According to official estimates, over the past year more than 1,200 people have been killed and between 200,000 and 500,000 have been displaced in the Swat valley as a result of fighting between Pakistani Taleban groups and the military. The Pakistani government is being urged to act immediately to...

The first anniversary of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on 27 December marks a year of failure by Pakistan’s leaders to investigate and bring to justice those responsible for this and other political and civilian killings, said Amnesty International today. The organization repeated its...

A draft law in Colombia aiming to grant reparation to victims of the country’s 40-year conflict has been called “discriminatory” by Amnesty International. Under the current draft, victims of paramilitary and guerrilla groups will be able to receive almost immediate monetary...

Amnesty International today called on the Colombian Congress not to approve the draft “Victims’ Law”.  This draft followed the government’s watering down of the original bill, which would have gone some way towards guaranteeing reparation to the victims of the country’s 40-year internal armed...

Amnesty International welcomed today’s adoption of the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, by the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee in New York.   “Many of those who have suffered violations of their rights, including rights to adequate...

Today 147 states at the United Nations voted overwhelmingly to move forward with work on an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). The Control Arms campaign, which represents millions of campaigners around the world welcomed the vote but called for more urgency from states to advance the process quickly and...

Killings of civilians • More than 70,000 people, the majority of them civilians, have been killed in Colombia’s armed conflict over the past 20 years. • At least 1,400 civilians were killed in 2007 (around 1,300 in 2006), compared with a recent high of 4,000 in 2002. • Of those cases where the...

For the second time in one month Turkish law enforcement officials have expelled the same group of Uzbekistani refugees into Iranian territory in flagrant disregard for international standards protecting the rights of refugees and asylum-seekers. Amnesty International is calling on the Turkish...

Turkish law enforcement officials have expelled the same group of Uzbekistani refugees into Iranian territory for the second time in one month. At least twenty-four Uzbekistani nationals are believed to have been rounded up by Turkish police in Van in eastern Turkey on Saturday and taken to an...

Members of the armed forces have threatened inhabitants of the Naya River basin by telling them that paramilitary groups are returning to the area. The paramilitary groups have supposedly been demobilized in a government-sponsored process. The lives of the area’s Afro-descendant communities are in...

The international community is evading its responsibility towards refugees from Iraq by promoting a false picture of the security situation in Iraq when the country is neither safe nor suitable for return, Amnesty International said today. In its new report, Rhetoric and reality: the Iraqi refugee...

Amnesty International today condemned the detention of Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai, saying that his detention was part of a sudden, sharp and dangerous crackdown on political opposition in the run-up to the elections. “Morgan Tsvangirai should be released...