Unlocking data excitement

2nd February 2010 by veronique 1 Comment »

Categories: Social Media & Campaigns open data
The Billion Pound-0-Gram (David Mcandless)

The Billion Pound-0-Gram (David Mcandless)

Governments and local authorities are starting to make their data available for re-use. Are we entering an new era of transparency?

  • Obama launched data.gov, which offers feeds from various departments including the US defence department and Nasa.
  • The UK government is opening its data on data.gov.uk. This is only about non-personal, non-sensitive data – information like the list of schools, crime rates or the performance of your council.
  • … and soon Boris Johnson will open an online data warehouse with more than 200 data sets relevant to life in the capital.

Why is open data that exciting?

By accessing information, we can understand better how the world works. We can do wonderful things with data today by visualising them, mashing them up or turning them into online applications.

Not convinced? Check out those few links…

Still not convinced…

Watch Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created the World Wide Web, talking about the importance of unlocking and linking data.

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Don’t forget your camera on your Xmas break

17th December 2009 by veronique 2 Comments »

Categories: Shell Social Media & Campaigns Uncategorized

Since we’ve launched the Hell station map action, we have received photos from more than 10 countries including Norway, Turkey, US, Germany, Spain, UK and France.

If you are travelling over Xmas and New Year, don’t forget your camera and email us some snaps of Hell stations! It will be great to reach 100 Hell stations by the end of the year.

Just email them to amnesty.amnesty@gmail.com and we will put them up on the map.

Have a nice break!

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Is your bank funding cluster bombs?

2nd December 2009 by ben 9 Comments »

Categories: arms trade

One third of all recorded cluster bomb casualties are children. Yet despite efforts to ban these indiscriminate weapons, 138 banks and other financial institutions continue to invest over US$20 billion in companies that produce them.

Cluster bombs are large explosive weapons that scatter dozens or hundreds of smaller submunitions over a wide area. They cannot distinguish between military targets and civilians. Many submunitions fail to detonate on impact and, like landmines, continue to kill and maim people long after the conflict has ended. Find out more about Dtar’s story by watching this short film.

The good

The global campaign to eradicate cluster bombs, spearheaded by the Cluster Munitions Coalition, reached a major breakthrough in 2008 when governments negotiated an international treaty to ban them. So far, 103 countries have joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions, including the UK.

The bad

Although the UK government has signed the ban and stopped production of cluster bombs, UK banks still invest in cluster bomb producers in countries that have not yet outlawed them. A ban simply can’t be effective if there is still funding for the production of these weapons.

The downright ugly

A recent report* finds that UK high street banks are lending or providing investment banking services to cluster bomb producers to the tune of:

– Barclays: US$274 million
– HSBC: US$657 million
– Royal Bank of Scotland (includes NatWest): US$64 million

That could be YOUR cash. And if there’s one thing banks can’t do without, it’s customers: tell your bank to stop this shameful practice once and for all. If you’re not a customer of these banks you can still contact them to let them know that you find their investment in producers of cluster bombs totally unacceptable.

Take action – email your bank now

Had a response? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

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Family of death row inmate visit Amnesty UK

24th November 2009 by agnes 2 Comments »

Categories: death penalty

Troy Davis was convicted for the murder of a policeman, which he maintains he did not commit. Convicted solely on eye-witness testimony as there was no physical evidence, Troy’s case has been the subject of global debate and campaigns for years. Or rather, years and years; Troy has been sitting on death row since 1991.

Since Troy’s conviction, 7 of the 9 witnesses who gave evidence against him have either recanted or changed their statements – with some claiming that the police coerced them into testifying against Troy. And yet, Troy still lives his life locked up in Georgia’s state prison, in the shadow of his death sentence.

The case of Troy Anthony Davis speaks of gross injustice, not only with specifically how he has been treated – but more widely as representative of how America’s justice system functions. Or malfunctions, depending on your outlook.  

This week, we have a unique opportunity to hear from Troy’s family, who dedicate a large proportion of their lives to campaigning for justice for Troy. Troy’s sister, Martina Correia, and her teenage son, De’Jaun, will be speaking and taking questions at an event here at Amnesty UK on Wednesday 25 November.

They will be joined by Richard Hughes from Keane, who is a long-term supporter of Troy’s case, and Kim Manning-Cooper, Amnesty UK’s Death Penalty Campaign Manager.

