The severe crackdown on civil society in Saudi Arabia, especially since 2011 and more acutely since May 2018, has not been matched by a clear or resolute EU strategy to ensure the support and protection of HRDs. The policies of the EU and its member states have instead been characterized by restraint and a lack of creativity to overcome the obstacles associated with supporting HRDs in an already severely restricted environment. While some positive practices have been adopted in the past four years, these have often failed to improve the situation of individual HRDs due to a lack of ownership and follow up on the part of the EU and its member states.

More than a million people in more than 200 countries and territories across the globe have come together to express their outrage at the sentencing of prominent Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh to 38 years and six months in prison and 148 lashes after two grossly unfair trials, Amnesty International announced today, as signatures demanding her release were handed in to Iranian embassies around the world.

Reacting to the onward voyage of the Saudi Arabian state shipping company’s vessel, the Bahri Yanbu, from the Spanish port of Santander this afternoon, Ara Marcen Naval, Deputy Director for Arms Control and Human Rights at Amnesty International, said:

The northwestern Bosnian towns of Bihać and Velika Kladuša, nestled at the very border with Croatia, have become a temporary refuge for some 5,500 refugees and migrants fleeing conflict, persecution and poverty. They arrived via the so-called “Balkans route”, passing through Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia, and are now on what they hope will be the last leg of their long journey. Very few people will decide to stay in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as the vast majority will try to reach the European Union (EU) by crossing into neighbouring Croatia – braving unfamiliar, and often inhospitable, terrain and unwelcoming police on its borders. While a member of the European Union, Croatia is not a Schengen area country, but is eager to demonstrate its readiness to join the border-free area in 2020 by decisively protecting the EU’s external borders from irregular migration.

European governments are complicit in the systematic,unlawful and frequently violent push backs and collective expulsions of thousands of asylum seekers to squalid and unsafe refugee camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina, said Amnesty International in a report published today.

Reacting to the European Parliament’s condemnation of the ongoing repression and torture of a group of women’s rights defenders detained in Saudi Arabia since May 2018, the Director of Amnesty International’s European Institutions Office Covadonga de la Campa said:

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MEDIA ADVISORY

While the UN Security Council remains bogged down by politics, the Human Rights Council, with the joint leadership of the European Union and Organization of Islamic Cooperation, has stepped up to the challenge with this serious and constructive approach to pave the way for justice

Ahead of a week of action across Europe, Amnesty International calls on European governments to stop forcibly sending people to deadly conditions in Afghanistan.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

The UK, German, Dutch and Italian governments have been assisting in the USA’s secret global killing programme for years, providing vital intelligence and infrastructure despite mounting civilian casualties and allegations of unlawful killings, including war crimes