#Rights

This makes me ill. If you ever needed even more argument that waterboarding is indeed torture of the most insidious and despicable kind (precisely because some people don’t think it is torture and condoned it), go spelunking through these Salon memorandums on what was done to Guantanamo detainees.

Waterboarding for dummies - Torture - Salon.com

… what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding ‘session.’ Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to ‘dam the runoff’ and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second ‘applications’ of liquid in each two-hour session - and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session - a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding - the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

Missed this video when it was making the rounds a while back. Interesting way of viewing the history of human rights, but I think its initial question that is posed is a valid one; how many of us could name the human rights we and the rest of the people on the planet are heir to ?

via my brother (of all the people you’d never think would send something like this.)

Bless the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Always doing some awesome work, they’ve put out a great piece on digital self defence.

6 Ideas For Those Needing Defensive Technology to Protect Free Speech from Authoritarian Regimes and 4 Ways the Rest of Us Can Help

Of course, authoritarian regimes can be widely interpreted here. Personally, I think the UK has gone off the deep end with both the way its using laws and its over-zealous database creation. And let’s face it, any country thinking of putting internet filters on your information is not that much further away (yes, I’m looking at you Australia and NZ) to say nothing of unapologetic offenders like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Frightening short piece from the Atlantic about the effects of Tiananmen censorship on cultural memory. I find this amazingly Orwellian and chilling as all hell. I think we all hope to live in a world where censorship doesn’t work as a form of repression.

I have spent a lot of time over the past three years with Chinese university students. They know a lot about the world, and about American history, and about certain periods in their own country’s past… But you can’t assume they will ever have heard of what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. For a minority of people in China, the upcoming date of June 4 has tremendous significance. For most young people, it’s just another day.

Amnesty International’s Annual Report for 2009 , the definitive report on the state of the world’s human rights is now live.

Pretty smooth sailing technically this time round due to using Drupal (the same CMS we use on the main amnesty.org site and some excellent dev help from the fine, fine folks over at CivicActions (except for a worrying little last-minute technical terror of a bug that slipped through).

As people who tune in regularly to the blog may be aware, the main site for Amnesty International was completely redesigned last year and launched on Dec 10th human rights day.

Since then, and with the advantages the underlying Drupal, CiviCRM, and Alfresco core technologies have given us (though we’ve had quite a few problems with alfresco since launching), we’ve been able to do quite a bit more than we were ever capable of doing before with the old platform and made some fundamental gains with the site.

The Human Rights Action Center in NYC just put up a fantastic animation illustrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the observation of which being one of the cornerstones of what Amnesty works towards, for the 60th anniversary of the document on the 10th of December this year.

Utterly fantastic job in tone, animation, simplicity and even the music.

The action centre has also given over their home page to it in a full browser high fidelity version which looks amazing. Probably won’t be up forever, but looks great if you go there now.

Just a shoutout to my favourite Rails ninjas here in London, the bambinos at New Bamboo *(disclaimer: they’re working on projects with both AI UK and with us at the Secretariat right now)*a, who just launched AI UK’s new Protect the Human site after partnering up with Made by Many .

{{ figure src="/images/farm4/3272/2792698081_71d634992a.png)" title=“AI UK’s Protect the Human” }}

Very nicely executed social networking site based on activism, sharing and discussion. Just wondering what they used to get the base done. They even managed to incorporate the new visual Global Identity and reconcile it with AI UK’s current visual scheme.

{{ figure src="/images/farm3/2197/2530505174_3173eb55d1_m.png" title=“The State of the World’s Human Rights 2008” }} )

Well, couple of bumps getting it out the front door, as well as having to deal with a killer 6am launch time to coordinate the global media strategy, but the mighty mighty AI web team managed in the wee hours of the morning and well in time for the first of or media blitz interviews with CNN.

Hard to watch but important to see.