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2011 (161)
Jan 31 2011 1:34PM
Fire in Cairo: human rights reforms are the cure for Egypts ills

Over the weekend Sky’s Tim Marshall tweeted from Egypt with the words “Burn like a fire in Cairo”, a line - as trainspotter-ish indie music types will tell you - that comes from The Cure’s “Fire In Cairo”, a song from their 1979 debut...

Jan 28 2011 4:07PM
'Diplomatic assurances', Ricin & turning a blind eye to torture overseas

Lawrence Archer, the jury foreman from the famed ‘Ricin trial’ (also known as the ‘No Ricin trial’ – they never found any) spoke last night at a fascinating event here at Amnesty’s Human Rights Action Centre in London. Very timely too...

Jan 27 2011 2:25PM
Egypt: who do you support?

“We believe the Egyptian government is stable”, said the US State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley on the World Tonight last night. Crowley was audibly uncomfortable at being pushed to repeat Hillary Clinton’s view from Tuesday that...

Jan 26 2011 3:54PM
Control orders what Teresa May didnt say

Control Orders will be scrapped from December 2011, and replaced with the catchily-named “T-Pims”, Terrorism prevention and investigation measures – that’s the long-awaited news from Home Secretary Teresa May today. It comes as a...

Jan 25 2011 3:03PM
Shell must spill the beans

Amnesty and Friends of the Earth have filed a joint complaint today with the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) accusing oil giant Shell of making misleading claims about the extent to which oil spills in the...

Jan 24 2011 5:23PM
Bold Bolkovac blowing the whistle on sex trafficking

A late blog today as we’ve been busy preparing for the launch of The Whistleblower book which is being hosted at Amnesty's headquarters in east London tomorrow. It's a gripping read which exposes how some private military contractors...

Jan 21 2011 1:10PM
Ken-ya stop police unlawfully killing?

There are some stories which I read and see which simply fill me with a sense of outrage and astonishment, and this is one of them. It’s the recent incident of the three unarmed men in Nairobi who were shot and killed by three police...

Jan 20 2011 4:03PM
Dread! This is a message to you Ruudi...

As a fly-by-night football fan (!) I couldn’t help but notice that there were two big football stories in the overnight news. First Eric Cantona has been appointed director of soccer at New York Cosmos. “Oh la la, it’s Cantona”, as the...

Jan 19 2011 3:20PM
Baby Doc, in the dock

The media swarm over the first anniversary of the Haiti earthquake had begun to quell, when in waltzed the former dictator who had made a run for it 25 years ago amid the fierce protests which finally put pay to his tyrannical rule...

Jan 18 2011 1:27PM
Gaza: growing new teeth for justice

For the second day running, I’m kicking off a post with a @jrug (C4 News’ Jonathan Rugman) tweet (hey, he gives good tweet!), sent while covering the upheaval in Tunisia: “Israeli journo covering Tunis protests: ‘They shout Palestinian...

Jan 17 2011 12:37PM
The blank generation: what next in Tunisia

A momentous weekend, but what next in Tunisia? A weekend tweet from Channel Four News’ Jonathan Rugman ( @jrug ) from Tunis captured the sense of uncertainty very nicely. “Poster of Ben Ali being taken down to reveal a blank – who will...

Jan 14 2011 5:26PM
UN-yielding aggression

The unrest across Ivory Coast may no longer dominate news headlines across the UK – in fact Tunisia’s unrest appears to be the ‘foreign news story of the day’ – but the Ivorian crisis is far from over. Just a few days ago, Amnesty...

Jan 13 2011 11:58AM
Nasrin Sotoudeh yet another woman in Iran jailed for defending peoples rights

My colleague Ann was on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour this morning, talking about Nasrin Sotoudeh , a human rights lawyer in Iran who was sentenced this week to eleven years in jail. Her conviction was for "acting against the national...

Jan 12 2011 1:15PM
Two cheers for Illinois

Brief one today - I'm in a big all-day media meeting with press officers from around the world (Alastair Campbell eat your heart out). So, my mini-reflection for the day is … it's not all gloom and doom coming out of the USA. In the...

Jan 11 2011 11:28AM
Guantánamo: nine years and counting

Call me an inveterate numerologist, but with the date on the palindromic 11/1/11 I think it’s only right to take stock of the situation at Guantánamo in numerical fashion. First off, and most obviously, today is – almost unbelievably –...

Jan 10 2011 5:46PM
Thin times: Tunisia's bloody protests

A couple of years ago Amnesty starting warning of the dangers of a global economic downturn leading to a deterioration in human rights around the world. With recent “food and jobs” protests in Tunisia and Algeria, we seem to be getting...

Jan 7 2011 1:26PM
Can a split Sudan see an end to years of human rights violations? Or worse to come...?

There’s an arresting image in today’s Guardian Eyewitness – centrefold spread – of a Sudanese woman gathering rubbish on a landfill in Juba . Amidst all the media attention relating to Sunday’s referendum across Sudan, the image...

Jan 7 2011 1:26PM
Can a split Sudan see an end to years of human rights violations and abuse?

There’s an arresting image in today’s Guardian Eyewitness – centrefold spread – of a Sudanese woman gathering rubbish on a landfill in Juba . Amidst all the media attention relating to Sunday’s referendum across Sudan, the image...

Jan 6 2011 3:26PM
Rape in Haitis camps

It never rains, but it pours like hell. That must be the prevalent feeling in Haiti’s camps as the first-year anniversary of 2010’s devastating earthquake approaches. Oxfam released a report today blaming ‘dithering and aid confusion’...

Jan 5 2011 4:44PM
Freebird: the Saudi spy vulture affair

If it had been the first day of April yesterday and not boring old 4 January (1/4 not 4/1) I don’t think many people would have believed that story about the vulture that was "arrested" in Saudi Arabia on suspicion of spying for Israel...

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