23rd January 2012 London, UK
This week is a big week for the UK in Strasbourg. We are 11 weeks into our 6 month Chairmanship of the Council of Europe. We are pressing ahead with our wide-ranging Chairmanship priorities, in particular our ambitious package of reforms for the European Court of Human Rights (the Court). The Council of Europe was […]
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11th January 2012 Bucharest, Romania
There are many Brits doing great things in Romania, like David Savage and Ben Wells from the Nightingales Children’s Project, a charity based in Cernavoda, 200kms from Bucharest. David came to Romania in 1993 to work in a local orphanage, and soon realised that there was a large number of children living in the orphanage […]
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11th January 2012
People sometimes wonder what an embassy does; and what international co-operation really means. By way of an interesting concrete example, the British Embassy organised a visit late last year by experts from the UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre to meet their Ukrainian counterparts. The CEOP experts also met Ukrainian and international NGOs […]
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6th December 2011 Geneva, Switzerland
You wouldn’t expect an international meeting on torture prevention to be a happy occasion but November’s global forum on the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture had the feel of a large and joyous family gathering. Given that the Optional Protocol is still in its youth, the atmosphere was more one of Barmitzvah than […]
1st December 2011
3 December is the International Day of People with Disability. I celebrated it a few days in advance with a reception at the Residence for Romania’s paralympic athletes who will be going to London next year. Romania is sending its biggest ever team to the Paralympic Games in London. Whereas in Beijing there were only […]