Publications

Anoosheh Ashoori and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe are both British nationals who have been arbitrarily detained in Iran for four years and five years, respectively. In this briefing, Amnesty International UK and REDRESS share the deeply held concerns of Anoosheh's and Nazanin’s families that there remain crucial areas not being pursued by the UK government to secure their release and bring them home. The briefing calls on the UK government to review their current, failed strategy, to ensure that by the end of 2021, all necessary and available steps have been taken to secure the release of Anoosheh, Nazanin, Mehran Raoof and Morad Tahbaz.

This Annual Review provides an overview of the activities and achievements carried out by REDRESS from April 2020 to March 2021.

In a letter released ahead of the 48^th session of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC48), 34 Sudanese, African, and international civil society organisations highlight the need for the Coun­cil to both continue supporting human rights reforms in Sudan and maintain human rights moni­tor­ing and reporting. The signatories suggest that the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) continue reporting to the Council on a yearly basis, and that its reports form a basis for debates.

REDRESS and 66 other civil society organisations wrote to Sudan's transitional government, urging it to urge the government to follow through on recent commitments to deepen its cooperation with the ICC by transferring former president Omar al-Bashir, Ahmed Haroun, and Abdel Raheem Muhammed Hussein to The Hague.

This report considers the practice of enforced disappearance in Africa, exploring the contexts in which it takes place, the existing international and regional legal and policy frameworks in place to prevent and respond to enforced disappearances, and the gaps in those frameworks that prevent the eradication of enforced disappearance in Africa, as well as making a set of recommendations to the relevant bodies on how to eliminate the practice on the continent. We are grateful to the law firm Linklaters for their invaluable pro-bono support. 

Launched one year ago on 6 July 2020, the UK’s Global Human Rights Sanctions regime gave the UK Foreign Secretary the ability to sanction persons implicated in human rights abuses anywhere across the globe. The first anniversary of the UK Global Human Rights Sanctions regime provides an opportunity to examine how the UK government has used its new tool for tackling human rights abuses, as detailed in this paper. A data-driven analysis shows 78 designations arising from 11 situations of human rights violations. There was a notable skew towards designations for violations of the right to life and prohibition on torture, with fewer designations for forced labour. Six entities were sanctioned, including military holding companies and public security bureaus. Individuals designated ranged from politicians and military officials to family members of perpetrators and prison doctors.

This training module gives an overview of the evidence of torture, the strategic issues when identifying and preparing torture evidence, characteristics of good pieces of evidence, conducting interviews to collect evidence and writing a witness statement. This module should be read in complementarity with Module 13: Working with Survivors of Trauma.

This training module gives an overview of the legal ethics and the legal code of conduct. It also highlights the role of lawyers or NGOs with their clients, the enhanced responsibility to those representing torture survivors, and the ethical issues relating to cases against torture.