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The Blair government's secret policy was in use for nearly a decade, reports the Guardian, until it was revoked by the coalition government last year.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 spite of [...]
The US is denying the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture unfettered access to detainee Bradley Manning.
Private first class Manning was arrested in May 2010 on suspicion of leaking incriminating military documents to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. He remains in US custody awaiting court marshall.
The conditions of his detention have been widely criticised as [...]
A London think-tank argues that international law requires “those who use or authorise the use of drone strikes to record and announce who has been killed and injured in each attack."
Drones — known in military jargon as ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’ or UAVs — are miniature aircraft with no human crew on board. They are [...]
Was the lethal shooting of Osama Bin Laden on 2 May legal? Not was it legal under US or Pakistani law, but was it legal under international human rights law? Were his and others' human rights violated? Does it really matter?
For answers to these questions I refer readers to this top-notch analysis by [...]
A spokesman for US Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has been forced to resign after criticising the way US serviceman Bradley Manning (pictured right & below) is being treated while in pre-trial detention.
Describing Manning's conditions as "mistreatment," then-assistant secretary of state for public affairs, Philip 'P.J.' Crowley, said:
"What is being done to Bradley Manning [...]
Two NATO helicopter gunships killed nine unarmed boys in Afghanistan on 1 March. The boys, aged between 9 and 15, were collecting firewood near their home in the north-eastern province of Kunar.
Some of them were dismembered in the attack.
The sole survivor, an 11-year-old boy named Hemad, was injured by shrapnel. He told the New [...]
On 29 January 2003, Mary Kelly, a 50 year-old Irish nurse, climbed a fence in broad daylight at Shannon airport in the west of the Republic of Ireland and 'disarmed' a US Navy warplane with an axe.
"Fully aware of the consequences" — up to 10 years' imprisonment — the mother-of-four 'smashed' the [...]
Shannonwatch is a non-governmental organisation established to monitor the use of an Irish civilian airport by foreign military.
These plane-spotting peace and human rights activists conduct "continuous monitoring of all military flights and rendition-linked flights in and out of Shannon [Airport] and through Irish airspace," many of them occurring in the dead of night.
[...]
Tonight's post will be brief — just a quote — in honour of the victims of the Christchurch earthquake (pictured) and all who suffered in the recent floods and fires in Australia. These all may have been caused by climate change.
"All across the world, in every kind of environment and region known to man [...]
In his "powerful, personal statement on radical confrontation with contemporary society," US Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan wrote in 1971:
“We have assumed the name of peacemakers, but we have been, by and large, unwilling to pay any significant price. And because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and [...]
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