Your local voice for Amnesty International
Liberty Investigates, founded in 2019, is a small dedicated team of investigative journalists publishing in-depth human rights stories in the UK, particularly with respect to migrants and policing. It spent two years examining the maltreatment and death of asylum seekers in Home Office care and exposed how more than 100 had died since 2016, including…
Continue reading Liberty Investigates
There are a number of Bills currently before Parliament with the potential to breach fundamental human rights. None have yet been finalised but we draw attention to them so that you can, where and when possible, take action. It is, for example, likely that the Bill of Rights – which we have featured in many…
Continue reading Updates on Legislation
We held our first Amnesty Talk for more than two years on Zoom on 29 November and were delighted that 25 people attended, despite England playing Wales in the football World Cup at the same time! It was an instructive, enlightening and thought-provoking talk. Professor Murphy asked, ‘can taxation contribute to a fairer society’? The…
Continue reading Report on Amnesty Talk – Tax is a Human Rights Issue
As part of his support for President Vladimir Putin’s war effort in Ukraine, President Lukashenko held a sham referendum on 27 February to allow Russian nuclear missiles on Belarusian territory. This sparked mass protests in the streets of the capital Minsk and elsewhere, with people chanting ‘No to war!’ ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ and ‘Long live Belarus!’…
Continue reading Opposition in Belarus to the War in Ukraine
OpenDemocracy and the Public Sociology Laboratory, an independent research initiative, carried out more than 200 in-depth interviews with Russians since 27 February. The people sampled tended to be educated and from large cities. The research showed that within this sample attitudes to the war split into three broad camps: supporters, opponents and, the largest group, the doubters.…
Continue reading Russians’ Views of the War in Ukraine
Good News Britain Former Iran detainee Anoosheh Ashoori ran the London Marathon in his Evin prisoner’s uniform on 2 October. He ran for hours each day in his cell hoping one day he would run the marathon as a free man. He dedicated his medal to the women of Iran, political prisoners and the freedom…
Continue reading Good and Bad News Update – Britain October 2022
Good News Europe Ukraine Railways and Doctors without Borders have created an ambulance train to carry patients from cities close to hostilities to hospitals some 1,000km away. So far they have carried over 650 patients. LGBTQ+ activists have set up shelters across Ukraine to help those who may need mental or physical support. The president…
Continue reading Good and Bad News Update – Europe October 2022
Good News World Research by Amnesty International which included 17,000 fans from 15 countries found that almost three quarters were in favour of compensating migrant workers who suffered abuses while working in Qatar in preparation for the football World Cup. Only ten per cent opposed this. The Australian government has promised to review the current…
Continue reading Good and Bad News Update – World October 2022
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Assessment of Human Rights Concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region The outgoing UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, released her long-awaited 48-page report on the Uyghur Region on 31 August. She concluded that China has committed ‘serious human rights violations’ in the application of its…
Continue reading Focus on Uyghur and Other Ethnic Minorities in Xinjiang
Annually, around 50mn people are forced from their homes by conflict and disaster. This book contains 11 short essays, each introducing a sequence of poems. The book is in two halves. The first revolves around migration in the natural world: birds’ migration follows a yearly pattern, for instance, with ‘homes’ or nests created in different places. …
Continue reading Worth Reading: We Are All from Somewhere Else. Migration and Survival in Poetry and Prose by Ruth Padel