This short clip is just a reminder of what the classical Amnesty International work is: collecting signatures for pressure, denouncing and solidarity.
Archive for the 'Amnesty international' Category
Amnesty’s classic work in video clip
February 8, 2013Courageous Chinese HRDs visit Liu Xia, wife of Liu Xiaobo, captured on video
January 23, 2013
Liu Xia, the wife of Liu Xiaobo has been illegally held under house arrest for over 26 months. She has not been able to communicate with others or leave her apartment freely.
On the 28 December 2012 a group of activists attracted Liu Xia’s attention outside her apartment beneath her window. They discussed how to get around the security guards through the side door. Liu Xia welcomed them with hugs and tears.
The meeting was brief, just three minutes as they wanted to avoid conflict with the security guards whose backup team would rush in soon. Some friends kept talking with Liu Xia through the windows and Liu Xia threw out some chocolates to them to express her thanks. Some were arguing with the security guards, explaining that they were just Liu Xia’s friends to celebrate Liu Xiaobo’s birthday with Liu Xia.
Eventually, all the friends managed to return home safely. Amnesty International has translated the video about their visit into English. The original can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJumioueaAo
Human Rights Defenders can dance!
December 11, 2012For those of you who thought that HRDs are mostly serious nerds, watch this lovely and lively clip of Amnesty International staff in the Paris office:
Amnesty short video on refugees on YouTube
June 19, 2012It is only 2 minutes long but tells a lot: when you don’t exist
Amnesty publishes video on forced evictions in Africa
May 17, 2012
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Amnesty International shows its ‘new’ broadened mandate with this short video on forced evictions in Africa. In 4 languages on YouTube: video by AI on forced evictions in Africa. It highlights the kind of human rights violations that the 2012 nominee of the MEA in Cambodia is dealing with: see short film on the multimedia monk on http://www.martinennalsaward.org
Related articles
- Breaking news: the venerable Luon Sovath from Cambodia – MEA 2012 nominee (thoolen.wordpress.com)
A balanced post on how the US should balance its human rights record
March 23, 2012Under the title “A Diminished Force for Good” Tom Parker of USA AI posted on 21 March 2012 a piece that – in a frank way – argues that the US should act with regard to its own human rights problems in order to regain international influence. It takes the lead role of the US in getting a resolution on Sri Lanka (successfully) passed in the Human Rights Council in Geneva this week and contrasts it with how the US has dealt with human rights abuses in its own ambit.
As Amnesty’s recent report Locked Away: Sri Lanka’s security detainees makes clear, human rights abuses still continue to this day in Sri Lanka. Instances of arbitrary and illegal detention have been widely reported, as have acts of torture and extrajudicial execution. Tom Parker says “I know from my own personal experience of working with Sri Lankan human rights defenders that the climate of fear in which opponents of the Rajapaksa regime operate is all-pervasive. The situation in Sri Lanka is grave and the intervention of the United Nations is much needed. .However, welcome though the US-sponsored resolution is, it is greatly undermined by the embarrassing gap that exists between US rhetoric and US behavior. Critics have not been slow in pointing this out.”…”The complete failure of the United States to address the deliberate use of torture as an integral part of the War on Terror hugely diminishes its ability to put pressure on other states to adhere to human rights standards that it itself has ignored. And we are all the poorer for it.”
“The alacrity with which the US Army has responded to the tragic deaths of sixteen Afghan villagers in Zangabad, Afghanistan, earlier this month demonstrates that accountability is nothing to be afraid of. Indeed it can be a powerful force for good….. The US is one of the [governments that actively promote human rights] but its influence has been greatly diminished over the past decade because of its reluctance to meaningfully address its own, very public, failings in this regard….We need a strong US voice speaking out for human rights in the world, but that can’t happen without real accountability at home.”
for the full text see: A Diminished Force for Good.
Ethiopia’s restrictions on HRDs just the tip of the iceberg: repression becomes more sophisticated worldwide
March 13, 2012Governments are becoming increasingly ‘sophisticated’ in their repression of human rights defenders. Probably as a result of the remarkable worldwide acceptance of human rights as a universal set of standards, Governments that want to continue to suppress criticism are resorting to more and more indirect methods of repression.
The basic universality of human rights is nowadays accepted by the quasi-totality of mankind. In the words of Normand and Zaidi, ‘the speed by which human rights has penetrated every corner of the globe is astounding. Compared to human rights, no other system of universal values spread so fast’. This has not stopped a small number of governments (e.g. Iran, Zimbabwe, North Korea) to continue to oppose the idea and depict human rights as a ‘western’ or ‘foreign’ product, alien to their culture. But the big majority seems to have accepted that there is a crucial distinction between the universality of human rights and its universalisation (or universal application). The first is the moral and legal principle that a core of human rights exists and applies to every person in the world irrespective of his or her culture, country, etc. The second is the process by which these universal standards become a reality. Here one cannot make the same optimistic observation about the speed by which human rights are spreading, but this is not only due to the ever-present gap between rhetoric and reality. The international system itself allows for differing interpretations by giving a margin of appreciation at the regional and national level and by permitting States to make reservations to international agreements. The big question is then, to what extent local cultural, legal and religious practices can be accommodated by the international system without losing its coherence.
