Newsroom

Update

Bobby Woods has an IQ of around 70 and is scheduled to be executed by the state of Texas on December 3.  The crime for which he was sentenced to die was heinous (he was convicted of raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl), but executing persons with mental retardation has been forbidden by the US Supreme Court since 2002.  Those with diminished mental capacity are deemed less culpable for the crimes they commit, therefore execution, for them, is a "cruel and unusual punishment." Since 2002 the problem, in Texas as elsewhere, has been defining what mental retardation is - most…

November 25, 2009

Update

I had the honor and pleasure of attending the RFK Human Rights Award ceremony last night, hosted by President Obama and Mrs. Obama at the White House, where Magodonga Mahlangu and Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) were recipients of the annual award. I can sum it up in one word: wow. I laughed, I cried, I was disappointed the toilet paper did not have the presidential seal. In President Obama's words: And that may be Magodonga's greatest achievement -- that she has given the women of Zimbabwe each other.  That she has given people who long for peace and justice…

November 24, 2009

Update

Maajid Nawaz is a British citizen of Pakistani descent who became involved in his youth with the radical Islamic Liberation Party (Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami), undertaking missions for the party in Pakistan and Egypt. Hizb al-Tahrir is an international movement that campaigns for the reestablishment of the caliphate in Muslim lands. In April 2002 Nawaz was detained by the Egyptian authorities along with three other British members of the party. He was interrogated for twelve weeks in Cairo's State Security Intelligence building, and then sent for pre-trial detention. He was written off by Hizb al-Tahrir as “a fallen solder.” Hizb at-Tahrir…

November 24, 2009

Update

Across the U.S., from Boston to Chicago to San Francisco, Amnesty International activists are demanding:  "Unlock the camps in Sri Lanka!" As the 26-year-old war between the Sri Lankan government and the opposition Tamil Tigers ended this past May, about 280,000 Tamil civilians fleeing the fighting were put in overcrowded, military-run camps which they were not allowed to leave.  The Sri Lankan government said that the civilians first had to be screened to determine if any of them were Tiger fighters.  Amnesty International has pointed out that this constitutes arbitrary detention and violates the civilians' right to freedom of movement.…

November 19, 2009

Update

This posting is part of our Write-a-Thon Cases Series. For more information visit www.amnestyusa.org/writeathon/ Four years ago, Chinese journalist Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison. His crime? Sending an e-mail. In April 2004, Shi Tao e-mailed a pro-democracy Web site in the United States about a government regulation ordering the country's media outlets to down play the upcoming 15th anniversary of the military crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square.  Authorities arrested him seven months later, charging him with "providing state secrets to foreign entities." China has a history of cracking down on freedom of expression through restricting…

November 19, 2009

Update

The death penalty is always inhumane, and the past few days in Texas have brought to light some of its most worrisome aspects. On Wednesday, The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended that Robert Thompson’s death sentence for his role in a 1996 robbery and shooting be commuted to life imprisonment. The shooter, Sammy Butler, was convicted and received life in prison, which raises serious questions about the arbitrary nature of how the death penalty works in real life. Why wait until the last minute to discuss the disproportionality of sentencing the accomplice to death while the man who pulled…

November 19, 2009

Update

Caught between a legal requirement to avoid cruelty, and its desire to kill prisoners, the state of Ohio is struggling to find an acceptable method of execution following the botched, and failed, attempt to put Romell Broom to death on September 15.  As reported in today’s New York Times, the method the state has chosen is injection into the vein of a single, lethal dose of anesthetic.  This seems peculiar, since it was failure to find a suitable vein that led to the botched executions of Joseph Clark and Christopher Newton, as well as the recent Broom fiasco. In the new…

November 18, 2009

Update

"We'd always seen Amnesty as the soft power tools of colonialism. So, when Amnesty, despite knowing that we hated them, adopted us, I felt -- maybe these democratic values aren't always hypocritical. Maybe some people take them seriously ... it was the beginning of my serious doubts."

November 17, 2009

Update

This posting is part of our Write-a-Thon Cases Series. For more information visit www.amnestyusa.org/writeathon/ Despite having been cleared for release more than four years ago, twenty-six-year-old Mohammed Mohammed Hassan Odaini remains detained in Guántanamo. Odaini was sent to the detention center at the U.S Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba in March 2002 along with fourteen other Yemeni nationals, all of whom were turned over by Pakistani police. In June 2005, U.S. authorities declared Odani suitable for release from Guantánamo. Yemeni authorities are prepared to take him back, however he continues to be detained without reason. He has not been interrogated…

November 17, 2009

Update

Back in 2007, Amnesty International launched a ground breaking website, Eyes on Darfur, which showcased satellite evidence of attacks on villages in Darfur. The images demonstrated the ongoing insecurity in the region and the destruction and violence civilians are confronted with on a daily basis. The site also broke new ground by allowing the world to literally “watch over” 12 villages that were determined to be highly at risk but that had not yet been attacked. Just a few weeks ago, we updated the satellite images on the Eyes on Darfur site and found that sadly, several of these at-risk villages…

November 17, 2009

Update

Anyone who does work on, or pays attention to anything going on in Latin America would know that it is the season for meetings and hearings to be held at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in DC.  I had never attended anything at the commission, well, until last week. I had no idea what to expect walking in, I just knew I was there as an AIUSA observer. The building itself is really big, and nice. Spanish is one of the working languages of the Organization of American States, (OAS) along with English and Portuguese, but it may as…

November 17, 2009

Update

This posting is part of our Write-a-Thon Cases Series. For more information visit www.amnestyusa.org/writeathon/ Vietnamese human rights lawyers Le Thi Cong Nhan and Nguyen Van Dai were arrested on March 6, 2007 for "conducting propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam" and sentenced to four and five years' imprisonment respectively for their activism and education efforts. Although the sentences have since each been reduced by one year, the two will be subject to several more years' house arrest upon their release. Meanwhile, the human rights situation remains grave in Vietnam, which has silenced activists through surveillance, restrictions on movement, arbitrary detention…

November 17, 2009