberal” state.  The change augurs ill for the European Union and the governments in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia seems to be moving in the same direction.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has pulled out of the coalition which has ruled Indian-controlled Kashmir which means that the region will now be ruled by the central Indian government until a new coalition is created.  The decision to leave the coalition stemmed from increased violence in the region.  The BJP had been in a coalition with the Muslim-backed People’s Democratic Party (PDP) since 2015, but the alliance was always uneasy.   The change to direct rule by the central government will make governing the region very difficult and it is likely that violence will increase in Kashmir.  The governance of Kashmir has been a highly contentious issue between India and Pakistan since the founding of the two states in 1947.

Today is World Refugee Day, a day designated to bring attention to the plight of the most vulnerable people in the world:  refugees.  In 2017, 2.9 million additional people sought political asylum, the highest number of people ever recorded.  Of that number, only 100,000 were given refuge.  The total number of people seeking refuge in the world is almost 70 million.  But there is little question that the attitude toward refugees today is as hostile as it was in the 1930s.  And the day is recognized on the same day that the US left the UN Human Rights Council.