In this context one sees increasingly that Governments use ‘tricks’ or at least more roundabout ways to tackle those they want to silence. Recent examples are the disbarment of lawyer Intigam Aliyev in Azerbijan (continuing legal work without license), financial fraud charges against Ales Bialiatski in Belarus (NGO refused recognition, therefore no bank account in Belarus, thus acceptance of grants in neighboring countries illegal), withdrawal of recognition of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. Now Amnesty International has come with a report on Ethiopia ‘Stifling human rights work: The impact of civil society legislation in Ethiopia’ (PDF). It describes in detail how the 2009 Charities and Societies Proclamation imposes heavy restrictions on human rights groups operating in the east African country, and allows for excessive government interference. The result is that Ethiopians have less access to independent human rights assistance. Amnesty International’s Deputy Africa Director Michelle Kagari said: ‘Rather than creating an enabling environment for human rights defenders to work in, the government has implemented a law which has crippled human rights work in Ethiopia. The space to make legitimate criticism is more restricted than ever.’ Human rights defenders risk imprisonment if they violate vaguely defined provisions within the 2009 law, making them afraid to speak out, and often resort to self-censorship, in order to avoid repercussions.
There are surely many other examples and it goes to show that those of us who want to assist HRDs in their work have to become also more sophisticated and cut through the maze of legalistic and bureaucratic measures to unearth the truth about the situation of HRDs. We have our work cut out!
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- Ethiopia: Human rights work crippled by restrictive law (ethioandinet.wordpress.com)
Ugandan Government raids LGBT-rights workshop and threatens MEA Laureate Kasha
February 14, 2012Amnesty International reports today that a Ugandan cabinet minister raided a workshop run by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists in Entebbe.
The Minister for Ethics and Integrity, Simon Lokodo, who was accompanied by police, announced that the workshop was illegal and ordered the rights activists out of the hotel where it was being held. He told activists that if they did not leave immediately, he would use force against them.
“This is an outrageous attempt to prevent lawful and peaceful activities of human rights defenders in Uganda,” said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.
The Minister also attempted to order the arrest of Kasha Jacqueline Nabagasera, a prominent LGBT rights activist and winner of the 2011 Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, who was forced to flee from the hotel. The reasons for the attempted arrest were not immediately clear, but were reported to be linked to Kasha Jacqueline’s attempt to challenge the Minister’s actions.
The move comes days after the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was re-tabled in the Ugandan Parliament. The Government of Uganda has sought to distance itself from the Bill, stating that the bill did not enjoy government support. However, “the Government’s claimed opposition to the Bill needs to be supported through their actions. The Ugandan government must allow legitimate, peaceful gatherings of human rights defenders, including those working on LGBT rights,” said Salil Shetty.
If the Anti-Homosexuality Bill becomes law, it would violate international human rights law and lead to further human rights violations.
via Uganda: Government raid on LGBT-rights workshop | Amnesty International.
AI campaign for freedom of expression and against death threats: a Guatemalan example
January 17, 2012
Norma Cruz is a human rights defender who received 47 death threats via text messages sent to her mobile phone. As the leader of women’s rights organization Survivors’ Foundation (Fundación Sobrevivientes) in Guatemala she receives repeated threats for simply doing her work to support victims of violence against women and for pursuing prosecutions against those responsible for committing the crimes.Sauro Scarpelli, Campaign Manager of the Individuals at Risk team, Amnesty International explains “At Amnesty International we are celebrating our 50th birthday and since our inception, we have been fighting for freedom of expression. It was our first campaign and unfortunately 50 years later, despite a very different world, those defending human rights continue to be silenced, imprisoned and threatened with violence in new and different forms.”
Thousands letters to the Attorney General in Guatemala asking for the start of a full and impartial investigation on the threats Norma received had an impact and in September 2011 one of the people who made death threats against Norma Cruz was convicted. The global pressure is working locally! That’s why Amnesty International is kicking off the year with a new action for freedom of expression on 23 January 2012.
picture: Guatemalan human rights defender Norma Cruz (c) Amnesty International
Go to: http://livewire.amnesty.org/2012/01/17/stop-the-death-threats-join-our-campaign-for-freedom-of-expression/
A typical Amnesty branch does typical work for HRDs
December 6, 2011Ahmed Khaleel, an Iraqi citizen who is taking a PhD at York University, gave a talk about Arab poets as human-rights defenders for the Scarborough group of Amnesty International. Dr Jay Prosser, reader in humanities at Leeds University, spoke about his recent co-authored book, Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis. Royalties from his book sales are being donated to Amnesty.
The seminar, at Hull University’s Scarborough campus, was attended by more than 40 people including the deputy mayor, Helen Mallory, who said: “The work Amnesty is doing now is as valuable as it’s always been but possibly more so because there are more human-rights violations taking place around the world. Their work will be neverending because, sadly, atrocities will always be committed. I’m quite humbled by the work they do.”
Not world-shocking news perhaps but a fine example of the day to day work for HRDs that local groups can do…
source: Amnesty seminar on human rights – News – Scarborough Evening News.
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 