Tag Archives: USA

10 Years After Katrina, Many New Orleans Residents Permanently Displaced

September 1, 2015 at 3:13 PM
A stairway is seen still standing 10 years after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the house on August 28, 2015 in Waveland, Mississippi. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

A stairway is seen still standing 10 years after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the house on August 28, 2015 in Waveland, Mississippi. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

In marking the 10 years since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina reached the Gulf shores, it is the actions of government authorities since the storm that have been nearly as catastrophic for residents of the Gulf Coast. As highlighted by the ongoing work of the local communities through #GulfSouthRising, the issues documented in Amnesty International’s 2005 report, Un-Natural Disaster: Human rights in the Gulf Coast still profoundly impact Gulf Coast residents’ right to return.   SEE THE REST OF THIS POST

Posted in USA

Chelsea Manning: “Why Speaking Out Is Worth the Risk”

August 21, 2015 at 2:10 PM

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Chelsea Manning is serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking classified US government documents to the website WikiLeaks. From her prison cell in Kansas, Chelsea tells us why speaking out against injustice can be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Join Amnesty International and tell President Barack Obama to #FreeManning NOW!

Why did you decide to leak documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

These documents were important because they relate to two connected counter-insurgency conflicts in real-time from the ground. Humanity has never had this complete and detailed a record of what modern warfare actually looks like. Once you realize that the co-ordinates represent a real place where people live; that the dates happened in our recent history; that the numbers are actually human lives – with all the love, hope, dreams, hatred, fear, and nightmares that come with them – then it’s difficult to ever forget how important these documents are. SEE THE REST OF THIS POST

Don’t Let Tariq Ba Odah Die At Guantanamo

August 18, 2015 at 8:21 PM
(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

By Rob Freer, US Researcher at Amnesty International

Almost 5,000 days after transferring Tariq Ali Abdullah Ahmed Ba Odah to the US detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the US authorities have turned the screw on him yet tighter. This is despite knowing that they risk inserting a nail in his coffin by so doing. The health of this Yemeni national is in a parlous state. He has been on hunger strike since 2007 in protest at his indefinite detention without charge or trial. His body weight is currently at around 56 per cent of its ideal and has been for several months. In a brief filed in federal court in June 2015, his lawyers assert that “he is visibly suffering from the devastating effects of severe malnutrition and is at serious risk of permanent and neurological impairment and death.” The brief seeks a judicial order requiring the government to “take every necessary and appropriate step to facilitate his immediate release from Guantánamo.” SEE THE REST OF THIS POST

Dispatch from Ferguson: One Year Later and The Work Ahead

August 14, 2015 at 4:21 PM

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As we tick past the one-year anniversary of Mike Brown’s death, we find ourselves in the midst of yet another state of emergency in St. Louis, protestors again lining the streets of West Florissant Avenue, and seemingly a new name added every day to the list of people -mostly people of color- killed at the hands of police.

I’m seeing this all from a room in St. Louis, and I can’t help but wonder: Why am I here? Has progress been made or is history repeating itself? SEE THE REST OF THIS POST

From US to Brazil: Say Their Names

August 12, 2015 at 5:06 PM
Demonstrators march through the Manguinhos favela to protest against police killings of blacks on August 22, 2014 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Every year, Brazil's police are responsible for around 2,000 deaths, one of the highest rates in the world. Many of the deaths in Rio involve blacks killed in favelas, also known as slums. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Demonstrators march through the Manguinhos favela to protest against police killings of blacks on August 22, 2014 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Every year, Brazil’s police are responsible for around 2,000 deaths, one of the highest rates in the world. Many of the deaths in Rio involve blacks killed in favelas, also known as slums. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

By Steven W. Hawkins, executive director of Amnesty International USA, and Atila Roque, executive director of Amnesty International Brazil

Here in the United States, we know the names. Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Tamir Rice. Walter Scott. Freddie Gray. Rekia Boyd. All African Americans killed by police.

But we don’t know the names of Eduardo de Jesus Ferreira — 10 years old and shot by police who mistook a phone for a gun. Or Alan de Souza Lima — who at 15 was filming his friends laughing and joking and unwittingly captured his own death seconds later in a hail of bullets. Or Claudia da Silva Ferreira, a 38-year-old mother who was wounded in a police shootout, tossed out of the unsecured back door of a police vehicle and fatally dragged 1,000 feet.

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The U.S. Has 1 Day Left to Answer for This Man’s American Torture Story — in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights

July 22, 2015 at 3:27 PM

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By Kimie Matsuo

Time is running out on another opportunity for the United States to do the right thing by Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, who is allegedly languishing in solitary confinement at Guantánamo after suffering torture and ill-treatment in CIA secret detention. SEE THE REST OF THIS POST

USA: It’s Time for Real Criminal Justice Reform

July 20, 2015 at 11:44 PM
US President Barack Obama speaks as he tours the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in El Reno, Oklahoma, July 16, 2015. Obama is the first sitting US President to visit a federal prison, in a push to reform one of the most expensive and crowded prison systems in the world. (Photo credit:SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

US President Barack Obama speaks as he tours the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in El Reno, Oklahoma, July 16, 2015. Obama is the first sitting US President to visit a federal prison, in a push to reform one of the most expensive and crowded prison systems in the world. (Photo credit:SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

This article originally appeared on The Huffington Post

Last week, President Obama put a much-needed spotlight on the vicious cycle of mass incarceration. In the past three decades, the prison population in the U.S. has ballooned due to a number of factors that have created a system rife with discrimination and other abuses. And the burden falls disproportionately on low-income people and people of color.

The President made a historic visit on July 16 to a federal prison — the first sitting president to do so. His visit spotlighted the massive overcrowding problem — he was shown one 9-by-10-foot cell that sometimes holds three prisoners — that is the result of a broken criminal justice system.

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“The America I Believe In”: 3 Hopes for this July 4th

July 3, 2015 at 9:38 AM

Amnesty International posterI see this poster every day in the main hallway of our Amnesty International office: it depicts the Statue of Liberty and reads: “The America I believe in leads the world on human rights.”

It’s aspirational. And in too many ways, it’s proven the opposite of true. The United States is leading the world in perversely innovative human rights abuses, such as unlawful drone strikes and mass surveillance tapping into the Internet’s backbone.

And when it’s the US rather than another country committing human right abuses, there are additional consequences: the U.S. sets dangerous precedents for other nations to follow, while providing abusive regimes a ready-made excuse to flout their human rights obligations.

Still, I think there’s hope. July 4th is a celebration not just of U.S. nationhood, but of the country’s ideals and the best parts of its history. It’s those that I think of, when I hope for this:

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From Albert Woodfox to Kalief Browder: The Devastation of Solitary Confinement

July 2, 2015 at 4:12 PM
A cell in the Closed Cell Restricted (isolation) unit in Angola prison in Louisiana. (Credit: Louisiana State Archives)

A cell in the isolation unit in Angola prison in Louisiana. (Credit: Louisiana State Archives)

The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has specifically condemned Woodfox’s treatment as torture and called on the United States to eliminate the use of prolonged isolation. Albert’s case has returned to the spotlight in the past month because he is no longer a convicted man – a federal judge ordered his unconditional release in early June, two years after his conviction had been overturned for a third time (a last-minute appeal kept him behind bars).

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