Free Lantern

With 100 days to go until the Beijing Olympics, Amnesty International today (30 April) launched the first in a series of four hard-hitting animated films highlighting human rights abuses linked to the Chinese authorities’ hosting of the Games, in particular the risks of peacefully protesting in China. Watch the first animation here:

Also see:

• Human Rights for China
• Summer Olympics
• Beijing’s Alternative logo

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A while ago I wrote about Amnesty Internationals campaign against Torture, Unsubscribe-Me. Amnesty is now launching a series of short effective films in order to spread the human rights message.
First add of these series is against waterboarding, a method that is used by the CIA in the “war against terror”. This is ‘The film the CIA doesn’t want you to see’. This film will be on 50 UK cinema screens from 5th of May.
Help spreading the word, by showing the video to your friends, posting it on your weblog/webpages or linking to it. You can also Unsubscribe yourself.
Warning: the video contains shocking content!

Also read:

• ‘The film the CIA doesn’t want you to see’: Amnesty launches new ‘waterboarding’ film
• Waterboarding: is it a slam dunk?
• Cheney Defends ‘Dunk in the Water’ Remark
• Ashcroft Compares Waterboarding To Being ‘Interviewed By Jon Stewart’

• New York times has a report about the Iranian blogosphere entitled: “Iranian Blogosphere Tests Government’s Limits“. The article refers to a research done in Harvard’s Law school that mapped Iran’s online public (See the resulting map here). The research and the report are both interesting. I have also translated part of them to Persian in my Persian blog.
• It’s been five years. Five years of bloodshed and displacement. Five years of fear and dread, and for children aged five and younger, war is all they’ve known. Since April five years ago, more than 200,000 have died and more than 2.3 million people have been forced to flee their homes as a result of the conflict in this vast region to the west of Sudan. Tomorrow there will be the day for Darfur in the UK.

2008 is the 60^th anniversary of Universal Declaration of Human rights.The Elders say that the government have been signing this declaration for the past 60 years but now you have the chance to sign it in Every Human Has Rights website. You can read a plain language version of the declaration in this homepage and be one of those who sign and join this campaign.
The Hub, the media site specialized for human rights, is also working with Every Human Has Rights campaign to build a global digital data bank of human rights stories, in text, audio and video.

Amnesty marks sixth ‘anniversary’ of Guantanamo with prison cell protest outside US embassy
Today was the sixth “anniversary” of Guantanamo prison opening, Amnesty International organized protests in London, Belfast in front of the US embassy to call for closure of this prison.

Getting close to the end of the year there are some good news for human rights activists: 

UN Calls for Moratorium on Death Penalty: The global campaign against the death penalty secured a landmark victory on Tuesday when the United Nations General Assembly endorsed the call for a worldwide moratorium (suspension) on executions. In a landslide result, 104 UN member states voted in favor of the ground-breaking resolution. 54 countries voted against, while there were 25 abstentions.

Also see:

 UN General Assembly calls for a global moratorium

The 2008 Summer Olympics will take place from 8-24 August 2008 in Beijing, while China still remains one of the countries with most human rights abuse in the world and it is the biggest prison for journalists and cyber-dissidents. This Olympics is a good chance to pressure the Chinese regime to respect the human rights issues. China’s hosting of the Olympics provides it with
a unique opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to human rights Amnesty International has a campaign to make sure that this opportunity does not pass by without notice, action
and sustained improvements. Here are the links for Amnesty.uk and amnesty.de campaign pages, you can go to these pages and take action.

Also take a look at the following webpage which is a campaign for Tibet, go to the page and watch the comic film:

Amnesty has reacted to the launch of a new computer viral promoting the film Saw IV where players torture celebrities using electric drills, knives and spiked clubs. It is called the chamber of torture, even looking at the design of the webpage makes me feel sick. I really don’t understand, how sick one should be to enjoy such thing.
“Torture isn’t something funny that happens to celebrities. It’s horrific and it is happening right now to real people. “If people want to see what’s really going on - and do something to stop it - they should join the thousands who’ve Unsubscribed from torture and terror at www.unsubscribe-me.org. ” Said Sara MacNeice, Amnesty International UK.

Unsubscribe Me is an Amnesty International campaign to unite against the human right abuse that is taking place in the name of “war on terror”. On the main page there is a video of a performance artist undergoing, for real, interrogation techniques permitted in the CIA handbook. I added the widget of this campaign with the video in this post if you want to watch it see the rest of this post.

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