Belfast and Beyond

The new ' Bs' of Belfast got me reflecting on what it is to 'be'. I'm afraid that this alliterative campaign first brought to my mind an anecdote I learnt as a child growing up on the edge of the damp dump (sorry, picturesque Victorian...

In an earlier blog I called for an end to the vilification of young people, highlighting a You Gov poll commissioned by Barnardo’s which quoted some pretty shocking findings in relation to young people. From the comments I realised...

With less than a fortnight to go before the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission gives the Government its long-awaited advice on the scope and substance of a proposed NI Bill of Rights, the BBC's local flagship politics programme...

Last week I demonstrated unusual prescience when I warned on this blog that UK policing urgently risked a slippery slope towards ever-increasing Taser deployment. On Monday the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will announce that up to 30...

Hopes are riding high on an Obama presidency. Not least among human rights campaigners in America and internationally who have had a tough few years trying to reconcile old fashioned concepts like the Geneva Conventions and the taboo...

In the week that readers of amnesty blogs were able to learn about how well informed and compassionate young people can be (care of the great selection of blogs from NI Youth ), a number of publications have provided further evidence...

Where was your Chief Constable last week? If they were among the 15,000 top cops from around the world attending the International Association of the Chiefs of Police conference in San Diego, maybe it’s time to start worrying...

The front pages displayed on the weekend news-stands suffered from no shortage of ‘Strictly Come X-Factor, Get Me Out of Here’ non-stories. Rather fewer front pages were given over, however, to the reporting of the deaths of two Royal...

A trawl through some of the online responses to the coverage of Bilal Abdulla's words on Iraq at his ongoing trial reveals a predictable variety of replies from some who find his views totally unacceptable, to those who are willing to...

Get yourself over to Telegraph Blogs for the latest on the likelihood of the UK having its very own truth and reconciliation commission (to deal with the legacy of the Northern Ireland conflict). We at Amnesty are pretty clear about...

How do you convince policy-makers and decison-makers in the education sector that they ought to be mainstreaming human rights education within the school system? That human rights are so self-evidently "a good thing" that they ought to...

Further to my blog of August 29th , for International Day of the Disappeared , when I listed the names of eleven of Northern Ireland's disappeared, it seems that the partial remains of one, Danny McIlhone, have been unearthed in county...

This afternoon I was on Queen's Radio , the student station at Queen's University Belfast, discussing the problem of rape with senior officer Detective Superintendent Karen Baxter of the PSNI and Laura Mulholland of the Students' Union...

A most welcome speech today from Denis Bradley, co-chair of the Consultative Group on the Past in Northern Ireland. In the speech, he declared more openly than ever before that the report from the Group would not be recommending any...

On the 16th September of this year, fivepeople were taken to hospital after shots were fired at a house in the LagmoreAvenue area of West Belfast. Then, on the 10th October a man was shot in both legs in West Belfast. On the 29th...

In the week that saw the United States elect a new President, it is good to see Amnesty USA launching a new blog, Human Rights Now , bringing together and improving the blogging platform for their previous blog strands. I have already...

I've never been able to tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. Maybe my tastebuds aren't sophisticated enough to appreciate the subtle variance in these sugar and carbonation confections. I do like the marketing though. Coca Cola...

Studs Terkel , the great American journalist, broadcaster and more is dead . He died on Friday, aged 96, after a career spanning most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. He was best known for his oral histories...

" It seems to me that here at such an early age, in children's books, we shoul be celebrating difference as well as cosy homegrown certainties. And through books our children can grow and imagine what it might be like to be in someone...