Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
Which group of people is most consistently hated by virtually the entire British population? Would they be murderers? Muslim extremists? No, there is one group that comes top every time I ask the question: paedophiles.
The degree of hatred for is consistent and venomous. The vilification runs so rampant that when one tabloid newspaper ran a campaign against ‘paedos’, some poor paediatrician had her house vandalized.
Now Channel Four has entered the fray, reintroducing the possibility of the death penalty into British society, and staging the televisual hanging of Gary Glitter, convicted as the paedophile we love to hate. While ...
Milan prosecutor Armando Spataro has announced that 23 CIA agents have been found guilty in absentia for their role in the illegal kidnapping and rendition of Abu Omar from a Milan street to an Egyptian secret prison in 2003.
People facilitating torture should be prosecuted, but the most fascinating thing about this prosecution is the two central characters. Spataro, who is not particularly left wing, was originally engaged in a criminal investigation of an alleged al-Qaida cell in Milan.
Omar is an Egyptian cleric who, if we are to believe the prosecutor, would have been the one in the dock ...
When Khristian Oliver stood trial for murder in Texas 10 years ago, several jurors consulted the Bible extensively during their deliberations. Despite the court of appeals ruling that an 'important line' had been 'crossed', Oliver's appeal was dismissed and he was executed last week.
One of the jurors testified that about 4 Bibles were in the jury room. Key passages were highlighted and handed around among fellow believers. At one point, a juror reportedly read aloud from a copy, including the passage: "And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a ...
It would be inaccurate to characterise Democratic politicians in the US as anti-Death penalty and pro human rights: Bill Clinton interrupted his 1992 Presidential campaign to sign the death warrant of lobotomised Ricky Ray Rector when he was still Governor of Arkansas and President Obama’s promise to close Guantanamo Bay has yet to be fulfilled.
Yet social conservatives who fall on the Republican side of the aisle tend to be uncompromising in their support for capital punishment and human rights abuses perpetrated in the name of ‘national security’. This is why the Republican wins in the US elections held ...
Amongst all the fallout from President Obama’s Nobel Prize win, my favourite is the recent suggestion by a Chadian Minister that the Norwegians made a mistake.
Rather sycophantically, Environment Minister Ali Souleymane Dabye went on to say that President Idriss Deby, who has ruled Chad for 19 years, should have beaten President Obama in the race for the Nobel.
The comment was greeted with mirth by many Chadians, and a mischievous Cameroonian journalist, the aptly named Innocent Ebodé of the Voix du Tchad, likened such a competition to a race between Olympic world-record-holder Usain Bolt and a one-legged runner ...
Death Penalty volunteer Laura Vignoles watches the All Parliamentary Group Debate on the abolition of the death penalty.
In an All Party Parliamentary Group Debate called by long-term Reprieve supporter Alistair Carmichael (MP for Orkney and Shetlands), the global abolition of the death penalty received a resounding and encouraging show of support.
In an hour and a half discussion politicians representing all three major political parties showed a remarkable consensus of opinion – the speech by DUP Member for East Londonderry, Gregory Campbell, providing the dissenting opinion which allowed the gathering to be accurately described as a debate.
The seven members ...
Singer David Knoplfer and former member of the band Dire Straits has been so moved by the case of Akmal Shaikh that he is dedicating the Rabbit Song every night on his forth-coming tour to the mentally ill Briton facing execution in China.
Like David, Akmal has composed and recorded a song about rabbits. Knoplfer describes the concept behind Akmal’s song as more ‘ambitious and grandiose’ than his own, as Akmal wholeheartedly believed that his song would usher in world peace.
The lyrics are ‘Come little rabbit come and play, Come little rabbit let us sing’. Reprieve believes this ...
Given that China doles out 140 death sentences each week, it is not surprising that every now and then one makes the international news.
Indeed, the cases have been making more headlines than normal of late, with half a dozen rioters in Urumqi scheduled to die, and another six people condemned in a crackdown on crime syndicates.
However, perhaps the case that strikes closest to home is the imminent execution of the bipolar British citizen, Akmal Shaikh.
The case raises stark questions to which there are no immediate answers. How could a man be edging so close to the death ...
£40,000 per juvenile on death row in Iran: cheap at twice the price?
A human rights lawyer in Iran has launched an appeal to raise the necessary financial compensation to save the lives of four juvenile offenders facing execution in Iran. Under Iranian law (based on the Sharia code), families of the victim can pardon the convicted person in return for a sum of ‘blood money’.
The amounts of money asked for the victims’ family are no nominal figures. It is extremely rare that death row prisoners can be pardoned in this manner, because of the vast sums involved ...
On October 8, seven Sahrawi human rights defenders were arrested by Moroccan police at the Mohamed V Airport in Casablanca, Morocco and remain in an undisclosed location, according to the Association Sahraouie des Victimes des Violations Graves des Droits Humains (ASVDH). The human rights defenders were returning from a trip to Algeria where they visited Sahrawi refugee camps in the southwest of the country. The group was arrested immediately after their plane landed at the airport in Casablanca.
This arrest was overseen by several security agencies, led by the military intelligence service, called: DGED, according to the sources of the ...
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Zero DB