Concerns Mount Over British Digital Economy Bill

The UK Digital Economy Bill is facing mounting criticism, as an influential group of MPs has expressed concern the bill may violate human rights.

Google and China: Interesting Times?

So what do we think about the Google China affair then? For anyone who has been hiding under a rock on Pluto lately, Google announced on January 13th that it “may end its operations in China following a “sophisticated and targeted” cyber attack origina…

Lisbon Treaty We Salute You

I almost thought I would never live to see the day but yes the Lisbon Treaty has cleared its final hurdle and will become European law possibly in December 2009.It’s all rather a damp squib for a UK privacy lawyer though. (Even one who is healthily sc…

Thirsting for Justice

(Originally posted on Huffington Post.)
When most of us think about lack of access to water among the poor, we’re more likely to envision people in third-world countries — victims of drought, famine or polluted rivers — rather than our neighbors here in the United States. After all, water is a necessity [...]

Reckoning with Torture

Tuesday night, almost 600 New Yorkers came out to hear a diverse line-up of writers, artists, a former CIA agent and former military interrogator reading from pages of documents that detail the Bush administration’s torture program.
We teamed up with PEN American Center to present Reckoning with Torture: Memos and Testimonies from the “War on Terror.”  [...]

We’ve Come So Far, But Have So Much Farther to Go

The U.S. is the world’s leading incarcerator with over 2.3 million people – or 1 in 99 adults – in prisons and jails across the country. Our incarceration rate of 760 per 100,000 people is the highest in the world — five to ten times that of other Western democracies. In addition, because of [...]

World Day Against the Death Penalty

Tomorrow marks World Day Against the Death Penalty, and it is only fitting that a global call was issued to abolish the practice. We join the ambassadors of the European Union (EU) who gathered today to call on all nations to abolish the cruel practice.
Ambassador John Bruton, the head of EU delegation to the U.S., [...]

Profile-Me-Not

In a letter to the Obama administration made public today, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) expressed concerns over a lack of progress to end racial discrimination in the United States. In particular, the letter urged the Obama administration and Congress to do more to end racial profiling, like [...]

Proposed Appropriations Bill Would Allow Defense Department to Suppress Torture Photos

We’ve just learned that the House and Senate conferees approved language today for the homeland security appropriations bill that, if passed, would grant the Department of Defense (DoD) the authority to continue suppressing photos depicting the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody overseas.
Since 2003, the ACLU has been seeking photos and records related to the [...]

The End of the Beginning? Or the Beginning of the End?

Nearly four years have passed since I first traveled to Guantánamo to observe proceedings in the military commission prosecution of Canadian Omar Khadr, who was 15 years old when seized in Afghanistan and has now spent fully a third of his life in captivity. In an ordinary justice system, Khadr’s trial – and very [...]