Georgia and the death penalty may feel a long way from our daily reality in the UK. If you want to understand Troy’s case from his family’s perspective and have the chance to ask them questions, make sure you attend the event where is the justice for me?: Campaigning for Troy Davis

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206 people lobby 65 MPs to Stop Violence Against Women

11th November 2009 by agnes 1 Comment »

Categories: violence against women

Last week, we held a mass lobby of parliament – demanding that all women in the UK are given equal access to refuges and support services.

Hundreds of you joined us at the House of Commons to meet your MP in person and ask for their commitment to making this happen. Hundreds others emailed or tweeted their MPs instead. We still need your voice on this and it’s not too late for you to take part – email or tweet your MP on this issue

The pressure is working – Amnesty has just cautiously welcomed the Home Office’s three-month pilot scheme to grant women facing violence and who have insecure immigration status the ability to access a refuge and seek specialised support. Read the press release

How it went at the House of Commons

260 supporters signed up to meet their MPs in person on 4 November, covering some 65 MPs between them - a great turn out! However, we do know that 3 people couldn’t come because they were busy trying to resolve 3 complex cases where women have no access to refuges and support services – showing the real and current impact of this issue upon women’s lives.

On the 4 November, a few of us went down to the House of Commons to support the activists. Some were understandably nervous about meeting their MP for the first time and confronting them on issues around violence against women in the UK – but everyone was determined to get the message across that all women in the UK need support and protection from violence, regardless of their immigration status.

 We blogged

We blogged live from the lobby, with each post describing the experience of  an individual supporter who met with their MP.  If you’d like to get a read about how the lobby went for different people, talking to various MPs from across the political spectrum, have a look at this blog 

 We filmed

We also managed to get a few supporters on camera, telling us how their meetings with their MPs went. Watch the video below to hear from one of the activists at the lobby.

More video footage from the lobby will be available to view soon. While you’re waiting, you could look at some of the photos from the lobby

We weren’t the only people at the lobby filming; Guardian video came down too, to interview some women who have suffered violence and not had access to refuges. Watch their footage

 We tweeted

Lots of you tweeted your MPs and discussed the issue on Twitter, using the hashtag #masslobby.  Check out how this looked on Twitter

All in all…

The Lobby was a great success in terms of how many people contacted their MPs, bringing to their attention the plight of women who have no acess to support services and refuges in the UK – and demanding that something is done about it.

 More videos and pictures from the day will be available soon.  In the meantime, your support is crucial – so if you haven’t done so already, email or tweet your MP on this issue

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Lobby to stop violence against women

23rd October 2009 by agnes 7 Comments »

Categories: Social Media & Campaigns violence against women

The UK Government is obliged to protect, respect and fulfil women’s human rights. As the 2010 general election is coming up and a change of government is possible, all political parties must address violence against women.

On Wednesday 4 November, hundreds people asked their MP to ensure that all women in the UK are given equal access to support and protection from violence – regardless of their immigration status.

It is vital that we keep up this pressure. You can help us do this via email or on Twitter.  Act now

The story so far – towards a violence against women strategy

We have been campaigning the government to uphold their obligations towards women’s rights.

  • In March, we petitioned MPs about the lack of support services for women – pointing out the huge gaps in services across Britain, illustrated in the Map of Gaps reports.
  • In May, the Home Office launched a public consultation to develop a ‘violence against women’ strategy. We fed into this, demanding that the strategy tackles destructive social attitudes around violence against women and that it plans services for minority ethnic women facing violence such as genital mutilation and honour crimes.
  • We have campaigned constantly for women with insecure immigration status to be given access to refuges. At the moment, if these women suffer violence they have nowhere to go; this is because of the no recourse to public funds rule. This must be overturned in order to end violence against all women in Britain.

UK political parties have been listening. The Government has committed to developing a ‘Together we can end violence against women and girls’ strategy by 2010, and a proposal for dealing with the problems facing women with no recourse to public funds, who cannot access refuges.

We need to keep up the pressure to ensure they fulfil these promises effectively.

The next step – lobby your MP

We need you to ask your MP for their support and commitment to help victims of violence against women – giving all women in the UK equal access to support and protection from violence.

If you would prefer to contact your MP via email, check out your MPs contact details on writetothem.com and have a read of our suggested requests for your MP  to include in your email.

