Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Also by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

• June 22, 2011

  Yelena Bonner In Her Own Right

  Yelena Bonner's life was all about the willingness to make the political personal and to back up ideals with the small, practical actions that constitute a movement – a package for a labor-camp inmate, signing an appeal, arranging a meeting with a foreign correspondent.

• April 11, 2011

  The OSCE's Failure Of Magical Thinking

  OSCE agreements are nonbinding, and its leverage mainly moral. But is it too much to ask that it avoid turning its leadership over to countries that do not abide by basic human rights?

• December 03, 2010

  OSCE Summit Was Less Than The Sum Of Its Parts

  The road to the summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was a torturous one, and many have wondered whether it was worth the effort.

• July 31, 2010

  The 'Joan Baez Stuff' Still Works

  At the opening of the 1980 Madrid Conference to review the 1975 Helsinki Final Act (which was signed 35 years ago, on August 1, 1975), a message was read by NGOs from a tiny scrap of paper with miniscule handwriting.

• July 02, 2010

  Is This Espionage 2.0?

  The media following the intriguing story of the FBI’s roll-up of a network of alleged Russian spies have been obsessed with the sexy Facebook pictures of one of the accused, Anna Chapman. Yet few have bothered to look past the sensational shots to her list of friends to see the kind of network a would-be spy might create using today’s free and easy social media tools.

• May 27, 2010

  Facebook Caught Between Roles As Civility Cop, First-Amendment Facilitator

  While Facebook's founder has often described his invention as a kind of country, even a massive community of people capable of acting in concert for good causes, unlike a real country Facebook has no democratically elected government nor any separation of powers or institutionalized checks and balances. Facebook does not have to explain itself when it comes to questions about how its Terms of Service are formulated and enforced. Facebook never publicizes the complaints it receives about hate groups nor reports on how it acts on them.

• March 10, 2010

  New OSCE Media Representative Faces Challenge Of Upholding Universality

  As the OSCE's media freedom representative, Miklos Haraszti, comes to the end of his term, there has been intense speculation about who will replace him. The post is likely to fall to Dunja Mijatovic, whose role as a media regulator in postwar Bosnia will likely bring greater focus to the complex role of the media during elections and ethnic conflicts.