Healthcare systems in Eastern Europe and Central Asia remain woefully unable to cope with HIV/AIDS as the region’s raging epidemic – the fastest growing in the world – takes on a new dimension, a senior UN official has told IPS.
A “virus” of restrictive abortion legislation is spreading from Eastern Europe, health experts and rights campaigners have said, amid Church pressure and misguided government attempts to stop falling birth rates.
A deeply-engrained culture of graft across Eastern Europe is destroying bonds between politicians and the people as populations lose faith in what they see as a self-serving elite “enriching” themselves at their expense, anti-corruption campaigners have said.
Monday’s resignation of Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas over a massive corruption scandal may well mark a new era of judicial independence in the Czech Republic and possibly the whole post-communist region.
Governments in Eastern Europe and Central Asia are being urged to end the institutionalisation of babies as more than 15,000 children a year in the region continue to be subjected to a practice experts say often leaves them physically and mentally scarred for life.
When the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which advocates an end to what it says has been a failed ‘war on drugs’, held its latest working meeting in Warsaw last month, the choice of venue was apt.
Despite pledges from governments across Eastern Europe and Central Asia to fight HIV/AIDS – one of the eight Millennium Development Goals – the region has the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemic.