Press release me, let me go

A friend told me a couple of weeks ago that he once went on one of those ‘all expenses paid’ holidays to the Caribbean with a girlfriend and hated it. They were on a compound surrounded by barbed wire, “to keep out the locals” and his...

There is some debate around about whether ‘online activism’ petitions, Facebook groups and webchats, are worthwhile and as fruitful as more old style methods of campaigning – like getting arrested… We’re sure we’ve got one that’s...

Today isFreedom Day in Gambia,but for many Gambians, the irony of this public holiday leaves a bitter taste. PresidentJammeh established this national holiday soon after he was elected president in1996. Since then sadly, little has...

As my boss Mike was saying the other day , one of the mixed pleasures of working in the Amnesty media team is that you get to do TV and radio interviews (“And now we're joined by Amnesty spokesman Neil Durkin …”). Mixed, because they...

As Nick Davis’ feature on BBC News Online reminds us, the Jamaican Constabulary Force’s motto is “ Serve, Protect and Reassure ”. This claim must be pretty hard to swallow for the thousands of people living in poorer parts of the...

I met a Chinese woman on Friday whose story really touched me. Her parents were recently snatched from their home in Inner Mongolia by non-uniformed men and bundled into an unmarked car. They were taken to a detention centre, where...

Bodies stacked up in make-shift morgues, hundreds killed and carted away in secret. These are the alarming claims being made about the secret death toll in the Iran elections crackdown. How true are they? Frankly, I think it’s still...

According to the Amnesty researcher on Russia talking to me yesterday, there used to be three key people when it came to uncovering human rights violations in Chechnya. These were the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the lawyer Stanislav...

Many of us are familiar with Disraeli ’s well-coined phrase, “lies, damned lies and statistics” but I reckon Charles Taylor brought a whole new saying to life as he took to the stand at The Hague yesterday. In his attempt to defend...

We had a flurry of activity in the press office late yesterday afternoon, with the Guardian and Daily Mail phoning me in quick succession to ask about a story they’d seen on the BBC and Ha’aretz websites, that the UK had imposed a...

“What did you have for breakfast?” the nice man from ITV asked me. Of course, he wasn’t really interested in my answer, only in using it to check that the sound levels were set correctly. I could have answered that I’d a bowl of Fruit...

A personal anecdote. It’s 1984 and I’m walking in the city centre of Sheffield on a Saturday afternoon, having just been browsing in Virgin Records looking at stuff I couldn't afford to buy because I’m on the dole. When …. wham! A man...

The decision taken by Jack Straw to change the law to now be able to prosecute those living in the UK and suspected of committing war crimes and acts of genocide as far back as 1991, has caused quite a stir in British media. Yesterday...

That master of dramatic political interventions David Davis has been at it again. This time he’s been standing up in the House of Commons denouncing the way that British intelligence officials have allegedly sent British nationals for...

It’s unusual to have so many international news stories dominate the news agenda. Ongoing Uighur protests in China, President Obama making a speech in Russia and more discussion about MJ’s memorial are the hot subjects at the moment...

The plight of the Uighurs – the much-persecuted, muslim ethnic majority in China’s distant north-western region of Xinjiang – was brought to the public’s attention this morning, and all for the wrong reasons. Getting reliable info from...

The question of how free people really are to express themselves and their sexual orientation in particular is a complex one. In the UK at least it seems like a very long time ago that it was actually against the law to be gay although...

In one of these strange bits of journalistic shorthand, the “Middle East” is often used as a way of referring to the Israel-Palestine situation. To me this has always seemed slightly bizarre. OK, I get the part-for-the-whole metonymy...

Perhaps unaware of the significance of the date, on 1 April Chechnya’s Kremlin-approved president Ramzan Kadyrov announced that after 15 years of conflict and human rights abuse, things in this Russian republic had returned to “normal”...

Do you drive? Do you fill up at Shell? Do you own shares in Shell? Does your pension fund invest in Shell? Do you know about the British government’s policy towards companies like Shell which are based in the UK but operate overseas...