More than 240 MPs have signed a motion ( EDM 713 ) to freeze UK military aid to Colombia until human rights concerns have been satisfied. It is unusual for an Early Day Motion to attract so much support. Among 243 who have signed the...

You might expect VeggieKris to be against vultures but it is not the carnivorous birds I am talking about. MPs demand an end to debt vultures . Brave Sally Keeble (seen with a vulture perched on her hand) has tabled a motion in...

If you Love Music and Hate Racism have a look at these events. Shropshire had a Love Music, Hate Racism event on Saturday 20 June 2009 at Shrewsbury College. It was not far from me but I was not able to attend. Maybe you did?

A BBC series presented by Alice Roberts, The Incredible Human Journey , has been showing the way that humans spread out of Africa to populate the rest of the world. Yes, even the leaders of the British National Party have African...

I have just walked down the road to vote in the local and European elections. When many politicians have been found with their snouts in the trough it is easy to get cynical and to feel that no politician can be trusted but I feel that...

Kate Adie writes on the BBC website that Tiananmen will not be forgotten and she returned to Tiananmen on this evening's BBC 2 programme. I missed all but the last part of the film but like many Amnesty supporters I already knew that...

Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, speaks on today's Guardian podcast . She judges that the credit crisis is a threat to human rights. She also says that world leaders are ignoring conflicts that may spawn serious...

Human Rights Watch have an International Film Festival . From 11 to 25 June 2009 it will be held in New York and it is also held regularly in other cities including London. One of the films to be shown in New York is Crude , a...

You may have noticed that I write about a series on Channel Four, Unreported World . On Friday evening, 1 May 2009, Afghanistan: Waiting for the Taliban showed suicide bombings, shootings and kidnaps on the increase in the Afghan...

Yesterday I was at a conference run by CAAT , Campaign Against the Arms Trade. It was an interactive conference and we had the chance to practise public speaking or to answer difficult questions in conversations. We found out more...

The Columbine High School tragedy of ten years ago is being remembered. Two students killed 12 classmates and a teacher. Others were injured. Ten years on have lessons been learned in the USA about lax gun laws? No, and so every so...

This evening's Unreported World on Channel Four was titled: Haiti, the island that ate itself . It is an island with interlinked poverty, environmental destruction and weak government. It is a vicious cycle seen in other places but the...

Dorothy Stang was an American nun and rainforest activist, one of many people murdered in Brazil for standing up for the rights of the poor and against the destruction of the Amazonian forest. As many as 1100 activists, small farmers...

The Rainforest Foundation UK tells us of Trouble in Belinga , in Gabon in west-central Africa. Gabon has huge reserves of minerals and there is a project to mine iron ore of which there could be about one billion tonnes. The CMEC...

Last Friday Unreported World on Channel Four took the viewer to Turkey, to investigate why women are being killed to defend the honour of their husbands. Reporter, Ramita Navai, sensitively probed into this deeply rooted custom and...

Today is the 50th anniversary of the Lhasa uprising in 1959 when the Dalai Lama fled from Tibet. Tibetans around the world and their supporters are peacefully protesting again about the Chinese occupation and the denial of the rights...

UNESCO has produced an online guide to endangered languages . It shows that around 2 500 languages are under threat worldwide. See Words of Warning by Lizzy Davies in the Guardian on 20 Feb. 2009.

SOVA (or in the Russian spelling COBA) is an organisation that reports on and challenges hate crime and ultra-nationalism. There are some pages in English on the SOVA website . You can also subscribe to weekly reports in the English...

Afghan civilian casualty rate at highest since Taliban rule, the Guardian headline reads today. A UN report says that more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2008 that in 2007. The number of civilians killed by US, NATO and Afghan...

Colonel Owen McNally has been arrested and charged under the Official Secrets Act for giving information to a human rights worker in Afghanistan. Was that information about civilian casualties in Afghanistan? As Conor Foley writes in...