McAuley High students have been taking part in a “Pledge of Silence” as part of Amnesty International’s Freedom Challenge campaign with the theme “If I were a refugee, I’d want it for me: Double the Quota!” Students wore signs and collected donations while remaining silent for three hours during the first part of the day. Read more
The New Zealand Government has not ruled out the possibility transferring any boat people reaching it shores to detention centres in third countries. It has rejected of the recommendation made by the United Nations Human Rights Council to rule out the transfer of asylum seekers to detention centers in third countries. This is one of Read more
A second Melanesian country is considering the death penalty as a punishment for major crimes. Vanuatu’s Minister for Justice and Community Services, Silas Yatan, says the government may bring in the death penalty. This follows several recent killings, including the murder of two women. In May this year the Papua New Guinea Parliament adopted a Read more
PNG’s The National newspaper has reported that six women and a man, who were accused of sorcery, were tortured as Easter “sacrifices” in a village in the Southern Highlands on March 28. In Lae last Wednesday Komape Lap, 54, claimed that he fought with their torturers and escaped to the Morobean capital to reveal what happened. Although Read more
Amnesty International, a human rights organisation that used to be neutral on abortion, is now using the issue of maternal mortality to advocate for abortion. In a new report, ostensibly on medical care for maternal health, Amnesty International calls on governments to repeal abortion laws and the protection of conscientious objection for medical workers, according Read more
Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand is calling on the leaders of the four Pacific Island countries that have the death penalty to remove it from legislation. A spokesperson, Margaret Taylor, says although it’s not been practised in the Pacific in the past 30 years, the death penalty remains law in Tonga, Papua New Guinea, Nauru Read more
Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands have fared poorly in the Amnesty International report on human rights for 2010. The report claims Thousands of people in the Pacific are being denied social and economic opportunity Human rights defenders have been threatened, imprisoned and tortured, and gender based violence is still a major issue in the Read more
Amnesty International has marked its 50th Anniversary by criticising the Vatican for the first time on its handling of child protection. The 2011 report, “The State of the World’s Human Rights,” examines human rights in 157 countries, and Amnesty International criticises the Vatican for failing to honour its obligations under the United nations Charter on the Read more
“We are witnessing unprecedented levels of human rights change as protests for freedom and justice spread like wildfire across the Middle East and North Africa. While our Government has been supportive of these promising changes, its failure to live up to our own human rights obligations smacks of hypocrisy” says Patrick Holmes, Chief Executive Officer Read more