Press release me, let me go

There was much talk over the weekend about Hillary Clinton’s whistle-stop tour around Europe. During her whirlwind tour the US Secretary of State managed to make a pit-stop at Westminster where she reassured Gordon Brown of the US-UK...

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...

Today is National Poetry Day in Britain. At Amnesty we recently received the very moving poem below from a Sri Lankan living in Canada who is trying to imagine what life in the detention camps in Sri Lanka must be like for a child...

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...

Lack of justice for women and girls who have been victims of rape and sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict situations is high on the agenda for Amnesty today. We have two reports looking at the exact theme but in countries...

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...

Amnesty is concerned at the excessive force applied by police officers against civilians in Honduras over the past few days. The firing of tear gas at a human rights organisation when around 100 men, women and children were inside is...

The Guardian today has two very different reports on rape. One focuses on a government review on how rape cases are handled here in the UK while the other looks at the prison sentence for a man in South Africa who was jailed for the...

In Sierra Leone one in every eight pregnant woman will die. It’s staggering to think that this could be so when the threat of dying in childbirth is so unlikely in the UK. Pregnant women in Sierra Leone die from a number of reasons...

There’s a man on death row facing imminent execution for the second time. How so? Romell Broom would already be dead if his execution by lethal injection on Tuesday hadn’t gone badly wrong when state officials couldn’t find a vein...

The biggest human rights story in the news today has to be the reports of British oil trading company Trafigura agreeing to settle out of court with 31,000 people in Ivory Coast. British law firm Leigh Day were representing the Ivorian...

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...

The gloves are off and the war of words is definitely back on by Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF officials toward the EU following the weekend’s visit to the country by European officials and their refusal to lift sanctions against Zimbabwe...

Good to read about Gordon Brown's apology for the indescribably brutal way in which computer pioneer Alan Turing was treated by the government and the courts in Britain fifty plus year ago. Turing, whose work was essential to the...

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”...

The biennial arms fair opened for business today at Docklands ExCel Centre amid a flurry of reports about international weapons transfers and protests. BBC News reports that Campaign Against the Arms Trade were expected to stage...