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Good News Kalush Orchestra, the Ukrainian entry, won the Eurovision Song Contest on 14 May. The band members had special permission to leave Ukraine and had to return on the following Monday. The Orchestra then sold their trophy, raising £712,000 to buy drones for the military. Russian human rights activists have formed an ‘underground railroad’…
Continue reading June Update on the War in Ukraine
Eleven Days in May This documentary is harrowing, but necessary, viewing. It remembers the lives and deaths of the 60 children killed in the sustained bombing of the Gaza Strip in May 2021 by showing family members sharing their memories of them through stories, photographs, home movies and personal belongings. In an interview, director Michael…
Continue reading Worth Watching – June 2022
Many of us have participated in government consultation processes and may well have wondered whether it was worth the effort. Here are two salutary stories. Scrapping At-home Abortion Pills A public consultation that led to the government scrapping at-home abortion pills was subject to a targeted campaign by right-to-life groups. Of over 18,000 responses, the…
Continue reading The Problem with the Government’s Consultation Process
More than 1,000 Palestinians are facing expulsion from their villages, one of the largest forcible transfers since Israel’s occupation of the West bank in 1967. The Supreme Court in Israel rejected evidence from residents of Masafer Yatta that their presence long preceded the declaration of the area as a ‘firing zone’ from which Palestinians are…
Continue reading Palestinian Evictions
For They Think That We’re Machines, Amnesty interviewed 34 workers in the security sector in Qatar between April 2021 and February 2022, collected documentary evidence such as employment contracts, photographs and video footage, and reviewed and analysed secondary sources including Qatari laws and FIFA policies. Many of the guards, all migrants working for eight private…
Continue reading Amnesty International Report: They Think That We’re Machines
The Home Office has stated that sending asylum seekers to Rwanda was not a penalty but a deterrent, and deportation would be on a case-by-case basis with monitoring in place. It acknowledged that LGBT+ people in Rwanda face ill-treatment. The Central Africa director of Human Rights Watch said the government’s safety assessment was ‘not grounded…
Continue reading Refugees to Rwanda Update
Released in May, this annual report charts current global trends in relation to the death penalty. The key findings are that both known executions and death sentences have increased, and that more than 28,500 people are under sentence of death around the world (unfortunately excluding China, Egypt, Iran, North Korea and Saudi Arabia – all…
Continue reading Amnesty International’s Annual Report on Death Sentences and Executions 2021
Sports have traditionally been viewed as a force for good in the world, but the term ‘sportswashing’ describes how some authoritarian governments use them as propaganda to ‘launder’ their global reputations by diverting attention from their deplorable records on human rights and social justice. For example, by hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics, China sought to…
Continue reading ‘Sportswashing’
The Queen’s Speech sets out the legislative agenda for the year to come. In all, 38 Bills were cited, several considered controversial and with an impact on human rights. These include the Online Safety Bill (dealing with harmful content online); the Victims’ Bill (to help victims have greater confidence in the criminal justice system); the…
Continue reading The Queen’s Speech and Human Rights
The SchemeIn April, the government signed an agreement with the East African nation Rwanda to send migrants who arrive in the UK and who are deemed ‘inadmissible’ – that is they have arrived without a visa and through an unofficial route – to detention centres in Rwanda. They will be detained in the UK pending…
Continue reading A Compassionate Response to Asylum Seekers – One-way Tickets to Rwanda?