If you are on Twitter and would rather tweet your MP, find out if your MP is also on Twitter by searching for them on Tweetminster – If they are, follow them (on Twitter). Then tweet your MP the message below, including the link as this will take your MP to a PDF with more detailed requests:

Make sure UK guarantees equal protection for all women in the UK facing violence http://bit.ly/2mLkH4

Spread the word

We want the government to be overwhelmed with requests for all women in the UK to have equal access to services and protection. This means that we need to get the word out – and we really need your help to do this.

Spread the message:

Lobby your MP to make sure that all women can access refuges and support services in Britain http://bit.ly/1gQTpJ

on Twitter using the hashtag #masslobby

On Facebook by updating your status, or by writing it on your friends’ walls

On your blog by posting about the lobby so that your fans find out about it. Even better, they might blog about it too, and then their readers might also blog on it and soon we will have an excellent end violence against women strategy that provides for all women, all over Britain.

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Rape in Chad, Bosnia – and right here in the city.

2nd October 2009 by agnes 1 Comment »

Tags:
Categories: violence against women

For the last two days, reports of women’s rights abuses have dominated the homepage of our site amnesty.org.uk, bringing the subject of violence against women to the fore of Amnesty UK’s online campaigning.

Two of the items concern women’s rights in conflict and post conflict situations, one of the 2 most dangerous situations for women in today’s world.  In Bosnia and Herzogovina, the people who raped women during the 1992-1995 conflict have still not been brought to justice.  In Chadian refugee camps, women who have escaped the Darfur conflict continue to face further sexual violence and rape. 

In both of these cases, the women are not just victims of rape – but victims of how society relates to their situation. The Bosnian authorities have failed thousands of rape survivors by not providing them with the the support they need and the reparations they deserve for these war crimes.  In Chad, women are ostracised for having been raped and face rejection from current or prospective husbands; to add to their plight, it is the very people who are looking after the women in the camps that are raping them. 

Sexual violence is inescapable for these women. To varying degrees, violence against women is accepted by all societies  worldwide – making it an inescapable reality of our times. While politically unstable countries seem an obvious environment for mass violence against women, the other most dangerous envrionment for women is in fact the home. The home – that is, in any and every country. 

At last night’s launch of the book Created Equal, the pervasive nature of violence against women was brought into sharp relief.  Clips from Rape in the City (channel 4 Dispatches) showed how widespread violent attitudes towards women are in London.  An informal street interview with a group of young young men quickly revealed a belief that sexual violence serves as a just punishment for women who are seen to insult or offend them.  I was left in disgusted shock, seeing how casually and confidently these men relayed what they would do to ‘offending’ women; listening to a 14 year old girl talk about how she became the victim of gang rape left me reeling.

How to change this situation was a key question for last night’s panel. Damion Carnell of the Nottinghamshire Domestic Violence Forum believes we need to educate young men and boys on non-violence towards women. For producer of Rape in the City, Karen Edwards, it is perhaps raising awareness to incentivise people to take action in their own communities. For Patrick Stewart, who witnessed domestic violence against his mother when he was young, it is patronising and supporting women’s aid organisations and Amnesty’s Stop Violence Against Women Campaign.

So back to our homepage. It is because so many women face the horror of sexual violence everywhere that Amnesty reports so prolifically on it. It is startling to what level women are at risk from gender based violence (i.e. because they are women) in the world today.  It is of course our duty to shout about it, show people that women’s rights are being abused - and to give you the opportunity to do something about it. So here it is:  please pay attention to each item on the homepage and help women who have suffered or are suffering violence in Bosnia, Chad, here – and everywhere.

See Patrick Stewart talk about his ecperience of violence against women – watch the video below.

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Vanished by the state

25th August 2009 by ben 11 Comments »

Categories: Social Media & Campaigns

What are you doing this evening? Are you planning to see family or friends?

Imagine that they don’t show up.

At first you think nothing of it. They must be delayed, or maybe their phone is out of battery. But as the hours tick by, you begin to worry. You make a few calls, ‘Yes, they were at work today, I saw them leaving around 6pm’ says a colleague.

The next morning, when they still haven’t appeared, you go to the police. But they too, know nothing. In fact they are rather dismissive. You search frantically, but every turn leads to a dead end.

Now imagine that four years have passed, and you are no closer to knowing where they are.

For Amina Janjua, this is reality.

In 2005, her husband disappeared while taking a bus across Pakistan.

‘This is the worst thing to happen to anyone.’ she says, ‘If someone dies you cry and people console you and after some time you come to terms with it, but if someone disappears, you cannot breathe, it is the bitterest of agonies.’

