As a tribute to Julián Carrillo, an environmental rights defender killed in October 2018, we launched Caught between bullets and neglect, a digest on Mexico’s failure to protect environmental human rights defenders. Just a few hours after the launch, two suspects in Julián’s murder were arrested, showing the immediate impact Amnesty can have on justice.
My name is John Edward Henry Sato. I am 95 years old. What brought me here? Well, they tell me it was the stork.
My mother was born in Scotland and my father is from Japan. They both served in the First World War – my mother was a nurse; my father was in the Japanese navy – and eventually settled in New Zealand.
As a child, I remember people of two different races were called half-breeds and I’d hear people referring to people of Italian descent as “daegos” [a derogatory term for Italian immigrants]. But I never heard an unkind word spoken about me.
I was quite a sickly child and I suffered from bad asthma, but I didn’t let it deter me from going to school. I loved school. When I was 14 or 15, I studied comparative religion. I wanted to discover the essence behind it all. People get the wrong impression of religion - if they don’t understand something, they are quite often afraid of it.
The climate crisis is not ‘just’ an environmental issue – it is also one of the greatest human rights challenges of our time. Climate change impacts the rights to life, health, food, water, housing and more, and disproportionately affects those who are already vulnerable, disadvantaged or facing discrimination.
Vitalina Koval, one of the human rights defenders featured in Write for Rights 2018 is an LGBTI advocate who was met with violence on International Women's Day. She posted this note to her Facebook page after taking home her letters from Amnesty supporters worldwide:
"'Rebel! Love! Don't give up your rights!' – is the kind of messages I receive from all over the world. Yesterday I received all the Amnesty International's Write for Rights letters and I am reading them today. Thank you Amnesty International Ukraine for collecting and delivering them and for everything!
On August 2, Maryam Malekpour was finally reunited with her brother Saeed in Vancouver after she had campaigned tirelessly for 11 years to free him from prison in Iran.
“The nightmare is finally over!” Maryam wrote on Twitter. “Together we prevailed.”
Maryam thanked “every single person who supported us throughout this time.”
Saeed, a permanent resident of Canada, was arrested in Iran in October 2008 while on a visit to his dying father.
Saeed was a web programmer and it was alleged that a program he developed was used to upload pornographic photos to the internet. Saeed had no knowledge of the program being used for that purpose.
After his arrest, Saeed was held in solitary confinement for more than a year. Ill-treated, tortured and denied medical care until he "confessed", Saeed’s televised “confession” was the only evidence used against him.
Following an unfair trial, Saeed was sentenced to death. In 2012, his sentence was reduced to life imprisonment.
By Laith Abu Zeyad, Amnesty International campaigner on Israel/ Palestine
On June 20, World Refugee Day, TripAdvisor CEO Stephen Kaufer published an op-ed urging businesses to help address the global refugee crisis and pledging to donate millions of dollars to humanitarian organisations "to support and help refugees rebuild their lives and reclaim their futures".
This is, of course, a commendable initiative, if only it did not contradict in spirit other practices of the company. While TripAdvisor has decided to help refugees in certain parts of the world, elsewhere - namely in the occupied Palestinian territories - it is contributing to the suffering of the local population, which itself is the source of one of the world's largest refugee communities.
Hanan Badr el-Din featured in Write for Rights 2017 when her husband disappeared in Egypt, she went to look for him, and got arrested. She was released on April 25, she is enjoying freedom for the first time in two years.
Hanan is a medical analysis specialist, a human rights defender and the co-founder of the Families of the Forcibly Disappeared Association. It was the disappearance of her husband Khalid Ezz el-Din that triggered her activism. She should never have been arrested and Amnesty International rejoices in her freedom.
At 19 years of age, Abdul Aziz Muhamat made the impossible decision to leave his family in the Darfur region of Sudan in 2013. He is one of the hundreds and thousands of people who have been displaced by the conflict. Fearing for his life, Aziz flew to Indonesia where he was promised safe passage to Australia by a smuggler but instead he was transferred to a detention centre on Manus Island.
In 2010, Google, the largest search engine in the world, made a promise not to support China’s censorship of the internet. But in 2018 it was revealed that Google was preparing to break its promise.
Google started working on a secretive program to re-launch its search engine in China code-named “Google Dragonfly”. People using Google in China would be blocked from accessing banned websites like Wikipedia and Facebook. Content from search terms like ‘human rights’ would be banned. The Chinese government would also be able to spy on Google’s users – and this is a government that routinely sends people to prison for simply sharing their views online.
To raise attention about the issue, Amnesty produced a couple of spoof videos that were widely circulated online. To increase pressure on Google to “drop Dragonfly”, we launched a global petition and Amnesty volunteers held demonstrations outside of Google’s offices around the world - including in Toronto.
Even many of Google’s employees were appalled by the Google Dragonfly project and spoke out against it.
After many years of hard campaigning, Canada has joined the UN Arms Trade Treaty (ATT)!
Amnesty International’s efforts to establish an international treaty to regulate the arms trade date back to the early-1990s. The ATT entered into force on 24 December 2014, and so far 130 countries around the world have signed the treaty.
Join the global movement for human rights.
