News and Updates for Members

For inspirational photos that tell the story of Amnesty Canada's work and its members, check out the ever-growing collection on the Amnesty Canada photostream on Flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aicanada/

There are photos from public events, photos of speakers who have shared their stories of courage and hope with us, and photos showcasing Amnesty members' creativity, energy and passion.

If you have event photos you'd like to share for the Flickr account, please contact jfarrATamnesty.ca.

On 25 January 2010, Alex Neve delivered petitions signed by thousands of Canadians calling for an end to violence against Indigenous Women in Canada to the Minister of State (Status of Women), the Honourable Helena Guergis.

Thank-you to everyone who signed the petition, and who participated in collecting petition signatures!  Your efforts allowed us to give a strong message to the government to do more to protect Indigenous women in Canada from violence.

Our new Amnesty International slideshow celebrates some of the human rights successes and touches on some of the challenges that the world experienced in 2009.

View the slideshow

Portishead, an award-winning electronic trio from Bristol, UK, have released a brand-new track - Chase the Tear - for Amnesty International.

It's now available as an exclusive download single from 7 digital with all earnings going towards Amnesty's human rights work.

Buy this track to support Amnesty

Watch the video

Last weekend, acclaimed Scottish author A.L. Kennedy took some time out from the International Festival of Authors in Toronto to talk to some members of Amnesty International Canada. 

And we got it on film!

A.L. Kennedy is one of the contributors to the new fiction anthology Freedom: A Collection of Short Fiction Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

View a short interview with the author about her involvement with this book, and hear some insights into the focus of her own story in it:  http://www.youtube.com/user/AmnestyIntlToronto#p/a/u/0/407l-f5CSGs

View a short interview with the author about her thoughts on Amnesty International and its work: http://www.youtube.com/user/AmnestyIntlToronto#p/a/u/2/Il-gA99CVSk

 (More about the Freedom anthology)

If you haven't yet checked out Amnesty International's YouTube channel, it's well worth a visit. It features links to almost 100 Amnesty-related video clips.

This week, the featured video is a final interview with Kim Dae-Jung, the former South Korean president, former death-row inmate, and Amnesty prisoner of conscience who died on August 18, 2009.

President Kim's final meeting with Amnesty was in April 2009 when he looked back at a key moment in his life when, after having been sentenced to death, he was approached by South Korea's military regime who offered to save his life if he cooperated with them. He refused to compromise his principles. International pressure led to the sentence being commuted to life imprisonment. Democratic reforms wre introduced in 1987, and ten years later Kim was elected president.

Go to Amnesty's YouTube channel.

I'll keep this post short, because what you really ought to do right now is click on the link below or the image above to check out One Love, One Heart - a fantastic new comic strip that Amnesty International member Marita Obst and her friend Luke Pickett have put together.

One Love, One Heart highlights the case of Canadian Omar Khadr and the ongoing struggle to bring him home from Guantanamo Bay, where he has been detained since 2002.

Read One Love, One Heart.

The Economist's website has a compelling slideshow about Aghanistan's child brides.

The pictures and narration are by Stephanie Sinclair, an award-winning US photographer who spent time in 2003 in rural Afghanistan.

In 2005, Amnesty International reported how a study by Afghanistan's Ministry of Women's Affairs showed that 57 per cent of women surveyed were married before they were 16. Some were reported to be as young as nine.

Watch the slideshow

Photojournalist Stuart Price spent more than a year in Darfur alongside United Nations forces who are trying to bring peace to this war-torn region in western Sudan.

The BBC's website is featuring a slideshow of Price's photographs portraying the faces and places of the Darfur conflict.

Watch the slideshow

Read about the background to the Darfur conflict 

Each year Peru’s poor, rural and Indigenous pregnant women are caught in a health-care lottery.

A new Amnesty International report - Fatal Flaws - reveals that hundreds of these women die because they are being denied the same health services as other women in the country.

Amnesty has also released a moving five-minute video that highlights some of the issues raised in the report.

Peru has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the Americas. According to official figures, 185 women die for every 100,000 live births in Peru. The United Nations puts the number even higher at 240. Most of these are rural, poor and Indigenous women.

"The rates of maternal mortality in Peru are scandalous," says Nuria García, Peru researcher at Amnesty International. "The fact that so many women are dying from preventable causes is a human rights violation." 

Watch the Amnesty video
Read the Fatal Flaws report (pdf - 5 MB)