“Surely if you insist on lessons to teach small children it is wrong for men to hit women, then you are implying that all men are a potential menace. Won't the end result be the kind of moral indoctrination that teaches all infants how...

As I was hinting yesterday , the government has indeed announced new measures to tackle violence against women and girls in the UK. It’s something that Amnesty’s been campaigning over for several years, not least as part of the End...

Best leave it, Tone, its a domestic. The Sweeney-style outlook of the police to domestic violence in 1970s Britain is now notorious. It was a Dont get involved attitude because Theyll sort it out and Weve got real villains to catch. (...

What’s Obama up to with his 9/11 death penalty remarks? Rather than stoking it up with comments on the death penalty and 9/11 trials, shouldn’t the US president be talking calmly about justice for the victims of the 11 September...

Secrecy, it seem, begets secrecy. Seven former Guantánamo prisoners who are pursuing a case for compensation from the UK government for alleged complicity by the intelligence services in their detention and abuse are running up against...

I’ve blogged a lot about the death penalty in recent weeks – see here and here if you missed them and, hey, please feel to read ‘em! – so I’ll keep it (relatively)brief. The Guardian went big on the topic today, one of those...

I noticed that Twitter comment on Channel 4’s The Execution Of Gary Glitter last night was almost entirely negative but, to be honest, I didn’t see what the big problem was. Quite a few people complain the programme failed to add...

There was a song from my goth-punk youth called “Do You Believe In The Westworld?”, one of Theatre Of Hate’s finest, and to riff on that: do you believe in the death penalty? Strange question to ask a reader of a human rights blog...

A couple of posts ago, my colleague Steve B was talking about what it must be like to be walking down a street in Madrid when you get stopped by what turns out to be a violent gang of police officers …. … which made me think … about...

… is the hypothetical question posed by a Channel 4 drama coming out in November. I say posed , but what we’re getting, apparently, is a 90-minute feature-length drama – The Execution of Gary Glitter – “set in an imaginary Britain in...

Back in 2006 I took a day out from the Amnesty office to “job-swap” at the news desk of The Independent at their (then) office at Canary Wharf in east London. All very interesting. For one thing: what a studious atmosphere! More like a...

As the old Buzzcocks favourite puts it, “Noise annoys”, and at first glance there’s something almost comical about claims that music was used to torture “war on terror” prisoners. Loud music can be annoying , but it doesn’t actually...

When Palestinian men suffer “light blows” at the hands of the Israeli police in East Jerusalem it’s apparently not worth prosecuting. Or so it appears. According to Yesh Din, a human rights group that has taken a case on behalf of some...

A couple of years ago I had two weeks off work because I was called up for jury service. A cushy number? Not really. Going to Snaresbrook crown court every morning to hear about a large-scale cocaine smuggling case was – interesting...

First it was Disney films and Robert Louis Stevenson adaptations ( Kidnapped !), the Bond films (Roger Moore period), then the adolescent stuff – Jaws , The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (couldn’t get in, it was an “18”-rater!), and then...

Alarming news from Iran (again). This time it’s the fact that there’s been a death sentence over the election protests. Mohammad Reza Ali-Zamani , a 37-year-old, is now facing death by hanging for the crime of supposedly taking up arms...

At the weekend my partner was watching Gandhi , one of our DVD rentals from (the excellent) Sofa Cinema. “I’m not that interested”, I said. “Seen it”. “Not that good.” “Ben Kingsley as Gandhi? Hmm, not sure.” I was stubborn, adamant. I...

Looking forward to the London Olympics? Well, it’s a fair bet that so are the trafficking gangs who force people into prostitution, domestic servitude or no-or-low-pay labouring jobs. In less than three years’ time the athletes and...

Today’s Guardian reports on what appears to have been the appalling death of a man who was allegedly tortured to death in detention by members of the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah-led intelligence services. According to the report...

… which, as middle-aged hippies like me will tell you, is a line from Neil Young’s student protest song “Ohio” (“Gotta get down to it / Soldiers are cutting us down / Should have been done long ago / What if you knew her and found her...