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On Thursday a U.S. federal appeals court in Boston struck down the provision of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that defines marriage as between one man and one woman, in a ruling that is a victory for both marriage equality and for human rights.

The court’s decision, which will not go into effect immediately, paves the way for the Supreme Court to consider the constitutionality of DOMA as early as next year.

“Congress’ denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples lawfully married in Massachusetts has not been adequately supported by any permissible federal interest,” wrote Judge Michael Boudin in the ruling.

Yet despite the unanimous court ruling and President Obama’s recent statement of support for marriage equality, the judges emphasized that their decision does not establish a national right to marriage between same-sex couples. The ruling applies to only to states such as Massachusetts, where same-sex couples can legally marry.

We at Amnesty International have argued all along that marriage equality is about human rights, not states’ rights. We hope that if this case reaches the Supreme Court, the nine justices will uphold the ruling and end the institutionalized discrimination that members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community experience at both the state and federal levels.

If you agree, please help us kick off Pride Month by urging Congress to restore the rights of all legally married same-sex couples to receive the benefits of marriage under federal law – and please tell everyone you know to do the same.

Afghan teacher Meher Afroza with her students at an Islamic school in Kabul. Under the Taliban, few girls attended school. Today 3 million girls go to school, and 20 percent of university of graduates are women. (Photo: ADEK BERRY/AFP/Getty Images)

World leaders, dignitaries and reporters will convene in Chicago next week for the 2012 NATO summit, and among the urgent questions they will consider is that of Afghanistan’s future after the 2014 withdrawal of U.S. and allied troops.

Yet Afghanistan’s female leaders were denied a place at the table for these critical discussions—despite Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s promise that the United States would not forsake the rights of Afghan women.

Indeed, recent developments signal that the significant but tenuous gains Afghan women have made over the past decade are mere bargaining chips in negotiations between U.S., Afghan and Taliban leaders seeking to expedite the transition to Afghan rule. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has proposed a program of “reintegration and reconciliation” with the Taliban that holds grim implications for women and girls, and in March he briefly endorsed an edict issued by a council of clerics that would allow husbands to beat their wives in certain situations and encourage gender segregation in workplaces and schools.

One of our ads in Chicago in time for the NATO summit

Thankfully, Afghan women refuse to be silenced. As the NATO summit begins next week, two prominent women leaders, Afifa Azim, executive director of the Afghan Women’s Network, and Manizha Naderi, executive director of Women for Afghan Women, will take part in Amnesty International’s May 20 Shadow Summit for Afghan Women, in Chicago. They will not only raise their voices in defense of women’s rights, they will argue that the full political, economic and social participation of women in Afghan society is vital to lasting peace.

Nargis Nehan, head of Equality for Peace and Democracy in Kabul, told NPR:

“We know how to communicate with the rest of the world, and we do have our own constituencies within Afghanistan—not only women, but also men.”

This generation of Afghan women leaders have finished school, graduated from university and won 27 percent of the seats in parliament in 2010. They have spoken to the international media and appealed to the U.N. Security Council to defend hard-won human rights advances—including a new law prohibiting violence against women,  early and forced marriage, and the deprivation of access to property, education or healthcare.

The question of history is a thorny one for the United States as it prepares its exit from a decade-long military intervention that has “quagmired” two administrations. But the Obama administration must not submit to political expediency and allow the Afghan government’s overtures to the Taliban and other insurgent groups to threaten women’s rights. At this critical moment, Afghan women desperately need us to stand with them to make sure that their rights are not swallowed up by the quicksand of transitional politics.

Sign our action: Women’s rights are non-negotiable in Afghanistan

Maria Vargas and Maira Garcia wait on line to get married at the City Clerk's office in Brooklyn, New York, on July 24, 2011, the first day gay couples were allowed to legally marry in New York state. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

President Obama’s courageous statement today in support of marriage equality was a boon to the human rights movement. The president’s announcement was especially heartening following the news yesterday that North Carolina passed a ban on marriage for same-sex couples and other partnership agreements and that Republican state legislators effectively blocked the Colorado Civil Union Act from going to a vote.

