Baskut Tuncak is, UN Special Rapporteur on hazardous substances and wastes: “In shipbreaking yards, workers often are exposed to toxic chemicals including asbestos, dusts and fibres, highly toxic industrial chemicals which have been banned for decades but are still present in ships, as well as lead, mercury, arsenic or cadmium in paints, coat ...

The road to Alang is lined with shops and warehouses selling items that once used to sail across the world’s oceans. Oak desks, faux crystal chandeliers, life vests and boats, ropes, electric cables and switches, leather chairs, paintings and reproductions, giant generators and motors – you name it. It is ship recycling in its most lite ...

“Shipbreaking is amongst the most dangerous of occupations, with unacceptably high levels of fatalities, injuries and work-related diseases”, the ILO warned in 2015. I went to Alang and sat down with the father of a worker who just died on the yard.  

When big multinational shipping companies opt for shipbreaking on South Asian beaches in order to maximize profits, one can be outraged, but will not be surprised. But what should we make of the news that Greenpeace’s iconic Rainbow Warrior II ended up on a beach in Bangladesh for scrapping?

Belgium’s queen Mathilde is one of 17 global sdg-advocates. What motivates her to engage with these sustainable development goals? Where did it all start? And what does she hope to achieve? These are only a few questions that got answered during a long afternoon, in an exclusive interview MO* had with the queen.

As a child, Jhumpa Lahiri often felt like an alien, both in Rhode Island and in Calcutta, the two pivotal places in her young life. Although the Indian-American writer has moved on since then, she says that ‘almost no day passes without me thinking: wouldn’t it have been nice to have one place of origin?’ A conversation about iden ...

Nine European countries forcibly return Afghans, and Pakistan is even threatening to force 1.5 million Afghans back to their country of origin. These politically motivated manoeuvres can be lethal -for the Afghans.

Koen Vanmechelen's chickens are world-famous. The artist himself is often identified with his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, which has been running for thirty years now. Yet Vanmechelen’s oeuvre extends far beyond the chicken: it deals with concepts such as diversity, identity and the restoration of freedom and equilibrium.

On the 24th of March Isabel Allende received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ghent. Gie Goris met the author in San Francisco and had a long interview with her on stories and lies, women and power, politics and migration. ‘The strength of women is not in power or in physical strength, but in resilience and compassion.’ ...

We have all seen these images popping up in our social media feeds: Afghanistan in the 1970’s versus Afghanistan in the 2010’s. The first image shows girls in Kabul, who could just as well have lived in Paris or Berkeley in that period, with their long hair, short skirts, smiling faces and confident regards. The more recent image, then, ...

Mukhisa Kituyi, previous Kenyan minister of Trade and Industry, is secretary-general of UNCTAD, the UN-organization for Trade and Development, since 2013. MO* interviewed him about the importance of and the barriers for regional trade in Africa. ‘We need to counteract the worldwide trend that regards multinational agreements as suspicious and ...

The world was surprised by the travel ban that President Trump proclaimed for inhabitants or citizens of seven mostly Islamic countries. This is, however, only the first step of a much larger strategy, according to Reza Aslan, the famous Iranian-American author and TV-maker. He hopes that by 2018, the current protests will bring about a renewed Dem ...