RightsBase

human rights news & views

British spies complicit in torture of rendition victims: secret document

Britain's spy agencies MI5 and MI6 were authorised to participate in interrogations on foreign soil and permit torture in 'proportion' to the presumed importance of the information sought. The Blair government's secret policy was in use for nearly a decade, reports the Guardian, until it was revoked by the coalition government last year. This, in […]

Australia violating the right to liberty: UN

The highest international authority on civil and political rights has found Australia is violating the rights of a Bangladeshi asylum seeker detained for nearly seven-and-a-half years. Danyal Shafiq, 34, was raised in an orphanage in Bangladesh. Fearing torture, harsh imprisonment or death at the hands of either Bangladeshi police or the Sharbahara Party, he fled […]

‘The most violent place in Asia’

Extra-judicial killings are a major source of human rights violation in Asia, according to the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), and, of eleven countries reviewed in the Commission’s 2006 Report on human rights in the region, Sri Lanka is the worst. On this second anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami, reconstruction in the north-east of […]