19th September 2011 Geneva, Switzerland
It’s been a tiring week. The Council has been busy enough but it hasn’t helped that our 6-month old seems to have lost the knack of sleeping at night for more than about 30 minutes at a time. My own dad, over from the UK, sees this as his own private revenge for the years […]
Read more on Protesting: Peacefully, noisily and a little too much | Reply
12th September 2011 Geneva, Switzerland
I’ve never liked this time of year. It always invokes my childhood dread of going back to school without having done any of my homework for the summer holidays. Each year I promised myself I’d change and be more organised the following summer. But I never was. On Monday the Human Rights Council begins its […]
12th August 2011
British Sea Power are on stage with some fir trees – not sure where they fit in, but that’s probably my ignorance. Earlier on we visited the Head of the new Tom Lantos Institute in Budapest (he was a Holocaust survivor and US Congressman and the Institute was launched by his family a few weeks […]
5th July 2011 Geneva, Switzerland
The Human Rights Council broke new ground this week and I ended up rather in the thick of it. On Tuesday, as part of the UK’s decision to do everything it can to hold the Gaddafi regime to account, the team in Geneva went after the 16 signatures needed from Human Rights Council members to […]
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 […]
Read more on Guest blogger: The other side of Roma integration | Reply