Morbidly enough, I’ve always thought songs about capital punishment were a pretty fascinating sub-genre. On this blog I’ve previously mentioned The Adverts’ punk classic “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes” (a number 18 hit in 1977, pop-pickers!) and...

The finding from the UN investigator Judge Richard Goldstone that both the Israeli Defense Forces and Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes in Gaza at the beginning of the year has met with two predictable responses. Response...

To kick off here are a couple of quotes: “While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus. It was a very beautiful place and it was really green.” “The wisdom never dies. On that kind of...

Who would be a journalist? It’s hard to get into. It’s tough work: frantic deadlines, high-pressure – get it wrong and your outfit might get sued! And there’s immense pressure to cut costs, especially on the inky-handed “Fleet Street”...

Comparisons to Nazi doctors conducting experiments on death camp prisoners are definitely overblown, but there’s something horribly sinister about news that the CIA used doctors extensively during “war on terror” torture sessions. My...

Let’s start with a numbers question. How many people is a thousand people? Not as easy as it sounds. Ever been at an event and someone asked you to say how many were there? You inevitably go: “Oh, about 200. No wait, maybe 300. No...

Strange interview by the Israeli ambassador on the radio this morning. In his 8.10am Today programme slot not only did Ron Prosor, Tel Aviv’s man in London, have a dig at Arab leaders who in his view buy football clubs like Manchester...

A confession, dear reader. The shockingly juvenile rock-metal band AC/DC were part of the soundtrack to my youth. They were always blasting away on mum and dad’s “stereogramme” when they (mum and dad) were up the pub on a Friday night...

Amnesty’s new report on how Tunisia is rounding up, torturing and imprisoning alleged Islamic terrorists is the sort of thing that any Amnesty blog reader will have heard before. Right, big surprise, you may think. I kind of thought...

It would be little exaggeration to say there’s only one story in town right now: Afghanistan. Well OK, there’s the business of the insanely fast “Lightning Bolt” (forget that old joke about languorous Jamaicans dahn at the beach ), and...

This time last year I wasn’t in a sweaty Amnesty office in London, I was … in a sweaty Amnesty office in Edinburgh . It comes to mind today because last August I was beavering away PR-ing Amnesty’s presence at the Edinburgh Festival...

Listen to Ivan Lewis stonewalling on the Today programme (8.10 interview) and you get the distinct impression that the government has … how can I put this, got something to hide . There, I’ve said it. I know, shocking isn’t it? A...

By which I mean … are the mass trials in Iran ‘political’ and are people being set up by the Iranian authorities? OK, the authorities are certainly putting a lot of politicians – past and present – on trial, so they’re literally...

As my boss Mike was saying the other day , one of the mixed pleasures of working in the Amnesty media team is that you get to do TV and radio interviews (“And now we're joined by Amnesty spokesman Neil Durkin …”). Mixed, because they...

Bodies stacked up in make-shift morgues, hundreds killed and carted away in secret. These are the alarming claims being made about the secret death toll in the Iran elections crackdown. How true are they? Frankly, I think it’s still...

According to the Amnesty researcher on Russia talking to me yesterday, there used to be three key people when it came to uncovering human rights violations in Chechnya. These were the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the lawyer Stanislav...

A personal anecdote. It’s 1984 and I’m walking in the city centre of Sheffield on a Saturday afternoon, having just been browsing in Virgin Records looking at stuff I couldn't afford to buy because I’m on the dole. When …. wham! A man...

That master of dramatic political interventions David Davis has been at it again. This time he’s been standing up in the House of Commons denouncing the way that British intelligence officials have allegedly sent British nationals for...

In one of these strange bits of journalistic shorthand, the “Middle East” is often used as a way of referring to the Israel-Palestine situation. To me this has always seemed slightly bizarre. OK, I get the part-for-the-whole metonymy...

Perhaps unaware of the significance of the date, on 1 April Chechnya’s Kremlin-approved president Ramzan Kadyrov announced that after 15 years of conflict and human rights abuse, things in this Russian republic had returned to “normal”...