Signatures
A follow up on the successful Amnesty International ad “signature”.
Also see the first part of this ad.
Olympics values
Beating peaceful protestors does not uphold the Olympics values
Amnesty International (UK) has launched the second video of “Human Rights For China” campaign. They’ve used the viral launch to highlight the case of Huang Qi, a 45 years old cyber-dissident who runs the www.64tianwang.com website and has been detained since 10 June. Huang Qi was having dinner at a local restaurant in Chengdu with two volunteers from his organisation, the Tianwang Human Rights Centre, when several men – believed to be plainclothes police - forced them into a vehicle and took them away. Since then no-one’s been able to see him or speak to him: which means he’s at real risk of torture.
Also see:
The first video
Human rights for China
New viral calls for online action as Amnesty demands release of cyber-dissident who helped victims
Beijing’s Alternative Logo
Amnesty International Report
Amnesty International today challenged world leaders to apologise for six decades of human rights failure and to re-commit themselves to deliver concrete improvements. …
Some of the most striking images of 2007 were of monks in Burma, lawyers in Pakistan, and women activists in Iran.
See Amnesty International’s report.
Related:
Every Human has Rights
Human rights for China
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:
Waterboarding
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!
Iranian blogosphere - Day for Darfur
- 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.
8th of March
Yesterday was 8th of March, I read an article(Persian) by an Iranian women rights activist. She reminded me that during the last year in Iran, 100 women right activists spent at least 1 night in prison. What was their sin? They were demanding their rights using different Nonviolent methods, like gathering signatures. A friend of mine Farnaz, has been between one of those that spent time in prison. She has also written about how the so called police was searching inches of their house to find her last year on the 8th of March.
I also hope that there will be an International women’s day which we can just be happy of our achievements, which discrimination and violence are just bad past memories, like how my good friend Jadi has also described it (in Persian).
Free Osanloo
Today was the action day for Osanloo, a trade union activist (head of Bus driver’s Union of Tehran) that is in Evin prison for demanding his and his coworkers rights. This day was organized by International Transport Worker’s Federation.
If you want to know more of his story you can see here. In the rest of this post you can watch a video entitled “Freedom Will Come” which introduces Osanloo, his mission and the reason he has spent more time in prison than outside.
News from Iran
Unfortunately only bad news are heard these days:
A Kurdish teacher has been sentenced to death. Authorities arrested Kamangar in Tehran in July 2006 and held him in various detention centers in Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and Tehran. Kamangar claims that during a period of detention in Unit 209 of Evin Prison in August 2006, officials tortured him to such an extent that they had to transfer him to the prison clinic to receive medical attention. Kamangar also alleges torture and ill-treatment while in detention in the cities of Sanandaj in Kurdistan province and Kermanshah.
The Iranian judiciary should revoke the death sentence of Kurdish teacher Farzad Kamangar, Human Rights Watch said today. (Read More)
The pressure on women rights activists is increasing as “The Feminist School“, a website organized by a group of Women Rights activists have been filtered inside Iran.
