On 23 January, around 500 people turned out for a demonstration calling for justice for the British detainees held in Guantanamo Bay.
Organised by a coalition of the Save Omar, Birmingham Guantanamo, Manchester Guantanamo and Belmarsh campaigns, the aim of the day was to highlight the continuing detention without trial of nine British residents, the credible allegations of routine torture tactics used against detainees, and the ongoing hunger strike at the military prison. One of…
Katharine von Schubert's book tells the story of a period of a year and half, when this young woman joined Quaker Peace and Social Witness's human rights observation programme in the West Bank. As such, I approached it with some trepidation. In the last few years, a number of volumes have emerged recounting the experiences of international activists in Palestine, from the International Solidarity Movement, Christian Peacemaker Teams and a range of other groups. Some have been very good, and…
Candle-lit vigils for the four peace activists abducted in Iraq were held around the country on the evening of Friday 2 December - including ones in Oxford, Bradford, Evesham, Derby and on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields church in Trafalgar Square, London.
The four - including Briton Norman Kember - are all genuinely long-time peace campaigners, who were in Iraq in connection with the work of Christian Peacemaker Teams, an international religious peace network active in anti-war…
On 10 November, nine nooses were hung outside the London Shell headquarters, paralleling the hangings of activist-author Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his Ogoni colleagues on 10 November 1995. The nine were arrested in Nigeria and held without charges, tortured, and eventually sentenced to death for their peaceful efforts to bring Shell's exploitation of the Ogoni people to light.
At his trial, Saro-Wiwa wrote for his closing testimony, “I and my colleagues are not the only ones on…
Political folk band Seize the Day, comedian Mark Thomas, and human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith descend on Hiatt's in early September to perform the Shackle Shuffle and to give the shackle-making company the message that their continued involvement with Guantanamo Bay must cease.
The factory is tucked away in suburbia. There is nothing to indicate that the nondescript buildings are linked to an international conspiracy of torture and confinement. Not far from the centre of…
Offering a singular take on recent US/UK strategies in the Middle East, A Letter to the Prime Minister follows international activist Jo Wilding on her remarkable journey of the last few years, in solidarity with the people of Iraq.
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On Sunday 15 May exiles from Sudan, along with supporters, gathered in London to demand that the British government take action to halt the genocide in the Sudanese region of Darfur.
The protest was organised by Waging Peace and the Darfur Solidarity Campaign and drew 300 people from across Britain. Protesters gathered outside Downing Street and the Sudanese Embassy and staged a die-in, symbolising the genocide. They held up placards with “Peace keepers into Darfur” and “Sanctions…
Millions of people around the world have donated money to the major disaster relief networks such as the Disasters Emergency Committee (http://www.dec.org.uk/). DEC reports that more than two million people in Britain have collectively donated a total of more than £200 million to their appeal. But while immediate disaster relief is vital to responding to the initial consequences of the tsunami, Peace News would like to draw your attention to…
January 1986. In the northern hills of Nicaragua, surrounded by Ronald Reagan's murderous Contras, a group of some 300 peace activists from all over the world find their path into Honduras blocked. The US and Honduran mililitaries are conducting joint exercises - no way through for anyone who believes in reconciliation and gentle peace.
Unnerved by the brooding hills and by their just-completed visit to a tiny cooperative where mothers showed pictures of their "Santos inocentes" (…
It repeats itself: the main hospital has been closed down by US troops and is being used for military operations, ambulances are being prevented, again by US troops, from moving around the town, which is being pounded from the air while the US and the Iraqi militias, disparate armed groups, fight in the streets and US soldiers drive around with loudspeakers, ordering civilians to leave or be killed.
It could be Falluja in April; this time it's Najaf. I hear that Kut has been bombed…
Israeli forces continue to put pressure on ISM activists through office raids and arrests.
On 9 May, Israeli forces raided the ISM media office in Beit Sahour, confiscating equipment and destroying the groups office space. The strong-arm operation was carried out by dozens of soldiers, border police and civilian police officers, who had surrounded the office with around 20 military vehicles.
Israeli forces also seized all the computers in the nearby office of the…
Over the past three months there have been growing protests at the ongoing violence in Darfur.
Thousands of people from the Sudanese diaspora, pan-Africanists, and the broader peace movement have taken to the streets - particularly in the US and Britain - including in London, New York, Glasgow and Washington.
In London, demonstrations have been attracting over 500 people and have been very mobile - visiting the embassies of several African countries and the British…
Crossing the Irish Sea, the “Battle of the Bog” reached London at the end of September, as protests were held outside Shell's South Bank headquarters.
Carried out in solidarity with the Irish “Shell to Sea” campaign to resist the development of a gas pipeline in a pristine conservation area in Rossport, Co Mayo, protesters managed to catch the police and local security off-guard when they dumped two tonnes of sand on Shell's doorstep and dropped a 40-foot banner reading “danger - keep…
Even the most quixotic of observers must surely have been forced to admit, in the light of the shocking pictures of abuse suffered by Iraqi prisoners at the hands of US (and probably British) soldiers and security personnel, that the state of affairs in Iraq is not quite the rosy one that some wish to portray it as.
But while the macabre photos from Abu-Ghraib jail may have shocked many people around the world, they came as no surprise to members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams,…
In a somewhat eccentric version of a road movie, Human Shields follows the 25 people who left England on double decker buses on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.
Featuring plenty of interviews with the “shields”, the film shows some of the tensions and anxieties that inevitably began to unfold. Apart from a few admirable exceptions, the voices that we hear at the end of the film are not the same as those we heard at the beginning, illustrating how it was not necessarily those who…
