Campaigning for human rights in the age of the internet

The Guardian has a neatly presented mosaic of faces of people who are suffering already from climate change , in Cuba, Chad, India, Bangladesh and other countries. Click on one of the faces to get the person's opinion. At the talks in...

Jack Shenker writes in the Guardian of the poverty, exclusion and discrimination faced by disabled people in Arab and north African countries.

The Poet Laureate has put a political slant on her version ot the Twelve Days of Christmas , including issues such as climate change and the war in Afghanistan. Poets holding the title previously have tended to keep away from...

The UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was discussing action on climate change recently at a conference of young people, in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference , starting in Copenhagen within the next 24 hours. One...

South Africa's president, Jacob Zuma, announced on World Aids Day, 1 Dec. 2009, that there would be a new policy to address the AIDS crisis in his country . He wants to move on from the political inertia on the issue and show a...

Defectors from North Korea have signed a petition to the International Criminal Court. They allege crimes against humanity and demand that the North Korean government is prosecuted . North Korea is thought to have at least five...

Vulture funds are to sue Liberia for £12 million in the High Court in London. I wrote before about the campaign against vulture funds . They seek to make a profit from exploiting some of the poorest people in the world. The amount...

The tar sands industry is destroying the homeland of one of Canada's First Nations. Royal Bank of Scotland is involved and that bank now has a majority share holding by the government. That means that if you as a taxpayer are not happy...

A minister in the German government has resigned. Franz Josef Jung admitted that the government withheld information about civilian casualties from a Nato airstrike in Afghanistan. He was defence minister at the time. Kate Connolly...

Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, writes on Power and Poverty in the latest issue of Amnesty Magazine, for November/December 2009. She asserts that the powerlessness of poor people is a key problem. She refers to...

Campaigners converged on parliament on 4 November 2009 to challenge the "no recourse" rule; see the article in Amnesty Magazine for November/December 2009. Also see Amnesty's web page: Women trapped in cycle of violence by UK law...

The November/December 2009 issue of Amnesty Magazine includes How racism keeps the executioner at work, an article by Georgia State Senator, Nan Orrock. She writes that blacks who kill whites are eleven times more likely to be executed...

Every year there is a vigil and protest at the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia, where the taxpayers of the USA fund a college for training police and military personnel from Latin America. Many of the graduates of the School of the...

Michael Palin is known for his television films of travels to the Sahara, the Himalayas, or around the planet. His latest travels are much nearer home. He has been visiting the refugees who live in the council estates of larger cities...

Despite my advice to Barack Obama the School of the Americas has not been closed down so it is time to protest again, on 20 to 22 November 2009. From all over the USA and from further away in the Americas thousands are converging at...

UNICEF has produced its latest report on life for children in different countries . Have a guess before you click. Where do you think is the worst country for children to grow up? The report from UNICEF is called The State of the World...

Gordon Brown is to apologise for policy of sending children to Australia . The practice continued into the 1960s. In some cases the children were told that they were orphans even when this was not true.

I wrote before about Human Zoos but there is a Somali village in mid-Wales with a much more positive mission.

Swimming with Loan Sharks was shown on the BBC on 16 November 2009. Swimming with such sharks is of course not a good idea but in recession-hit Britain desperate people do turn to them. As well as suffering from even worse debt they...

Inside the Israel Lobby was shown in the Dispatches series on Monday 16 November 2009.