By Ann Harrison, Amnesty International’s Iran researcher I was cheered to see Amnesty International members joining others across the world to wish Iranian Prisoner of Conscience Behareh Hedayat Happy Birthday in an effort to secure her release.  A Facebook page has been set up to collect messages...

By Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’sCrisis Researcher1 April 2011, Ajdabiya Ajdabiya, a city of more than 100,000 people, is again empty of its residents. Yesterday, even the few residents who had begun to return earlier in the week were again fleeing eastwards in horror at the news that...

Lucy Macnamara, Communications Manager, Art for Amnesty I’m back with Amnesty International on the U2 360 tour, kicking off the first concert of the Latin America leg here at the Estadio Nacioal in Santiago, Chile.  It’s an infamous stadium with a dark past.  I have to admit a shiver went down my...

By Donatella Rovera,Amnesty International’s Crisis ResearcherAjdabiya, 30 March 2011Visiting Ajdabiya for two days I met Adam al-Tarhouni who told me how his 67-year-old father, Miftah, and his 36-year-old brother, Mohammad, were both killed on Sunday, 20 March, near Ajdabiya’s eastern gate, when...

By Salil Shetty, Secretary-General of Amnesty InternationalLast March, when Andrei Zhuk’s mother brought one of her usual food parcels to the prison in Minsk, she was turned away. Her son ‘had been moved’, officials told her. She should not come looking for him anymore, they said, but should...

By Alaphia Zoyab, Online Communities Officer On Friday morning the online team at Amnesty International was in for a pleasant surprise. At work we have our Amnesty website open on our computers throughout the day and are very familiar with trends on the number of people who sign our web petitions....

By Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International crisis researcher Yesterday, at the home of the Dbeish family in Hay Dollar, a wealthy neighbourhood in the south-west of Benghazi, Hanan, a mother of six, showed me the smashed up bedroom where she had been sleeping with three of her children when a...

By Rachel Campbell, Amnesty International Campaigner for Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories Today, the UN Human Rights Council will meet to begin debating a crucial report on seriously flawed Israeli and Palestinian investigations into grave violations of international law committed...

By Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International crisis researcher The situation has significantly deteriorated in Benghazi and elsewhere in eastern Libya in the past few days. Since yesterday, while Colonel al-Gaddafi’s spokespeople reiterate that their forces are observing a ceasefire, armed al-Gaddafi...

By Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International Crisis Researcher Benghazi, Libya, 18 March 2011 Yesterday, I managed to speak by phone to a family that I met last week when I was in Ajdabya, a town about 160km west of Benghazi which has been pounded by Colonel al-Gaddafi’s military forces in recent...

The publication on Monday of United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon’s interim report on Iran to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva did not reveal any startling new information. Yet, it was a grim reminder to the international community of the wide scale and range of human rights violations...

By Max Tucker, Amnesty International’s campaigner for South Caucasus and Central Asia, reporting from Baku Around 30 people were arrested in Baku today when part of a virtual protest against the government in Azerbaijan became reality. Small groups of people gathered spontaneously in different...