Newsroom

Update

In an interview published today in The Nation, a Sri Lankan newspaper, Mahinda Samarasinghe, the Minister of Disaster Management and Human Rights, claimed that an international investigation into abuses committed by both sides during the recent fighting could destabilize Sri Lankan society.  In mid-May, the Sri Lankan government had announced that it had defeated the opposition Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), reconquering all the territory held by them and killing their leaders.  The LTTE had been fighting for an independent state for the Tamil minority in the north and east of the island for over 26 years.  Both sides committed gross human rights…

June 7, 2009

Update

Just a word of introduction as this is my first post here. My name's Sameer Dossani and I'm the campaign director for the Demand Dignity Campaign, our campaign to address issues relating to Human Rights and poverty. Prior to working with Amensty, I've been in the development world critiquing the policies and projects of the IMF and World Bank on human rights grounds. If you'd like to find out more about the campaign please get in touch through the contact us section of this site. This post was written as a response to a critique of our annual report from…

June 6, 2009

Update

I have to say I'm disappointed.  Today, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon briefed members of the Security Council in an informal session about his May 22 visit to Sri Lanka.  The members of the Council took no action as the session reportedly was just a briefing.  Afterwards, the Secretary-General spoke to reporters.  Secretary-General Ban told reporters that he'd been informed by the Sri Lankan government that restrictions on access by aid agencies to the internment camps holding displaced civilians had been eased since his visit.  Nearly 300,000 civilians displaced by the recent fighting between the Sri Lankan government and the opposition…

June 6, 2009

Update

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to brief the Security Council tomorrow on Sri Lanka.  As with past sessions on Sri Lanka, it will be a closed-door session and won't even be held in the Council area, since Sri Lanka isn't on the Security Council's agenda, as the Council president recently explained. Amnesty International today said that the Security Council should stop discussing Sri Lanka informally and instead should address Sri Lanka's human rights crisis in a formal session resulting in strong action being taken by the Council.  The Sri Lankan government is still denying aid agencies full access to civilians displaced by the…

June 5, 2009

Update

I am extremely disappointed that Governor M. Jodi Rell today vetoed HB 6578, which would have abolished the death penalty in Connecticut. Governor Rell’s veto of this legislation represents a missed opportunity for the state of Connecticut to extricate itself from the useless and costly boondoggle that is capital punishment.  Any other policy that wasted valuable taxpayer dollars without reducing crime or making anyone safer would have been eliminated without hesitation. No system can be perfected enough to prevent the innocent from being sent to death row.  Recent cases have demonstrated the fallibility of Connecticut’s justice system.  In the last…

June 5, 2009

Update

Just in case you think the odds are slim that two government figures would be assassinated within a 48 hour period not just once, but twice, think again. And not only that, in the same country no less. In a ghoulish re-run of events in March, the interim Army Chief (replacing the one killed in a bomb) announced that two men linked to assassinated President Vieira were killed yesterday. "The military confirmed the killings of former Defense Minister Helder Proenca and presidential candidate Baciro Dabo, saying the men were killed because they were plotting a coup against the current government." The…

June 5, 2009

Update

Yesterday the Council of the European Union, made up of ministers from all 27 EU countries, agreed to allow former Guantanamo inmates cleared for release to settle in those countries prepared to take them. The EU ministers made this decision despite the fact that, once inmates are resettled in the EU, they will able to move from country to country relatively freely. 27 European states, all with good reason to be concerned about the terrorist threat posed Al Qaeda, are prepared to take this step to help America out of a jam of entirely its own making. Yet, not one…

June 5, 2009

Update

In the immediate aftermath of President Obama’s speech today in Cairo, the heavy web traffic of discussion among Arab activists was divided essentially into two camps.  One person claimed that the speech could have been given by George W. Bush.  Another compared it to Sadat’s historic trip to Jerusalem. It’s not that either opinion is wrong – either may be proved right – but it was the nature of this talk from the very beginning that its meaning won’t be known for years down the road.  For what will make it historic (or not) is not the rhetoric of the…

June 4, 2009

Update

Last night turned into a fiery exchange of words during the second of several debates lined up ahead of next week's presidential election. While there currently no English translations available on YouTube of the debates, CCTV has a couple of clips up here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ythBumOAtZ0 Former Prime Minister Mir Hussein Musavi and incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad traded barbs on issues ranging from the economy to nuclear power to Ahmadinejad's inflammatory comments about the Holocaust. Reuters, the New York Times, and Bloomberg all discuss the debate in more detail. Samah Choudhury contributed to this post

June 4, 2009

Update

Nearly twenty years ago Troy Davis was convicted of killing a Georgia police officer. As has become well known, the case against him has grown weaker and weaker as seven of the prosecution’s nine witnesses have recanted their testimony, many saying that they were coerced by police. Davis’ latest stay of execution has now expired, after his application for a second habeas petition was denied, preventing him from presenting new evidence. But late last year, the Chatham County, Georgia (the county in which Troy Davis was convicted) elected a brand new District Attorney named Larry Chisholm, who successfully campaigned on…

June 4, 2009

Update

It seems Chinese authorities were busy today. While people around the world commemorated the 20th anniversary of the pro-democracy demonstrations and ensuing massacre at Beijing's Tiananmen Square, police reportedly swarmed into the sqaure, in order to nip any potential protest in the bud. Numerous websites were blocked, including Twitter, Hotmail, and Flickr, along with many Chinese blogs and other sites. A former Tiananmen protester was sent on a government-sponsored "vacation" to keep him from carrying out a hunger strike. Although the Chinese government seems to be doing all it can to help people forget about the people who died in…

June 4, 2009

Update

President Obama is due to arrive in Cairo on Thursday to give a hotly anticipated speech to the Muslim world during a five day trip to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Germany and France. His speech is said to be similar to his previous one in Turkey, in which he will reiterate that the US wishes to foster warm relations with Muslim nations and will not, in his words, “simply impose… values on another country with a different history and a different culture.” He also told the BBC he plans to engage in “tough, direct diplomacy”. This tough and direct diplomacy, though,…

June 3, 2009