Have you got a minute? Or 67 minutes to be precise? Put them to good use because today is a special day. It is Nelson Mandela International Day, now in the official UN calendar. It marks his birthday – and makes a call to action to...

As South Sudan marks its third birthday as an independent state, Amnesty is here on 'mission', documenting human rights abuses committed by government and opposition forces in a growing conflict. I want to share an uplifting "Amnesty...

During a crisis or disaster, YouTube is widely used to share footage—including a host of videos that are old or, in some cases, staged or faked. An enormous challenge for human rights workers, journalists or first responders alike is...

On 11 June, Paraguay’s President Cartes signed into law an Expropriation Bill that returns more than 55 square miles of traditional land to the Sawhoyamaxa people – an area about the size of Cardiff. It’s hopefully the end of a...

Just the news I’d been hoping for! Agnes Uwimana Nkusi was released three weeks earlier than expected on 18 June. In her working life, she was the editor of the tabloid newspaper Umurabyo but I was thinking joyfully about her personal...

In August 2012, Claudia was woken at 3:00 in the morning when soldiers burst into her home in Veracruz City, Mexico. They tied her hands and blindfolded her. They took her to the local naval base where they tortured her: they subjected...

Twitter is everywhere these days and everyone seems to be tweeting - compressing our lives into short updates to share with the world. So what could be more ‘now’ than a twitter trial? I don’t mean trial by twitter of course, but...

In Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline , the critic and academic miriam cooke (sic) puts the country’s long history of detaining political dissidents into stark perspective. She tells Daniel Gorman: ‘It became clear to me...

I am Nabeel Rajab, President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) and Director of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR). I have just been released from prison after serving a two-year sentence for my peaceful and legitimate...

'I’ve got a trained eye… he is not just a photographer' Paranoia, fear of free speech and the ‘trained eye’ of the authorities are ensuring that public space in Russia is shrinking. This is how public protest works in Russia now. This...

‘We’re sending a message of hope’ Junior Mayema was explaining to me why he’d taken the bold step of appearing in From the Same Soil , a new film that beautifully documents the experiences of three refugees in Cape Town. All three fled...

The Indian elections are the largest voting exercise the world has ever seen. More than 550 million Indian voters have gone to the polls to elect a new government in the world’s largest democracy. The elections have been a potpourri of...

Paraguay’s Senate have voted to support an Expropriation Bill that could prove a landmark in the struggle of the country’s indigenous communities to gain recognition of their rights to their ancestral lands. Amnesty International has...

I was in court on Monday to hear first-hand the ludicrous decision to continue the trial of 29 young women and men in what has been coined the ‘Twitter trial’. The prosecution – based solely on tweets about the Gezi Park protests last...

Ahead of the Indonesian elections this month we joined TAPOL, Survival International and Down to Earth outside the Indonesian Embassy to call for the immediate and unconditional release of prisoners of conscience imprisoned solely for...

Early last Saturday morning (5 April 2014), the streets of Rio de Janeiro’s Maré complex of favelas (slums) woke up to a military occupation by around 2,700 federal Army troops. They took over from a military police contingent that had...

The only reason I’m alive is because my attackers ran out of bullets. I remember that evening – 17 December 2013 – very clearly. The look of surprise on the gunman’s face after he hunched down on one knee, took aim at me one last time...

The Twitter shutdown started at about 11pm on Thursday night. My telephone started to ring: had I heard that Twitter was blocked? There was confusion about who could access Twitter, who couldn’t, and why. And would the government...

Late yesterday, Glenn Ford - now 64 years old - walked out of the Louisiana’s infamous Angola prison after spending nearly three decades behind bars for a crime he’s always claimed he never committed. He was sentenced to death in 1984...

Anthony Holden is a writer, broadcaster and critic, and was the US Editor for the Observer and Assistant Editor for The TImes. He's written many biographies including one on Tchaikovsky, and watched the Sochi 2014 opening ceremony to...