10 października 2008 roku w Centrum Stosunków Międzynarodowych odbyło się spotkanie dotyczące najnowszej publikacji Freedom House „Nations in Transit”. Gościem spotkania był Dr Vladimir Shkolnikov, dyrektor Freedom House Europe.
‘Nations in Transit’, published annually by Freedom House, is a comprehensive, comparative, multidimensional study focusing on 29 countries and administrative areas from Central Europe to Eurasia. The study looks at independence of the judiciary, democratic governance, freedom of the media, and the civil society as key indicators of democratic developments of these countries and areas. Since 2004 Nations in Transit has been based in Budapest to build greater synergies between the organization’s analytical and programmatic work in the post-Communist region. The most recent volume suggests a number of worrying trends from the reform fatigue in Central Europe and democracy in retreat in Georgia to the rise of authoritarian petro-States such as Russia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan.
The seminar was organized within the framework of the partnership with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Poland.
Vladimir D. Shkolnikov, Ph. D. is the Director of Freedom House-Europe in Budapest. He has over fifteen years of experience in democracy and human rights promotion. Before joining Freedom House he was with the Warsaw-based office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE/ODIHR) where he first served as the Head of the Migration Unit and then as the Head of the ODIHR’s Democratization Department. He was responsible for supervising a large portfolio of the ODIHR’s programs of technical assistance t civil society, think tanks, political parties and governmental institutions in the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia and chaired a number of OSCE democracy and rule of law conferences. He received a commendation for his migration work from the 1996 OSCE Lisbon Summit of Heads of States and Governments. He has also served as the Deputy Head of the ODIHR Election Observation Mission to the 1999 Kazakhstan Presidential Elections. Dr. Shkolnikov has written several articles on democratization in the South Caucasus. He graduated with honors from California State University, Sacramento and received an MPP and Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Policy Analysis where he specialized in Russian and Eurasian Studies.