The president’s statement is also an important act of global human rights leadership that will no doubt lend hope to lesbian, gay bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in countries like Saudi Arabia, Uganda and Cameroon who face threats of execution, torture, imprisonment and persecution for their sexual orientation.

Yet we must remember that marriage equality for LGBT people is a human right, and as such should not be left for states to “decide the issue on their own,” as President Obama suggested today.

These policy debates have big real-life implications, ranging from additional logistical burdens that complicate the wedding-planning process to access to health care that could make the difference between life and death.

“My partner and I plan to get married next summer,” said Emilie Segal, a rancher in Laramie, Wyoming. Although the state recognizes civil unions people enter into in other states, Emilie and her partner will have to travel outside Wyoming to get married, and they cannot purchase a family health care policy. Furthermore, neither their civil union nor their impending marriage would be recognized by current federal law.

“It’s an issue of economic and social justice. A couple with resources can move to a gay-friendly state, but those without resources cannot. We shouldn’t have different rights and freedoms based on where we live or our economic status.”

It was moving to hear the president speak of how his daughters’ experiences had influenced his views on the issue—a sign that, in some parts of the country, at least, a sea change is underway. But LGBT people in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin—all states that have laws banning marriage for same-sex couples—should not be denied their human rights just because their state legislators have not had similar epiphanies.

Indeed, the rights of LGBT people on a range of issues, including marriage, hospital visitation, adoption, housing, and employment, vary wildly from state to state. Human rights are by nature inherent and universal—not regional—and we must continue our work to advance this understanding at all levels of government.

There are plenty of reasons to bemoan the state of U.S. journalism: shuttered foreign bureaus, the slow death by strangulation of investigative reporting, the incessant chatter of the punditocracy.

But let’s be real: although a passionate muckraker might not be able to make a decent living anymore, she can still pursue a story without fearing for her life.

Not so in many other parts of the world. If the way a society treats its journalists is a measure of how repressive it is, then 2011 has been banner year for autocrats and criminals.

The number of journalists killed increased from 2010 to 2011,and the number of those arrested nearly doubled. As protests spread across the Middle East and North Africa, so did crackdowns by security forces seeking to distort the first draft of history. Criminal violence in Latin America also took a heavy—and gruesome—toll on media freedom.  In only the first few months of 2012, 17 journalists have already been killed.

Here are 10 reasons why they need our support (all figures are for 2011, unless otherwise indicated, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders):

1. Number of journalists killed: 66

2. Top 5 deadliest countriesto be a journalist:

• Pakistan
• Mexico
• Philippines
• Brazil
• Russia

3. Journalists who were physically attacked or threatened: 1,959

4. Journalists who were kidnapped: 71

5. Journalists who were arrested: 1,044

6. Journalists who were jailed: 179

7. Bloggers who were physically attacked: 62

8. Bloggers/netizens who were arrested: 199

9. Journalists killed in Mexico alone over the past 10 years: 80

10. Journalists killed in the first few months of 2012: 17

As Amnesty International marks World Press Freedom Day on May 3rd, we honor those who have lost their lives or their freedom for speaking truth to power. And we invite you to stand with those who need our protection as they continue to fight on the front lines no matter the cost.

When Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner took the stage, Dorsey seized the opportunity to ask him: “Will you please tell President Obama to close Guantánamo?” Her question brought a raucous cheer from the audience, and several hundred people rose to their feet. When the audience finally sat down, Posner, the former executive director of Human Rights First, said, “I will and have and will continue to tell anyone I can find in the administration that we have to take our word seriously. The challenge is that we are confronted by the political reality in this country. We hear all the time from people on the other side but don’t hear enough from people telling us to close Guantánamo now.” Amnesty International Secretary-General Salil Shetty reminded us that in order for Posner and other like-minded officials within the Obama administration to have influence, they need the backing of grassroots pressure from activists like us.

That message—that real change must come from the bottom up—has been the central theme of this conference. Human rights defenders from Mexico and China to Zimbabwe testified as to how letters, faxes, emails and phone calls from Amnesty activists have saved their lives.

