By Alex Neve, Secretary General, Amnesty International Canada. Follow Alex on Twitter @AlexNeveAmnesty Want to feel more secure?  Bill C-51, which is being examined by a Parliamentary committee in  three weeks of truncated hearings, offers up criminal offences that infringe free expression,...

By Alex Neve, Secretary General, Amnesty International Canada. Follow Alex on Twitter: @AlexNeveAmnesty There is so much packed into the government’s current national security law reform, it is hard to know where to focus.  Bills C-44 and C-51, currently before Parliament, constitute the most...

By Tarek Chatila, Montreal-area activist and writer for Amnesty Canada’s Isr/OT/PA co-group “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” wrote French critic Alphonse Karr in 1849. Turbulent change, he observed, has a counterproductive tendency to reinforce the status quo. A truism...

  Don’t Let Down Your Guard:  Standing together and speaking out for human rights – Year end message to Amnesty International supporters from Alex Neve, Secretary General, Amnesty International Canada There were so many reminders during 2014 of how deeply important solidarity is in our...

By Jackie Hansen, Major Campaigns and Women’s Rights Campaigner There appears to be a rise in homophobia around the world. From Russia and Kyrgyzstan to Nigeria, Uganda, and beyond, homosexuality is becoming further criminalized. This is particularly hard to understand here in Canada where we are...

By Kathy Price, Mexico Campaigner The photos arrived in a steady stream on my Facebook feed, a flood of images too numerous to include here – impossible to ignore. From the wide boulevards of Mexico’s capital to the streets of small towns across the country, women and men, young and old,...

By Mabel Au, Director of Amnesty International in Hong Kong. The streets of Hong Kong are hard to recognize these days. The exhilarating energy filling the city’s main roads, crowded with hopeful protesters, is something I have not seen since I was a young student back in 1989, when we took to...

by Tara Scurr, Business & Human Rights Campaigner, Amnesty International Canada – from Guatemala City “It’s been hard, because it’s not easy to bear being spat at in the face, being pushed and shoved, the tear gas, the tussles with the police, and we women having to throw ourselves...

  , by Alex Neve, Secretary General, and Tara Scurr, Business and Human Rights Campaigner , Amnesty International Canada ,  – Guatemala City, Guatemala, 18 September, 2014 , What better way to spend the evening before launching our important new report, Mining in Guatemala: Rights at...

The skin across Sasha’s forehead and around his eyes is slightly yellow and there is a recent scab on his temple. He is healing well. Ten days before our meeting, the 19-year-old was barely recognizable: the skin on his face stretched tight, swollen and bruised. Abducted and tortured, Sasha...

On the morning of 27 May, Hanna, was sitting in her flat in eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, when there was a knock on the door. As her boyfriend Feodor lifted the latch, seven armed men wearing balaclavas and camouflaged fatigues barged through. They said they were from the Donetsk People’s...

Amina Filali committed suicide by swallowing rat poison in March 2012. She was 16 years old. Her desperate act showed the depth of her pain and despair: she must have felt that nobody was there to help her. We soon learned that Amina had been raped in her small Moroccan town, by a man she was...