GuestBloggers

In Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline , the critic and academic miriam cooke (sic) puts the country’s long history of detaining political dissidents into stark perspective. She tells Daniel Gorman: ‘It became clear to me...

I am Nabeel Rajab, President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) and Director of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR). I have just been released from prison after serving a two-year sentence for my peaceful and legitimate...

'I’ve got a trained eye… he is not just a photographer' Paranoia, fear of free speech and the ‘trained eye’ of the authorities are ensuring that public space in Russia is shrinking. This is how public protest works in Russia now. This...

‘We’re sending a message of hope’ Junior Mayema was explaining to me why he’d taken the bold step of appearing in From the Same Soil , a new film that beautifully documents the experiences of three refugees in Cape Town. All three fled...

The Indian elections are the largest voting exercise the world has ever seen. More than 550 million Indian voters have gone to the polls to elect a new government in the world’s largest democracy. The elections have been a potpourri of...

Paraguay’s Senate have voted to support an Expropriation Bill that could prove a landmark in the struggle of the country’s indigenous communities to gain recognition of their rights to their ancestral lands. Amnesty International has...

I was in court on Monday to hear first-hand the ludicrous decision to continue the trial of 29 young women and men in what has been coined the ‘Twitter trial’. The prosecution – based solely on tweets about the Gezi Park protests last...

Ahead of the Indonesian elections this month we joined TAPOL, Survival International and Down to Earth outside the Indonesian Embassy to call for the immediate and unconditional release of prisoners of conscience imprisoned solely for...

Early last Saturday morning (5 April 2014), the streets of Rio de Janeiro’s Maré complex of favelas (slums) woke up to a military occupation by around 2,700 federal Army troops. They took over from a military police contingent that had...

The only reason I’m alive is because my attackers ran out of bullets. I remember that evening – 17 December 2013 – very clearly. The look of surprise on the gunman’s face after he hunched down on one knee, took aim at me one last time...

The Twitter shutdown started at about 11pm on Thursday night. My telephone started to ring: had I heard that Twitter was blocked? There was confusion about who could access Twitter, who couldn’t, and why. And would the government...

Late yesterday, Glenn Ford - now 64 years old - walked out of the Louisiana’s infamous Angola prison after spending nearly three decades behind bars for a crime he’s always claimed he never committed. He was sentenced to death in 1984...

Anthony Holden is a writer, broadcaster and critic, and was the US Editor for the Observer and Assistant Editor for The TImes. He's written many biographies including one on Tchaikovsky, and watched the Sochi 2014 opening ceremony to...

In the small town of Boali, 100km north of the capital Bangui, the Muslim neighbourhoods are eerily silent, completely empty of their inhabitants. Every single home has been thoroughly looted. Even the front doors have been removed and...

The image of a man laying on a bench in a packed court room in northern Nigeria, screaming in pain as he was being lashed 20 times with an oil-smeared whip is profoundly shocking. But this is par for the course in a country where same...

On Friday 17 January family members, dignitaries and community representatives in Greater Manchester and elsewhere are to pay their respects to the British doctor Dr Abbas Khan , and also to remember the thousands of other victims of...

“We must be careful today. Last time, the police used tear gas and we had to run.” This was my interpreter’s warning as we walked to the court in Ankara to observe the third hearing of a trial for Amnesty in December 2013. The...

Sitting on a thin mattress inside a ramshackle structure on a muddy hilltop, elderly Abu Fares told me how he came to live in poverty in Iraq’s relatively prosperous northern Kurdistan region. For the past 11 months, he and his wife –...

When Olympic bronze-medal winning diver Tom Daley made 'that' announcement to his 2.4 million Twitter followers, it made headlines in the national press for days. Sadly, he received a fair number of homophobic comments , but the vast...

Johan Teterissa is a primary school teacher serving a 15-year sentence for leading a peaceful protest in 2007 in Indonesia. He was arrested along with 21 other activists during a government organised event in Ambon, the capital of...