Fighting to stay afloat, Cambodia, 12-14 March 2006

We came to the floating village of Peak Kantel by boat at the very end of the dry season. Ben Sok, the village chief, whose 78 years made him older than most Cambodians, welcomed us in his boat house. He offered grilled eel and tea and a long story about his village’s struggle to be… […]

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Shocked by Saudi executions, February 2007

I was stunned one morning last February when I opened the press and read that three Sri Lankan men, with whom I had been in contact and on whose behalf I had been working, had been executed several hours earlier in Saudi Arabia. It was upsetting and confusing. I was greatly distressed by such a […]

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Racing for an Arms Trade Treaty, New York, October 2006

It was a bright morning in Manhattan on the small patch of sidewalk they call Ralph Bunch Park, opposite the UN building. This was the day the First Committee of the UN General Assembly was going to consider a resolution on the international Arms Trade Treaty (ATT).
Our objective was extremely ambitious: out of 192 governments […]

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Delivering the Control Arms petition, New York, June 2006

In June, at last came the chance to hand over our Control Arms ‘Million Faces’ petition to Kofi Annan, the then UN Secretary General. It had been collected thanks to work by arms control activists around the world over the last three years. The biggest photo petition ever!
Early in the morning, before UN business got […]

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Going orange for Guantánamo, 16 Dec 2006

It was a bright, cold December morning and I was cycling through the streets of London in an orange jumpsuit. Not something I’d normally do, but I had a good reason. I was on my way to an AI demonstration at Downing Street - organised to mark the beginning of a month of activism calling […]

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Campaigning for the right to health, Peru, July 2006

I wasn’t sure what to expect when we launched a campaign for the right to maternal and infant health care at a national health conference in Peru in July 2006. This was the first time I had launched a campaign on the right to health for the most vulnerable.

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Reassuring the survivors in Chad, November 2006

This is an extract from the blog by Amnesty International’s delegation who went on mission to Chad in November 2006:
The attack left 40 dead –shot or burned to death including three babies and one crippled elderly man. Seven women were abducted during the course of that attack and held for several hours during which time […]

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