Imposing martial law on 13 December 1981, the communist government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski violated the Polish constitution and international law, Rzeczpospolita leads, reporting on the ruling of the Constitutional Court on 16 March. The court stated that martial law could have been introduced only in the event of war and Poland was not in a state of war with any country at that time. “This is a great posthumous victory for my husband. But most of all an act of justice for all martial law victims,” said the wife of the late Janusz Kochanowski, the ombudsman who brought the case before the court in 2008. Dziennik Gazeta Prawna notes that “about 130,000 people sentenced during martial law may now demand retrial, acquittal, and compensation”. Martial law crushed the Solidarność movement, the first free trade union organisation in the former Soviet bloc, and stopped reforms in Poland until the Round Table talks of 1989.
The leader of Greece’s leftist alliance SYRIZA is the new bright hope of Greek politics. Steering a course between pragmatism and the rhetoric of class warfare, he has unsettled Berlin, and not just those who back Angela Merkel's austerity policies. 
Europe’s economic woes have forced us to try to understand the secret Olympian world of global finance. But now that we pay more attention to bond yields and stability mechanisms, isn’t it clear that the experts up on their lofty peaks don’t know what’s going on either? 
This year’s Eurovision Song Contest is hosted by Azerbaijan, a country that is far from being a model democracy. An Estonian journalist takes a critical look at the deferential treatment enjoyed by the regime in Baku.