Newsroom

Update

Communities across the country are demanding the human right to health care, while Congress is tweaking its latest version of health insurance legislation that continues to treat health care as a commodity. This unacceptable discrepancy between public will and corporate power in Washington, DC, is being challenged by state-based campaigns for the human right to health care. Activists in states such as California and Vermont have their eyes on a prize much grander than anything Congress is willing to consider: single payer health care at state level. So it’s no coincidence that it is Vermont’s U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I)…

December 10, 2009

Update

The date of December 10th was chosen to honor the United Nations General Assembly's adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) more than sixty years ago today. The declaration says that every human being deserves dignity, freedom and respect. It is the first blueprint for our global rights and continues to light the way for our work today. Protecting human rights may sound like a major undertaking, but here are 5 simple things that you can do to stand up for our universal rights today – on Human Rights Day - and for as long as it takes…

December 10, 2009

Update

The Copenhagen Climate Change conference opened this week with an urgent call to action on the rapidly warming temperatures and the associated human costs that come from it.  And, no country in the world will be more affected than the small nation of Maldives.  The country is a series of tiny atolls that rise no more than a few feet above sea level.  The fear is that as sea levels rise, the entire country of Maldives will simply be swamped and disappear.  All 309,000 residents of the country will have to move—everyone from the President to the poorest resident.  The…

December 10, 2009

Update

Amnesty International spoke to three inspiring women’s rights activists about the challenges they face in their work, the personal risks they endure and their motivation to continue their struggle.  Today, on World Human Rights Day, we should take a moment to recognize the work done by Gertrude Hambira from Zimbabwe, Zebo Sharifova from Tajikistan and Aminatou Haidar from Western Sahara, and countless women like them around the world, to defend human rights. Despite threats and physical abuse women’s human rights defenders strive to improve women’s lives and promote human rights.  However, all too often, their work is constrained by limited…

December 10, 2009

Update

The stats are in: according to Amnesty International’s recent report, The Gender Trap: Women, Violence and Poverty, women comprise 70 percent of the world’s poor and 75 percent of the world’s illiterate. One in three women – nearly one billion women – will be beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime.  In Chad’s refugee camps, female survivors of war face sexual harassment, rape, and other forms of oppression on a daily basis. In the Middle East and in immigrant communities around the world, an estimated 5,000 women are victims of “honor” killings every year. And sadly, the…

December 10, 2009

Update

After nearly two weeks, I continue to be surprised at how much news coverage there is about the party crashers who interrupted the White House state dinner with India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (maybe I shouldn't be so surprised). But as someone who closely follows human rights in South Asia, I was wondering how the plight of the underprivileged in India might garner even the fraction of attention that the Salahi couple have. Unfortunately for the case of two activists for indigenous peoples in India trying to earn even a smidgen of that interest for their people, it has ended…

December 9, 2009

Update

This post was written by Shaimaa, the wife of Write-a-thon case, Musaad Suliman Hassan Hussein (known by his pen name Musaad Abu Fagr), who has been in administrative detention in Egypt since February 2008. Two years have passed since my husband Musaad Abu Fagr was arrested. For my daughter Ranad and I, every day that passes feels like 10 years. Ranad was three years old when my husband was arrested. She used to sleep after he kissed her goodnight and wake up after a kiss from him. He used to drive her to school every day. Ranad is now five…

December 9, 2009

Update

Amnesty International does. It looks like Human Rights Watch does too. So do countless family members of those who have been "disappeared", arbitrarily detained, tortured, or well, all of the above. The new report just released from AI includes some emblematic cases of human rights violations committed by the Mexican military….just in the past year. Keep in mind this report is in by no means exhaustive either. Many other NGOs have been documenting these types of cases for years, and it doesn’t look like things are getting better. The Calderon Administration does have a tough job to do. Between combating the…

December 9, 2009

Update

This posting is part of our Write-a-Thon Cases Series. For more information visit www.amnestyusa.org/writeathon/ Birtukan Mideksa, an opposition party leader, is serving a life sentence in Kaliti Prison in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She was previously arrested in November 2005 after the Coalition for Unity and Democracy party, of which she was a leader, disputed the results of local and parliamentary elections. Post-election demonstrations turned violent -- security forces shot dead 187 people and wounded 765 others, while at least six police officers were also killed. Birtukan Mideksa was charged with treason among other charges, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.…

December 8, 2009

Update

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009: 52 students were set to graduate in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, an unprecedented number for this country which has been ravaged by conflict for decades. But the graduation ceremony was interrupted by a suicide bomber. The death toll? 23 people. Dozens more were injured. Three members of the Transitional Federal Government were also killed, including the Ministers of Higher Education, Education and Health, indicating that the attack was most likely politically motivated. One of the students who was graduating that day, a 23 year old future doctor, tells IRIN what happened: I was extremely happy that after…

December 8, 2009

Update

UPDATE:  Kenneth Biros was executed by Ohio's new, untested, one-drug method.  It took the execution team about 30 minutes to find a vein; once the drug was administered, death occurred in about 10 minutes. December 7, in addition to being Pearl Harbor Day, is the day when, 27 years ago, Texas became the first state to kill a prisoner with lethal injection. Since then there have been over one thousand lethal injections in the US, all using the same basic three-drug protocol.  Tomorrow morning, barring intervention from a court, Ohio will change that. Kenneth Biros is scheduled to be the…

December 7, 2009

Update

An internally displaced person is someone forced from their home by natural disaster, extreme poverty or political conflict but do not leave the borders of their homeland. This is the crucial difference between internally displaced persons and refugees; refugees cross a border, leaving their homeland and subject to protections afforded by international treaties. There are more than 25 million internally displaced persons (IDP's)  in the world, outnumbering refugees by a ratio of two to one. However the vast majority of relief efforts target refugees rather than IDPs and there are no United Nations agencies or international treaties that specifically target this population-until now.  Africa…

December 4, 2009