By Alaphia Zoyab, an Online Communications Officer from Amnesty’s International Secretariat. All governments say they want to stop the flow of illicit arms, but listening to many of them at the UN today, it became clear that not many are willing to do anything about it. This is because it will...

GUEST BLOG: By a journalist who has just been inside Syria. The views expressed are not necessarily those of Amnesty International. Faced with a growing anti-government protest movement, the Syrian authorities have stifled freedom of speech in Syria as a last-ditch attempt to curtail dissenting...

By Kondylia Gogou and Giorgos Kosmopoulos, researcher and campaigner in Amnesty International’s EU Team After a three-day visit to the detention facilities of Fylakio, Ferres, Soufli and Tyhero on Greece’s border with Turkey, we left with knots in our stomachs having witnessed the appalling...

GUEST BLOG: by a journalist who has just come back from Tajikistan. The views expressed are not necessarily those of Amnesty International. On Monday 13th June the BBC reporter, Urunboy Usmanov, left his office in Khujand, northern Tajikistan, as usual. When he did not arrive home, his family was...

By Rachel Campbell from Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme. “As the days go by, we begin to despair of the day when we will see our son again. I know neither where he is held nor how he fares … or whether he is even alive.”(Noam Shalit, Gilad Shalit’s father, addressing...

By Amnesty International’s Central and East Africa Campaigner. Freedom of expression in Rwanda has been unduly restricted for many years. The killings of a political opponent and a journalist in 2010 indicate how people who criticize the authorities are often at risk. We believe the Rwandan...

Arriving at Cairo airport earlier this week, the first time I had been to the country since the ’25 January Revolution’, I got what seemed to be an early sign that some things have changed. Our bags were opened at customs and contained a large amount of Amnesty International Arabic language...

By Sherif Elsayed-Ali, Head of Refugee and Migrants’ Rights at Amnesty International Some 150 bodies were found in the sea off the Tunisian Kerkennah islands only a few weeks ago. These bodies were of people who fled the violent conflict in Libya to seek safety in Europe. Their death added to the...

By José Luis Díaz, Head of Amnesty International’s United Nations Office As we prepared for the screening today of the Channel 4 film, “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields” at Amnesty International’s United Nations office in New York, our main worry was the size of the turnout. We had already seen the...

By Charlotte Phillips, Amnesty International researcher on refugees’ and migrants’ rights.Life in Choucha camp is hard. Located in the Tunisian desert, not far from the border with Libya, the scorching midday sun beats down on row upon row of tiny tents, where thousands of refugees take shelter...

By Maisy Weicherding, Central Asia Researcher at Amnesty International Five years ago I was first introduced to Azimzhan Askarov, a gentle and unassuming man in his fifties, in the chaotic and friendly offices of the human rights organization Spravedlivost (Justice) in the town of Jalal-Abad in...

The road south from the southern Turkish town of Hatay rises steeply through verdant agricultural land. At the small border village of Guvecci I get out of the car and immediately see dozens of men sitting on the edge of the road or otherwise milling about the stone houses, waiting. Syrians all,...