blackmail / coercion, no-man's-land

Serbians unhappy with speed of EU integration

The Netherlands however froze the SAA, demanding full cooperation with the war crimes tribunal in The Hague and the arrest of remaining fugitives Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic. In addition, the global financial crisis caused a drop in foreign investment that hit Serbia especially hard.

The poll showed that the country's citizens are unhappy with the speed of Serbia's EU integration and that 49 percent believe that "constant political conditions and blackmail" of Serbia by the EU is the greatest obstacle to Serbia's EU entry, while 20 percent blamed it on the "incompetence of the domestic government."

No one knows how widespread sexual blackmail is, but the case echoes other instances of sexual coercion that have surfaced in recent years, including agents criminally charged in Atlanta, Miami and Santa Ana, Calif. And it raises broader questions about the system’s vulnerability to corruption at a time when millions of noncitizens live in a kind of legal no-man’s land, increasingly fearful of seeking the law’s protection.


blackmail Show phonetics
noun [U]
when you obtain money from people or force them to do something by threatening to make known a secret of theirs or to harm them:
In a position of authority, a weakness for the opposite sex leaves you open to blackmail.

blackmail
verb [T]
They used the photographs to blackmail her into spying for them.

blackmailer
noun [C]

black・mail

━━ n., vt. ゆすり（取る）, 恐喝（する）; 脅迫して…させる ((into)).
black・mailer　n.
⇒black

coerce Hide phonetics
verb [T] FORMAL
to persuade someone forcefully to do something which they are unwilling to do:
The court heard that the six defendants had been coerced into making a confession.

coercion Hide phonetics
noun [U] FORMAL
He claimed the police had used coercion, threats and promises to illegally obtain the statement.

coercive Hide phonetics
adjective
using force to persuade people to do things which they are unwilling to do:
The president relied on the coercive powers of the military.
coercive measures/tactics


no-man's-land Hide phonetics
noun
1 [S or U] an area or strip of land which no one owns or controls such as a strip of land between two countries' borders, especially in a war:
to be lost/stranded/stuck in no-man's-land
They found themselves trapped in the no-man's-land between the two warring factions.

2 [S] a situation or area of activity where there are no rules or which no one understands or controls because it belongs neither to one type nor another:
The families of people who die in custody are in a legal no-man's-land when they try to discover what went wrong.


(from Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary)