The only way to answer charges of a political cover-up is to hand this case over to the director of public prosecutions Next week, the foreign secretary will present the Foreign Office's annual report on human rights violations around the world. For anyone who cares about Britain and human rights, it will feel difficult to ask about anything except the British government's own entangleme...

John Pilger was excellent in the Guardian yesterday… “Today, a surreal event will take place in London. The Foreign Office is holding an open day “to highlight the importance of human rights in our work as part of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. There will be various “stalls” and “panel discussions”,

Every country in the UN has its human rights record examined every four years, and the UK will be reviewed again in 2012. However, during the last review in 2008 only 19 civil society organisations sent submissions to the Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). This seems incredibly low to me.

The King of Bahrain has been reported to the United Nations Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders following threats he made to human rights defenders in Bahrain. Lord Eric Avebury, Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs spokeperson and vice-chair of the UK Parliamentary Human Rights Group, has written to the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders, Ms Hina Jilani, about the threats made against p...

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights has today published a report on the prospect of a UK bill of rights. Committee chairman Andrew Dismore argues that the report's recommendations offer a solution to the thorny question of how such bills should deal with social and economic rights. The Human Rights Act is a parliamentary model of human rights protection. ...

The Joint Committee on Human Rights of the House of Lords and the House of Commons has published a report called ’A Bill of Rights for the UK? Twenty-ninth Report of Session 2007–08’ (HL Paper 165-I, HC 150-I; published 10 August 2008): The report outlines a future UK Bill of Rights. *** Browsing the report, you would have to be a genius to detect that the United Kingdom is a mem...

This site provides free access to the full text of a 144 page report by the Global Migration Group, a multi-agency group whose members include UN organisations and representatives from other international bodies interested in safeguarding the rights of migrants, which was published in October 2008. ISBN: 978-0-89714-900-6. The report considers the legal framework protecting the human rights of mig...

One of the things that is most execrable about Canada's so-called human rights commissions is that they trade on the words "human rights". And, like counterfeit money devaluing real money, their counterfeit human rights, like the "human right" not to be offended, devalue the term that once was reserved for real rights like freedom of religion, the equality of men and women before the law...

I feel that many will not agree that an international agreement written with the express purpose of protecting human rights could possible be responsible for the removal of rights, how could it be that this is possible. Well what exactly are basic human rights; traditionally they are controls on those who ...

I did a double take when I read about this, but I shouldn't have been surprised. Here's a bit from the Obama State Department's first report to the UN Human Rights Council, sent for the approval of beacons of human rights like Libya, Saudi Arabia,and Pakistan: In its first-ever report to the U.N. Human Rights Council on conditions in the United States, the State Department said Mond...