For Hamzah Latif, a 23-year-old student activist from the University of Michigan, Dearborn, this idea was driven home when Amnesty USA Executive Director Larry Cox—in a voice choked with emotion, given his lifetime of dedication to anti-death penalty work—ticked off the list of states that have abolished the death penalty, most recently Illinois.

“To know that it meant so much to everybody in the room—that’s when I realized this is where I need to be,” said Latif, who on Saturday received the Ladis Kristof fellowship, which will allow him to spend eight weeks training with an Amnesty field organizer in our western regional office. “The fact that we can all feel the emotion and the relief and sense of accomplishment for the same goal of abolishing the death penalty—this is how social movements work. You achieve smaller victories, and they create a domino effect.”

Although I spent most of the conference doing back-to-back interviews with human rights defenders, I heard speaker after speaker in the plenary and panel sessions—many of them lions in the global human rights community—echo the theme that real change can only be achieved by methodical, brick-by-brick organizing. They pointed out that when pundits spoke of Egypt’s “Facebook Revolution,” they overlooked years, sometimes decades, of groundwork laid by grassroots activists and civil society groups. They advised us that social media tools are only useful once activists have laid the foundation and created true buy-in.

Latif, who attended several sessions in which activists worked closely with staff to hone their nuts-and-bolts organizing skills, said he was eager to bring the energy of the conference, as well as new information and strategies back home to his Dearborn student group, which has been recognized as Student Group of the Midwest region for four years running. He assured me that activists are leaving the conference with both a clear sense of the importance of grassroots organizing and concrete instructions to guide them for the next several months.

Her brief address was followed by a riveting speech by Jenni Williams, co-founder of Women of Zimbabwe Arise, a group of women who have been jailed, tortured and persecuted for their non-violent demonstrations to demand social justice. Williams recalled one August night when police abducted seven WOZA members. “The phone calls started at 3 a.m. We heard our members had been arrested in suburbs, so we called Amnesty International. By 12 noon, all seven members were delivered back to their homes by the same police officers who had abducted them,” said Williams.

Earlier in the day, I spotted New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof listening to similarly harrowing tales at the well-attended panel discussion, “Muzzling the Watchdogs,” featuring Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho, Sri Lankan journalist J.S. Tissainayagam and Iranian American journalist Roxana Saberi. All three had been arrested, imprisoned and persecuted for their work to expose injustice, and each was the subject of Amnesty International urgent actions and/or international letter campaigns demanding their freedom.

Lydia Cacho, the woman Mother Jones called “Mexico’s most wanted journalist,” thanked Amnesty International members for throwing her a lifeline time and time again. From the beginning of her career in journalism, Cacho focused on women’s and children’s rights—”before they were called human rights.” She fought editors to get her stories published and even opened a shelter for women and children fleeing violence—a move that put her life in peril repeatedly. The danger of Cacho’s work intensified after she published The Demons of Eden, her 2004 book exposing a Cancun child pornography ring involving prominent businessmen with connections to high-level government officials. Since then, she has been hunted and persecuted by powerful forces within Mexico’s government and criminal underworld.

Cacho, who has survived kidnap, torture, multiple assassination attempts and judicial persecution, emphasized how grassroots human rights work reinforces our interdependence. “Every time you take a stand for anyone—and you have saved the lives of everyone at this table in some way—you are being a true defender of free expression,” Cacho told the large audience who attended the panel. “Your voice is so powerful. It not only makes your rights valuable, it makes our rights valuable.”

I had the immense privilege of interviewing Cacho earlier in the day, and her account of her 2005 kidnapping at the behest of the governor of the state of Puebla was chilling. Her response to my question of how she kept herself from unraveling during that ordeal of torture and threats is something I wish every activist here could have heard. “When you have looked into the eyes of an eight-year-old girl who tells you about being raped and tortured repeatedly on videotape—not to save herself but solely in order to save other girls from ever having to live through such unspeakable horror—there is nothing else you can do but continue the fight. She gave me strength.”

