Filed under: democracy, digital revolution, politics | Tags: human_rights, politics, uk
As many of you will know, the government’s proposal to increase the pre-charge detention limit to 42 days – six weeks – has scraped through parliament by a majority of nine. Not that the politics is important to us, but it means that it only passed with the votes of the Ulster Unionists.
This is bad news for human rights. The government didn’t make a convincing case that this would make anyone safer and in fact, by further alienating the Muslim community with measures that will inevitably affect them most, it may make things worse. This is a lesson that should have been learned from Northern Ireland, and clearly hasn’t been.
The ‘concessions’ that have been granted are basically meaningless: parliamentary scrutiny won’t be any use as MPs won’t have any detailed information on individual cases. The judicial safeguards that have been put in place are nowhere near strong enough.
The Bill now has to go before the Lords – and as it only scraped through by nine votes in the Commons, they may well be inclined to ’savage’ it. That’s where we’ll be focusing our attention now and you’ll be hearing a lot more from us soon.
As unsubscribers, Amnesty will be getting our view across on phone-ins, message board and blog posts. The public is being robbed of its basic human rights and we need to make sure that everyone knows what is at stake.
BTW: you don’t have to be a member of Amnesty International to unsubscribe from human rights abuses in the ‘war on terror’ but you might want to join them
Filed under: ethical, politics | Tags: guantamano, human rights, human_rights, politics
In 2006, the UN Human Rights Commission called on the US government to shut down Guantánamo Bay.
Two years after the UN report and six years after the first prisoners arrived at Guantánamo, there are still 290 prisoners awaiting trial and/or release.
To date, only one of the nearly 800 prisoners at Guantánamo has been tried. Of those 800 prisoners, only 14% were captured by US military and coalition forces – the remaining 86% were brought to US custody through awarded bounty.
After six years of trumping civil liberties under habeus corpus and the Geneva Convention, its time to demand to shut down Guantánamo!
Sign a petition here or join in the protests and demonstrate with Amnesty outside the US Embassy in London, or if you can’t make that then Wear Orange on January 11th!
Wherever you are on January 11th, we encourage you to wear orange to raise public awareness and strengthen the movement to demand an end to torture and indefinite detention. Consider wearing Witness Against Torture’s Orange “Shut Down Guantánamo” t-shirts, an ACLU arm band, or even an orange jump suit.
Filed under: documentary | Tags: director, documentary, human rights, human_rights, indigenous, peak oil
idocs…create the change
Here is a blog from a friend of mine. Ajay Rai. Check out his website if you are interested in making films that can effect social change, or if you just want to think about change…
CRUDE
The new documentary from director Franny Armstrong (McLibel) and Oscar-winning producer John Battsek (One Day In September)
Filed under: documentary, ethical | Tags: coffee, ethiopia, fair trade, film, free trade, human_rights
