Belfast and Beyond

I don't know If Dame Stella Rimington is an Amnesty member or not. But she should be. The former spy-boss has become one of the UK's most eloquent defenders of rights and liberties since she left the government's payroll and started...

Tuesday morning and I made it along to Stormont's Long Gallery for the launch of ICTU 's Israel Palestine report (available here to download , exclusively for Belfast and Beyond readers!). Hosted by Sinn Féin leader, Gerry Adams MP...

Slugger O'Toole is the daddy of the Northern Irish blogosphere. Founded and run by the inestimable Mick Fealty as a uniquely popular, cross-community blog for debate and discussion of NI politics and life, it is always worth a visit...

Tony Blair famously said that Guantanamo bay is ‘ an anomaly’ . House of Lords Law Lord, Lord Steyn, called Guantanamo Bay a ‘ legal black hole ’. Both these descriptions would help us believe that, if carried out, Obama’s pledges to...

BBC NI's Spotlight programme was back on form this week with a review of the case of Prisoner B2970, Colin Bell. He was the prisoner at HMP Maghaberry near Belfast, who committed suicide while his prison guards – supposedly keeping a...

"Raging Bull Raging Bull", that's all that Chris Arendt heard down the phone line before it went dead, and this was how he found out that he had been deployed, although he and the rest of his unit initially thought they were going to...

Since World War II, this country and the world have built up a system of protections for all our rights. From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 to the Human Rights Act of 1998, we saw five decades of progress in the...

Just a quick blog as I can’t resist sharing my recent misfortune with the Amnesty community and beyond. Similarly to Patrick I have been struck down by an ailment, although speaking literally it wasn’t an illness that struck me but...

Northern Ireland-educated Secretary General of Amnesty International, Irene Khan, is in Davos for the World Economic Forum. Of course, as this blog has recorded, its not the first time that Amnesty or Irene has been to the gathering of...

Am at home in my sick bed, popping penicillin and paracetemol like sweeties, but just wanted to post a quick 'ta very much' to those who nominated Belfast and Beyond for the Irish Blog Awards . We've been nominated in the News /...

Tomorrow the long awaited Eames-Bradley Consultative Group on The Past (CGP) report will be released. Recent reports suggesting that all victims of the troubles (irrespective of their own roles in the troubles) will be entitled to the...

Satrurday was spent at the SDLP annual party conference in Armagh. It was normal party conference stuff. A very early start, a very late finish and lots of resolutions, speeches and delegates to be talked to at our Amnesty stand and...

In November of last year I blogged about the resurgence of paramilitary punishment violence in Northern Ireland and called for a community solution to what many believe is a community problem. Support for punishment violence was linked...

"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter...

I hope Mossey is having a ball out in Washington DC for Obama's inauguration. As a bit of a political junkie myself, I have a sense of what he must be feeling. It could simply be relief that, after eight long years, we're finally...

Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama , (Paperback, 464 pages, Canongate Books, rrp £8.99, available £4.99) On Tuesday I will go along to Queen’s University Belfast for an event, to be addressed by the United States Consul General, Susan...

If you missed 'In Prison My Whole Life' at the Belfast Film Festival last April, there's another chance to see it tonight and tomorrow at Belfast's Queen's Film Theatre . It's a powerful, fast-moving film documentary, dealing with the...

You read it here first. Sort of… Back in August I speculated that deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness could soon find himself in the Philippines aiding the search for peace in the Mindanao region of the country between the...

Go to youtube url here . Enjoy! This inspiring video feeds my new year's hopes for an end to immigration control. Reggae superstar, Tiken Jah Fakoly, singing here, was featured in the documentary film, 'An Independent Mind', directed...

That's just one of the hilarious headlines generated by Daily Mail-o-matic , which gives you a new Daily Mail-style headline every time you hit the refresh button. "Now updated to include 2009 bogeymen!" the site cheerfully tells us...