When Amina was able to piece together the truth, she discovered that both her husband and his colleague Faisal had been taken into secret detention by the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency. Sadly for her, there has still been no official confirmation of what happened to them both.

Figures from the UN suggest that four people are subject to enforced disappearance every day, a crime that is often carried out by the state, or with their full knowledge.


Speak up for those that have been disappeared:

On social networks

1. Change your avatar to the image below:

2. Change your status e.g. I will not be contactable on Facebook / Twitter for the foreseeable future. Here’s why:  http://bit.ly/siSky

If you are on Twitter, you can add a Twibbon saying ‘Missing’ to show solidarity with the Day of the disappeared

3. [Twitter only] Change your location to ‘Unknown’ and your website to http://bit.ly/siSky [this page]


Act now

Email Justice Minister Jack Straw, urging the UK government to sign the UN Convention on Enforced Disappearance.

Speak up on five of our highlighted cases

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Mapping hell stations

21st August 2009 by ben 14 Comments »

Tags:
Categories: Shell Social Media & Campaigns

After the success of our webchat with Shell, and the revealing answers we were given, it is time for the next stage of our campaign to Make Shell Come Clean

Join us as we target Shell on Google Maps, turning Shell stations into ‘hell stations’ to publicly highlight the damage Shell is doing in the Niger Delta (see Amnesty’s report for further details)

We can’t do this without you, so please get involved by taking photos that obscure the S of the Shell sign from view, and sending them to us. Click on one of the logos below to get the idea.

Wherever you are in the world, we want your hell stations!


View Hell stations in a larger map

Task 1: Start snapping those Hell Stations!

Instructions

  • Find a Shell station in your area, by searching ‘Shell’ or ‘Shell UK Ltd’ on Google Maps. Alternatively you could use Shell’s own station finder (UK only)
  • Use a prop to block the view of the ‘S’ of Shell, as others have done on the map above. Get creative! You could use a friend’s hand, or better still an object that represents your outrage at Shell’s disregard for human rights in the Niger Delta.
  • Snap away!

Send them to us

  • Simply send an MMS to +44 7733 134670 or amnesty.amnesty@gmail.com with the location of the station, and we’ll do the rest

Task 2: Give Shell stations bad reviews

  • Find any Shell station on Google Maps, and give it a one star review, ensuring that your main message is in the first line of the review. It will then show up in searches like this:

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@amnestyuk vs @shelldotcom

29th July 2009 by ben 30 Comments »

Tags:
Categories: Shell




A simple Twitter message, repeated by just a few hundred users, and the world’s biggest company was scrambling to set up an online dialogue.

The request was for an opportunity to discuss Amnesty’s recent report ‘Petroleum, Pollution and Poverty’, which highlighted human rights abuses in the Niger Delta, where despite vast profits for oil companies, 31 million people are living in poverty.

The details were soon finalised. It was to happen on the Shell Dialogues site, with a parallel and open chat right here on Protect the Human.

On one side was Shell, with a panel of five senior staff, a slick introductory video and a well-oiled PR machine. On the other, the 445 individuals who had registered to take part, including experts from Amnesty, the Remember Saro-wiwa campaign, Friends of the Earth and local organisations based in Nigeria.

The stage was set.

What followed was an endless stream of questions about Shell’s human rights record, including why they continue with gas flaring despite a government ban, why they haven’t published their environmental assessments, and why they have failed to adequately clean up oil spills.

It didn’t take long before cracks began to appear in their positive PR machine, with country chair Basil Omiyi admitted that ‘Yes’, Shell does believe that pollution and environmental damage associated with the oil industry has contributed to poverty and conflict in the Niger Delta. Their assertion that ‘the oil industry’s footprint is impacting on small parts of the delta’ was an understatement of epic proportions, and their claim that ‘Shell is giving all spills immediate attention’ was completely dismissed by those working in the Niger Delta.

We should give Shell some credit for at least being willing to discuss these issues, though their rose tinted view fooled no one.

The next step is to watch this space, for a promised transcript of the dialogue, along with answers to the questions they didn’t have time to answer. In the meantime we are analysing their answers and plotting our next move.

If you’ve not yet sent an email to Shell’s new CEO, please take a moment to do this. If you have, why not send a message to @shelldotcom on Twitter, asking them to respond to the 3500+ emails that have been sent.

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