Human rights group Amnesty International said in a report published Tuesday that Israeli restrictions prevented Palestinians from receiving enough water in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The report said Israel’s daily water consumption per capita was four times higher than that in the Palestinian territories. (full article…)

Amnesty International has condemned the execution of Behnoud Shojaee, a 21-year-old Iranian, at Tehran’s Evin Prison at dawn on Sunday, for a murder he was accused of having committed when he was 17. (full article…)

B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Haaretz and the international media – to Israelis, these have all fallen into the trash bin of the mendacious Palestinians. In the best case, they have become trapped in their own pure-hearted naivete, and in the worst, into collaborating with efforts to besmirch Israel and bolster prejudices against it. Like the Serbs of yore, we Israelis continue thinking it’s the world that is wrong, and only we who are right. (full article…)

US President Barack Obama met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo on Thursday as he continued his trip to the Middle East.

Amnesty International has documented a series of human rights violations in Egypt. It is particularly concerned about the extension of the state of emergency and the planned new anti-terrorism law, which seeks to grant security forces emergency-style powers.

Counter terrorism continues to be used to justify human rights violations, such as administrative detention lasting in hundreds of cases for more than a decade, prolonged incommunicado and secret detentions, torture an unfair trials before emergency and military courts.

US involvement in these practices has extended to “renditions” by US intelligence services to Egypt, making it a key transit and destination country for the interrogation or indefinite detention and torture of terror suspects. (more…)

An “horrific” public execution and crucifixion of a man in Saudi Arabia has been condemned by Amnesty International. Ahmed bin ‘Adhaib bin ‘Askar al-shamlani al-’Anzi was beheaded and his body crucified in a public place in Riyadh on Friday. (more…)

“The release of CIA memos on interrogation methods by the US department of justice appears to have offered a get-out-of-jail-free card to people involved in torture,” Amnesty International said. “Torture is never acceptable and those who conduct it should not escape justice.” (more…)

If there is a single act that characterizes the plight of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation, it is waiting: waiting in lines to pass through the hundreds of checkpoints scattered across the West Bank, waiting for Israel to issue an identification card, waiting for permission to travel to the next village or out of the country, waiting for loved ones languishing in Israeli prisons to be released — waiting for peace, waiting for justice.

And for nearly two months, I found myself sharing the experience of waiting — for Israel to allow me into Gaza.

Last year, I spent an extended period of time in Gaza working with the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), helping them to document human rights abuses in the occupied territories. But the abuses I documented then now seem tame in comparison to the recent heights of atrocity Gaza has endured.
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In 2008, at least 2,390 people were known to have been executed in 25 countries and at least 8,864 people were sentenced to death in 52 countries around the world. As in previous years, the five countries with the highest number of executions in 2008 were China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United States of America (Fig. 1). Together these five countries carried out 93 per cent of all executions carried out in 2008. These countries provide the greatest challenge towards global abolition of the death penalty. (more…)

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who visited the Gaza Strip last week, called for a “full investigation,” Amnesty International is accusing Israel of “war crimes,” and Louis Michel, the EU’s commissioner for aid to developing countries, says: “It is evident that Israel does not respect international humanitarian law.” (more…)

“Such extensive use of this weapon in Gaza’s densely populated residential neighbourhoods is inherently indiscriminate,” Donatella Rovera, a Middle East researcher with Amnesty International, said in a statement. “Its repeated use in this manner, despite evidence of its indiscriminate effects and its toll on civilians, is a war crime,” she said. (more…)

Resolution 1860 continues the trend recently favored by the mainstream international human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to equate the clearly disproportionate suffering of the occupied and the occupiers, the victims and the perpetrators of war crimes. For instance, the resolution emphasizes that “the Palestinian and Israeli civilian populations must be protected,” as though Palestinian civilians and Israeli civilians have somehow been under the equivalent threat during this war. The figure of over 4,000 dead and wounded in Gaza compared to a dozen Israelis—mostly soldiers—makes this equivalence morally irresponsible to say the least. (more…)

The weeds are already growing rampant at the notorious “Camp X-Ray,” and President-elect Barack Obama plans to shut down the entire detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Now the Pentagon is inviting journalists to tour the camp one last time.

One would imagine a trip to the world’s best-known and most notorious prison could be an unpleasant experience. Everyone knows the horror stories from Guantanamo: how the prisoners were chained on the flight to Cuba, and how they arrived at the camp half-frozen, their eyes blindfolded and completely disoriented. They didn’t know where they were at the time, and many of them are still there today, in the prison where the United States keeps its terror suspects.

A special group recently embarked on a trip to Guantanamo that would prove to be significantly more comfortable. The group met at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in the early morning hours, where a North American Airlines charter flight was already waiting. The destination, with the airport code NBW, well removed from the rule of US constitutional law, is known simply as GTMO in military slang. The boarding pass was first of many amusing souvenirs of the trip. (more…)

As anti-government demonstrations continue in Greece for the fourth day running, Amnesty International calls for a clear commitment by the authorities to end the unlawful and disproportionate use of force by police. (more…)

I must say that these so-called “anarchists” are for the most part nothing of the sort. Most of them are hooligans without coherent political objectives beyond arbitrary acts of vandalism. So, as much as the Greek police force is a generally corrupt and abhorrent institution, the riots have no potential (or clear aspirations) to change anything as far as I can tell. Without direction, the rioting is simply pointless destruction.

Like all wars, the dark, untold stories of the Iraqi conflict drain from its shattered landscape like the filthy waters of the Tigris. And still the revelations come.

The Independent has learnt that secret executions are being carried out in the prisons run by Nouri al-Maliki’s “democratic” government.

The hangings are carried out regularly – from a wooden gallows in a small, cramped cell – in Saddam Hussein’s old intelligence headquarters at Kazimiyah. There is no public record of these killings in what is now called Baghdad’s “high-security detention facility” but most of the victims – there have been hundreds since America introduced “democracy” to Iraq – are said to be insurgents, given the same summary justice they mete out to their own captives.

The secrets of Iraq’s death chambers lie mostly hidden from foreign eyes but a few brave Western souls have come forward to tell of this prison horror. The accounts provide only a glimpse into the Iraqi story, at times tantalisingly cut short, at others gloomily predictable. Those who tell it are as depressed as they are filled with hopelessness.

“Most of the executions are of supposed insurgents of one kind or another,” a Westerner who has seen the execution chamber at Kazimiyah told me. “But hanging isn’t easy.” As always, the devil is in the detail. (more…)