A heavily worked phrase used by the tourist industry is to describe a particular destination as a “country of contrast”. Sri Lanka is surely such a country - at one level a popular tourist destination, which according to the...

Today, Amnesty released a report on the criminalisation of homosexuality south of the Sahara: Making love a crime: Criminalisation of same-sex conduct in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our report documents an increase in homophobic attacks and...

This afternoon the House of Lords will debate the report published by the Bill of Rights Commission back in December . This debate is of course not the be-all and end-all of the UK’s human rights debate, but it reminds us of the ‘drum...

My eight year old son recently asked me “what’s an artisan baker?” (we were in Dulwich!) and I explained that an artisan is a skilled physical worker - that artisan bakers’ bread will be made by hand and baked in the shop, whereas the...

A feminist’s work is never done – especially a feminist on twitter. Every time I log on, my twitter feed is full of tweets from the fabulous Everyday Sexism Project which collates stories of sexism. The stories outrage rather than...

Of William Shakespeare, it is often said that his works are as relevant today as when he originally penned them. I suspect this will be the same for the legendary punk poet John Cooper Clarke , the Bard of Salford, after all some of...

Do you remember where you were on September 11, 2001? It’s one of those days that most people remember – most people with access to TV and the internet that is – because the events of that day were so shocking. I was working in a call...

Type ‘Mexico’ into Google and the vast majority of the links presented to you will relate to tourism (unless that’s just a result of scarily accurate user profiling…yes Google, I have just got back from a holiday and yes, Google, I do...