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Press Release

On the launch of its 2015 State of the World report, Amnesty International USA urged President Obama to use his last year in office to bring U.S. laws and policies in line with international human rights standards.

February 22, 2016

Update

Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe for 36 years, turns 92 this month. His birthday celebrations are known as lavish occasions; last year his guests dined on baby elephant. This year, reports are the big event will occur this weekend in a stadium with a purported planned budget of $800,000. Mugabe’s personal photographer states he is planning a concert, a bash dubbed “Well done, Bob,” to honor Mugabe and his contributions. The festivities will occur in the wake of President Mugabe declaring a national emergency due to the drought gripping the region. An estimated 2.4 million Zimbabweans are in need of…

February 22, 2016

Update

To be a Muslim in America right now is to fear that your best days -- your most ordinary days -- are behind you. Anti-Muslim hate and fear-mongering is going mainstream, and the future is a startling unknown. Many fear that the vicious rhetoric we are hearing is a harbinger of things to come: discrimination, harassment and violent attacks on Muslims, or people who look Muslim that spreads and even becomes a new normal. That could set the stage, one day in the not-so-distant future, for government policies like mandatory registration of Muslims and internment. Could that really happen? Perhaps…

February 21, 2016

Press Release

The Turkish authorities have denied entry to injured Syrian civilians in need of immediate medical care, after fleeing the intense bombardment of the northern Aleppo countryside in the past two weeks, said Amnesty International from the Öncüpınar/Bab al-Salam border crossing.

February 19, 2016

Press Release

Today, the last imprisoned member of the Angola 3, Albert Woodfox, was released after more than four decades in solitary confinement.

February 19, 2016

Update

On February 19, 2016, Louisiana prisoner Albert Woodfox walked free, 44 years after he was first put into solitary confinement. He was the United States’ longest serving prisoner held in isolation. Nearly every day for more than half of his life, Albert Woodfox woke up in a cell the size of a parking space, surrounded by concrete and steel. Today, for the first time in more than four decades, he will be able to walk outside and look up into the sky. Over the course of nearly five years working on Albert Woodfox’s case at Amnesty, I heard many times…

February 19, 2016

Report

International protection of human rights is in danger of unravelling as short-term national self-interest and draconian security crackdowns have led to a wholesale assault on basic freedoms and rights, warned Amnesty International as it launched its annual assessment of human rights around the world. “Your rights are in jeopardy: they are being treated with utter contempt by many governments around the world,” said Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

February 18, 2016

Press Release

The 40 death sentences handed down today in Iraq after a fundamentally flawed mass trial shows a reckless disregard for justice and human life, said Amnesty International, and brings the total sentenced in 2016 close to 100.

February 18, 2016

Press Release

International protection of human rights is in danger of unravelling as short-term national self-interest and draconian security crackdowns have led to a wholesale assault on basic freedoms and rights, warned Amnesty International as it launched its annual assessment of human rights around the world. “Your rights are in jeopardy: they are being treated with utter contempt by many governments around the world,” said Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

February 18, 2016

Update

In 2014, Amnesty International USA gave one of its highest awards for human rights activism to a collection of women who for more than two decades ignored governmental harassment and ran a torture and domestic violence rehabilitation center in Cairo, Egypt. This week, the Egyptian government gave an order to shut them down. The El Nadim Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture and Domestic Violence was founded in 1993 by Drs. Susan Fayad, Magda Adly and Aida Seif Al Dawla. In name and in practice, these women, all of whom started their activism as college students in the…

February 18, 2016

Press Release

Moves by the authorities to shut down the renowned El Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence appear to mark an expansion of the ongoing crackdown on human rights activists in Egypt, said Amnesty International today.

February 17, 2016

Press Release

The Delhi police must immediately release Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Students’ Union President Kanhaiya Kumar and former Delhi University lecturer SAR Geelani and drop sedition charges against them, Amnesty International India said today. The police must also investigate multiple attacks by lawyers against journalists and others at a Delhi court.

February 17, 2016