Block the way to war and fascism!

In recent years, a pathological Russophobia and war psychosis have spread throughout the “collective West.” EU foreign policy representative Kaja Kallas is a prime example: “If Europe can’t defeat Russia, how can it cope with China?” The many thousands of sanctions imposed by NATO states against the Russian Federation are not in accordance with international law, as the UN Charter grants them exclusive authority to the Security Council. Thus, they are weapons used by a warring party in an attempt to defeat its opponent. The fact that these NATO sanctions are also fully supported by Austria and Switzerland proves that their formal neutrality remains an illusion until popular pressure creates political majorities that make them a reality.

With the anti-Russian sanctions out of the democratic sector

Anti-Russian sanctionitis is not only ruining the Western European economy to the detriment of wage workers in that sector by cutting them off from cheap Russian raw materials and equally cheap Russian energy sources, but also human rights, a fact manifested both domestically and in foreign policy. It even extends beyond the European continent, in the collective West, when, under the Biden administration, military analyst and former US weapons inspector Scott Ritter had his passport confiscated to prevent him from traveling to the Russian Federation, and he only got it back after six months of the Trump administration. Or when, in early August, lawyer Yair Dagan Biran, known for representing pandemic opponents and mRNA vaccine refusers in Israel, was banned from booking a flight from Israel to Bulgaria, even though he quickly succeeded in overturning this ban through a court lawsuit.

So it doesn’t matter whether the rulers in the collective West feel disturbed in their pro-Zionist or anti-Russian policies by people who deconstruct their narratives. These are clear human rights violations whose effects go beyond the right to freedom of expression, even if they begin with restrictions on it.

Such is the case with Francesca Paola Albanese, an Italian legal scholar specializing in international law and human rights, who has served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 2022. In July 2025, the United States imposed sanctions on Albanese for waging a “campaign of political and economic warfare” against the United States and the Zionist entity Israel by openly naming the perpetrators of the genocide in Gaza.

Evghenia Gutsul, Bashkan of Gagauzia, Milorad Dodik, President of Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Blagomir Kotsev, Mayor of the city of Varna in Bulgaria, were in the way of the anti-Russian fury. They were persecuted because they rightly argued that we all, regardless of our country of residence, have something to gain from international friendship with the Russian Federation. Blagomir has been in custody since July 8 on trumped-up corruption charges, while Evghenia has already been in prison for seven years, even though no evidence has been presented that she was accused of financing an election campaign with Russian money. Milorad has so far evaded arrest on the charge of failing to carry out an order from the EU governor. In reality, as in the case of the election annulment and the candidacy bans in Romania, the aim is to push through NATO’s anti-Russian line everywhere with the support of the fascist-Banderist regime in Kyiv.

A clear human rights violation was committed with the sanctioning of three journalists in the 17th package. The most severely affected are not Thomas Röper and Alina Lipp – who reside in the Russian Federation and have no assets in the EU – but Hüseyin Doğru, a German citizen living in Berlin with his family . He was placed on the sanctions list for his anti-Zionist reporting on Palestine, because reporting on Zionist crimes “serves anti-Russian narratives.” It can be assumed that the Berlin government of the Federal Republic of Germany commissioned this from the EU Commission, as it considers the defense of the Zionist entity of Israel to be a “reason of state,” while in reality, the underlying objective is the profit interests of the arms industry.

The World Union of Freethinkers vigorously protests these blatant human rights violations and calls on Berlin residents to provide all possible assistance to the sanctioned Hüseyin Doğru, even if this constitutes a violation of the sanctions. These sanctions are illegal and illegitimate under international law: Only UN Security Council sanctions are legal, although even these would be illegitimate if they violated human rights, as in the case of Hüseyin Doğru, Alina Lipp, and Thomas Röper.

These sanctions are nothing but further proof that the Federal Republic of Germany, along with the EU and NATO, has left the democratic sector on the path to a new fascism, one that comes without brownshirts and blackshirts and threatens to end no less deadly than that of the Thousand-Year Reich. Where injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty!

Jean-Marie Jacoby
Secretary General

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