24th June 2011 Geneva, Switzerland
Life is full of unwritten rules which help determine the limits of acceptable behaviour and which help you avoid making embarrassing and sometimes costly mistakes. The peculiar world of the Human Rights Council is no exception. No one tells you these little bits of conventional wisdom like, don’t deliver the first 2 minutes of your […]
20th June 2011
Some weeks ago I blogged about the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. This week (11-19 June) the Budapest Pride Festival is taking place, with the annual March due tomorrow. The police have pledged that the March will be secure and safe (though there has been an announcement about a possible far right counter-demonstration in […]
6th June 2011 Geneva, Switzerland
There’ve been some major changes since I last updated my blog. I’ll start with the most important, which is that I became a dad for the first time in early March. Funnily enough, my son Ben was born on the Human Rights Council’s annual day on the rights of the child which has reinforced an […]
2nd June 2011 Bucharest, Romania
Guest blogger: Irina Niţă, Director, ACCEPT Association Several years ago I overheard someone talking during a coffee break, at a NGOs conference: ‘ACCEPT makes so much fuss, for what? For the less than 50 gay people who live in Romania!?’ Today there are still journalists who write about ‘hundreds of homosexuals’ living in Romania. Psychologists […]
5th April 2011
As we note on our website, “Human Rights and Democracy: The 2010 FCO Report” was publicly launched by the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, in London on 31 March, alongside guest speakers Dr Agnes Callamard from the freedom of expression NGO Article 19, and the Iranian Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari. The report is available online at www.fco.gov.uk/hrdreport. For […]
28th March 2011 Bucharest, Romania
Every now and then something happens and the debate about integration of the Roma minority in Romania is reignited. In 2010 it was the repatriation of several hundred Romanian Roma from France. Last year the attention of media, civil society, other Member States and the European Commission has turned once more to this subject. So […]
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28th March 2011 Bucharest, Romania
The Little People Association has been working for the past decade with children who are battling cancer in Romania. The work initially started in one oncology centre in the North of Romania. Our daily activities provided an escape from the treatment procedures that a young child or teenager had to endure – board games, movie […]
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21st March 2011
59 years in jail, reduced to 35 years, for satire? It sounds like a bad joke. But this is the sentence handed down by the regime in Burma in 2008 to popular comedian Maung Thura, better known as Zarganar. And his case is a good example of why the international community continues to call on […]
8th March 2011 Geneva, Switzerland
Guest blog by Jacqui Hunt, Equality Now This session of the Human Rights Council sees the appointment of a new mechanism to promote women’s rights – a working group to focus on discrimination against women in law and practice. A significant milestone in respect of women’s rights of which the Human Rights Council should be […]
24th January 2011
Which is the country which is most free in the CIS? Can we say confidently that it is Ukraine? Or how about a new pretender to that crown – Moldova? There are many ways to measure freedom, some more objective than others. As I noted in a recent blog on human rights, one can often […]