After spending nearly two full days interviewing human rights defenders I have admired for years, I have come away with this observation: These people who dedicate their lives to fight seemingly insurmountable odds share in common a luminous sense of purpose that comes from the surrender of the individual to the collective. This connection with a larger purpose has sustained them through unspeakable hardships most of us cannot imagine. And while most of us may not be cut out for the kind of danger or hardship they face on a daily basis, each and every one of us can offer an act of solidarity that may, at that critical moment, tip the scales in favor of life over death.

I spent the most of today interviewing people who reminded me in stark terms how grassroots activism saves lives. Thanks to the gracious efforts of documentary director Joe Gantz (of HBO’s The Defenders), who had volunteered to cover the conference with his incredible crew, we began the day by recording the testimonies of Jenni Williams and Magodonga Mahlangu, co-founders of Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA). They, along with the other founding members of WOZA, first took to the streets in 2003 to demand social justice—and as a result they have endured years of arbitrary detentions, police beatings, death threats, harassment and harsh conditions in jail.

During a recent arrest, they said, fellow WOZA members jumped into the police van in solidarity. Soon the van was packed with women.  “The police decided not to take us to the main jail, since the last time they took us there,” said Jenni, “the jail had received so many faxes, emails and phone calls from Amnesty activists.” They took the women to another jail outside of town but were again turned away by jailers who did not want the international attention. By the end of the day, they had been turned away from four jails because authorities did not want to be in Amnesty International’s spotlight.

After WOZA, we interviewed Bishop Reynolds Thomas and Vera Thomas, who have been fighting for twenty years to keep their son Reggie Clemons from being executed by the state of Missouri. They have been living the ultimate nightmare since Reggie, then a suburban teenage inventor with no criminal history, was arrested for the murder of two white women and sentenced to death in 1993. A presumption of guilt drove the case inexorably forward, a presumption that persisted despite strong claims of innocence, clear evidence of police brutality and prosecutorial misconduct that was described by four federal judges as “abusive and boorish.” Reynolds and Vera described feeling “alone in the wilderness” until community organizations got involved, and when Amnesty International published a report on the case last year it was like a “shot in the arm,” said Vera.

Steve Earle at right, with Magdaleno Rose-Avila, founder of Homies Unidos, UFW organizer and longtime Amnesty International activist.

Death penalty abolitionist Steve Earle came up to the taping room for a brief interview with longtime organizer and Amnesty activist Magdaleno Rose-Avila. Upon meeting Steve face-to-face, I had a serious fan-geek moment. Being a country music ignoramus, I never knew what Steve Earle looked like, although I knew social justice and death penalty abolition were strong themes in his music. When he walked in the door and we shook hands, he seemed so familiar to me, as if we had met many times before. The moment he opened his mouth to speak, I realized that he had appeared in HBO series The Wire as Walon, Bubs’ 12-step sponsor. As Steve spoke about his decades of death penalty abolition work, he wore Walon’s compassionate, thoughtful countenance like a comfortable old sweater.

My Steve Earle fascination only grew during the course of the evening. After our executive director, Larry Cox, delivered a rousing keynote address to a ballroom packed with more than a thousand activists, after moving performances by State Radio lead singer Chad Stokes and Jaguares’ lead singer Saul Hernandez, after a tear-jerker of a ceremony honoring Joan Baez for her lifetime of human rights work, Steve Earle came onstage.

Strumming gently on his guitar, he took his time telling the story of the first time he heard Joan Baez. It was 1969, and his father had taken him and his four siblings to the drive-in. But by the time he had rounded up the kids and arrived the movie was sold out. “He would have had a mutiny on his hands, so he decided to take us to see whatever was on the other screen, which turned out to be Woodstock.” Earle then proceeded to sing Joe Hill, the song Baez sang at the close of the first day of Woodstock in her now legendary performance, a song that changed Steve Earle’s life.

Joan herself came back onstage, and together they sang a couple of Steve wrote for her, including a gorgeous rendition of “Jerusalem.” After the performance, hundreds of activists lingered in the ballroom, reluctant to break the spell. Although they may all collapse with exhaustion tonight, tomorrow they, like us, will roll up their sleeves and get to work.