Amnesty International believes that the proposals set out in the Consultation Document for the enactment of Article 23 legislation under the Basic Law in many instances are contrary to international human rights laws and standards. Amnesty is concerned that the definition of national security is...

Amnesty International has submitted comments to the Hong Kong Security Bureau on the consultation document for the proposed Safeguarding National Security Ordinance under Article 23 of the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution. In this submission, Amnesty calls on the Hong Kong government to...

On 17 February, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KR-I) authorities released journalist Guhdar Zebari after more than three years of unjust imprisonment. Authorities in the KR-I arrested Guhdar Zebari in October 2020 along with four other journalists and activists. The Erbil Criminal Court sentenced...

Prominent Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abdel Fattah has spent 52 months arbitrarily detained simply for exercising his human rights. On 20 December 2021, he was convicted on bogus charges and sentenced to five years in prison, following a grossly unfair trial. Alaa Abdel Fattah, who has spent...

Authorities in Saudi Arabia must immediately release 29-year-old fitness instructor, human rights defender and blogger Manahel al-Otaibi who has been forcibly disappeared since November 2023, Amnesty International said today. Prison and other officials have cut off all of her contact with her...

In recent years the Russian authorities have been increasingly using false, politically motivated terrorism-related charges. Their abuse has reached a whole new level with the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022

Ukrainian citizen Oleksandr Marchenko, imprisoned in Russia on fabricated charges of espionage, continues to be harassed and ill-treated in custody. The penal authorities have intermittently placed Oleksandr Marchenko in punishment or confinement cells on spurious grounds and deny him contact with...

On 16 November 2022, Saudi authorities arrested 29-year-old Manahel al-Otaibi. She has been forcibly disappeared since November 2023. She was charged with violating the Anti-Cyber Crime Law due to her tweets in support of women’s rights as well as posting photos of herself at the mall without an...

The unfair mass trial of 84 Emirati men, including human rights defenders and prisoners of conscience Ahmed Mansoor, Mohammed al-Roken and Nasser bin Ghaith, on charges under an indictment that has so far been kept secret, is ongoing. On 7 February 2024, during the fifth trial session before the...

The Emirates Detainees Advocacy Center (EDAC), the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR), Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch urgently appeal to United Nations special procedures, UN Member States, and the European Union to call on the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to drop recent abusive...

On 17 January 2024, an Andorran court acquitted human rights defender Vanessa Mendoza Cortés. She was wrongfully prosecuted on a criminal charge of defamation for speaking out about women human rights and Andorra’s total ban on abortion at a UN expert body in 2019.

Kurdish man Reza Rasaei, from the Yaresan religious minority, is at imminent risk of execution in relation to the “Woman Life Freedom” uprising after the Supreme Court rejected a request for judicial review on 16 January. His death sentence was issued following a grossly unfair trial that relied on...