Well-being is apparently dangerous in Turkey. When my friend Ozlem Dalkiran attended a training workshop on holistic security she was asked to draw something which represented what she was worried about. It is the sort of well meaning flipchart & post-it note psycho-babble which messes with my stress levels, but Ozlem gamely drew a map of Turkey with icons representing people fleeing war in Iraq & Syria in the East and friends in prison in Istanbul.
Estos son tiempos difíciles para los derechos humanos, pero los pesimistas no deben subestimar lo resilientes y poderosos que pueden ser los defensores de derechos humanos.
El 19 de junio, el New York Times publicó un detallado reportaje sobre el uso, por parte del gobierno mexicano, de software espía por valor de 80 millones de dólares contra abogados/as, periodistas y defensores/as de derechos humanos.
In September 2016, the man who had ruled Uzbekistan for 27 years died. As often happens when authoritarians pass on, Islam Karimov’s death after so many years in power left questions as to who would fill the vacuum, and whether the country’s new ruler would ease the repressive practices of the past regime. When Shvakat Mirziyoyev quickly emerged as the successor to Karimov, many in the international community believed that there would be some form of liberalisation.
On 7 March, Wikileaks published a trove of documents showing the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) capabilities to remotely hack devices running Android, iOS, Windows, Mac OS X and others. These leaks demonstrate how the CIA and, very likely, other intelligence services, are able to exploit software and operating systems’ vulnerabilities.
My friend Dr Mudawi Ibrahim Adam is currently chained by hands and feet to a wall in Kober Prison in Khartoum. He has been badly beaten. He started a hunger strike on Sunday in protest at his detention without access to a lawyer since the 7th of December 2016. He was allowed a brief visit from his brothers 10 days ago, but has otherwise been denied access also to his family.
Brutal repression received a lot of encouragement.
Killers and torturers enjoyed impunity.
The commitment to human rights of supposedly democratic political leaders remained weak, an optional extra, a nice thing to do if it did not interfere with other interests.
Putin and Xi Jinping led an idealogical assault on the very idea of human rights.
El deterioro de la democracia y el Estado de derecho en Nicaragua es cada vez más preocupante y tiene importantes consecuencias para defensores y defensoras de derechos humanos y la sociedad Nicaragüense en general. A medida que la familia Presidencial ha consolidado su control sobre la Asamblea Nacional, el Ejército, la Policía y los medios de comunicación, hemos presenciado una disminución constante del espacio para la sociedad civil.
My friend Dr Mudawi Ibrahim Adam is in detention again in Khartoum. He was taken by the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) from the University of Khartoum on 7th December and is being held without access to his lawyer or his family. He has previously been detained on several occasions, for over a month in 2010 and earlier for a total of 18 months in several spells during 2003-2005.
