Campaigning for human rights in the age of the internet

A singer I have liked for years is June Tabor and she is doing a concert in Gent, Belgium on 10 Nov. 2008 with Huw Warren and Mark Emerson. The concert is to mark four important anniversaries including 90 years since the 1918 Armistice...

I am a musician and I love listening to music as well as playing it. Regular readers of my blog may remember that I like to mention songs that inspire or inform and support the human rights movement. I have been at a music festival for...

I have the view that the Serious Fraud Office should investigate allegations of serious fraud – the clue to what they should be doing is in the name of the organisation! The government appealed against the legal ruling that the Serious...

A film called Johnny Mad Dog is set to create an unusual level of authenticity by using Liberian children who have been soldiers. Update, October 2009: See this review of the film from the Guardian.

I went on a walk the other day and was talking to a young woman who has views that should make her an Amnesty supporter. However, she said that she had fallen out with the organisation, partly over the policy on abortion and partly...

Control Arms is a campaign run by organisations including Amnesty International. They have just re-launched the website. One of the ways you can contribute is to ask your MP to sign a declaration of support for an effective arms treaty...

Colombia: Blood on Britain's Hands is the title of a recent article on the Upside Down World website by Jeremy Dear. Update, Nov. 2008: Amnesty has a news item on Colombia: One step forward, many to go . Sacking 25 members of the...

I was pleased to see some political singing in the concert to celebrate Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday. Entertainment is fine but why not put a political edge on it as well? Eddy Grant sang his song, Give Me Hope, Joanna , which comes...

I agree that the real disaster in Burma is the government , to use a phrase I read on the Burma Campaign website where you can also view their short video featuring the voice of Ricky Gervais. A girl survives the cyclone but there are...

Opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, has announced that he will not stand in the next round of the elections in Zimbabwe. He does not want to ask voters to support him and so risk injury or death. An article today on BBC News...

A report in the Observer says that high street stores such as Primark are not being careful enough about the source of goods such as clothing. Primark has now sacked three of its suppliers after revelations by Panorama and the Observer...

See this list of ten shocking facts about slavery today . Shocking fact number one is that there are more people in slavery now than at any time in history. Update 8 July 2008: Foreign domestic workers in Saudi Arabia suffer severe...

Documents confirm that the government of the USA hid details of detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), according to this article on McClatchy. Documents just released by a Senate committee quote a military...

Have a look at these powerful adverts created by Amnesty International in several different countries.

Earlier this year Foreign Secretary David Miliband apologised to MPs and said that he had been misinformed when he said that extraordinary rendition flights had not landed on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, a British territory. He...

Chinese migrant workers in the UK suffer Lives in shadow , hidden away and at risk. The article is by Hsiao-Hung Pai, a journalist who was born in Taiwan and now lives in Britain. She writes for the Guardian , specialising in stories...

Cluster bombs are being discussed in Dublin at an international conference. Mark Durkan of the SDLP has tabled a motion in the UK parliament. Amnesty welcomes Durkan's move . You can check who has signed the motion . This is an "Early...

An article on Open Democracy predicts that North Korea could be heading for a famine . The authors also say that there was a severe famine there in the late 1990s that may have killed as many as one million people.

"Ethical Arms Trade?" is the title of an article in the New Statesman but I felt that it needed a few more question marks. The article by Andrew Feinstein is critical of BAE and of the report on its practices by the Woolf committee. He...

The Chinese government do seem to be taking prompt and effective action for the victims of the earthquake. It is a contrast with the Burmese government's response so far to the cyclone. How far are natural disasters entirely natural...