The Great Car Insurance Swindle Panorama

There has been widespread condemnation of three bomb attacks

in India's main commercial city, Mumbai. At least 21 people were

killed and many more injured. One exploded in the heart of the city

and two others in the south, all during rush hours. Indian officials

say it appeared to be a co- ordinated terrorist attack.

News Corporation has withdrawn its controversial bid for a full

takeover of BSkyB Youth stop-off -- BSkyB. The company said it was too

difficult to progress with the bid in the current climate.

The Egyptian government says more than 600 senior police officers

have been removed from their jobs. Their dismissal has been a key

demand of protesters, who criticised officers of the killing

-- for the killing of hundreds of protesters during their Hutu

uprising against Holzinger Barak. - - during February's uprising

against Hosni Mubarak. This year, Amnesty International

passes a milestone. 50 years of campaigning against prisoners of

conscious. This 50th birthday is marked less by collective

satisfaction than soul-searching. The group's strategy has come under

Welcome to HARDtalk. 50 years - congratulations on that. Would you

except Amnesty International is now a campaigning juggernaut that has

moved an awful long way from the founding ideas of 1961?

Not in its values and its basic premise because that has not

changed. Currently, Amnesty International is about ordinary

people coming together to do extraordinary things and when we

started, it was about political prisoners. Then we realised many of

the theme -- many of them were being tortured. Dictators are

getting much smarter so they started making people disappear.

Then you have to deal with the dictators themselves, international

justice. I would say Amnesty has evolved over 50 years, but always

adapting to changing circumstances. As you described it, always working

towards the idea of political freedom and baffling political

oppression, it will look at what Amnesty International is involved

in today it is a sort of capsule against fighting and -- fighting

against a grab-bag of different abuses.

I recently came back from North Africa. When you look at what is

happening on the streets of many cities, especially in North Africa,

you can see the classic problem of political freedom, and people's

writes for food and water, that is something we can talk about sitting

in the studio. There was a Tunisian who set himself on fire, which

triggered the Tunisian Revolution, which triggered the rest of the

Arab world's revolution. No-one campaigning organisation can

represent all of those different issues. Wars and the beauty of

Amnesty in early days was that the focus was clear, thein all about

representing those people who were locked up because of their thoughts

and speech. We a fighting for the rights of

people whose rights are violated. - we are fighting. You cannot

separate economic rights from political rights. It is not for us

to say, "We are only doing this thing." Where is the clarity of

Amnesty getting involved in the abortion debate?

Saying it will champion the rights of women who have been raped or

forcibly coerced into sex and then have become pregnant. I do not see

how that fits with the original ideas.

Half of the populations in the countries we working are women. The

women we are working with, when we started looking beyond prison,

there was a bit strong proportion of the population saying that

women's rights were very Central. We do not take a generic position

on the right to life all right to health. It is a human rights

framework. My knee devoutly religious people,

not least Catholics, like your founder, took the view that life

began at conception. By outlining and championing the rights of women

to have an abortion if they have been forcibly, basically, made to

have sex, are you not pursuing the logic that right to life does not

start at conception. We all know amnesty is fully committed to

respect for life and against the death penalty.

Him Indonesia, Amnesty has been working for many years against

oppression and political dictatorship. Today, if you take

the number of women dying because of bad health practices, it is

20,000 women who died. Indonesia traditionally has one million

abortions taking place. Most of them are in the shadow because no-

one wants to legalise abortion. You can say that it does not matter

that 20,000 women are dying because that is not your concern. What

we're doing in the case of Indonesia is explaining to the

people of Indonesia and talking to the Governor of Indonesia about how

there is a direct relationship between rising abortion and the

whole maternal mortality rate. It is very central. I think it is

difficult to separate these things. We made British bishop, Michael

Evans, after you adopted the stance, quit your organisation, saying,

"Amnesty seems to have forgotten the paramount human right, the

right to life," You do not focus on that?

We are focused on making sure women do not have unsafe pregnancies. We

need to make sure women have access to information, that they feel

empowered to use contraception, whether they are rich or poor,

single or married. That is our focused. We're not focused on what

people do when they get married and get pregnant.

Let's bring it back to politics and repression and the fight for

freedom. You recently back from Cairo, in the midst of the Arab

spring. Isn't the message of the Arabs bring in some ways that there

is now less need for outside analysis and the intervention from

groups such as yours because, in a very real sense, people are doing

it for themselves. We are not outside. We may be

sitting in a studio in the UK, but we have an organisation of 3

million members across the globe. I was in so where's a few days ago

and local people came to me and talk about their local Amnesty

Group. We are spread across 100 countries with 3 million local

members. What is a snake that you're dishing in Egypt? In the

midst of all this crisis, the tarry a Square killings, Amnesty has been

documented -- documenting all the human rights violations. I was

mentioning to the Minister of the interior that we have records of

all the violations that had been committed under Holzinger Barak

over the last 30 years. -- under Hosni Mubarak.

People now have mobile phones, they are on social networks, they're

sending each other pictures and video of what is happening in real

time. You then many months later sending researchers and right along

reports about this and that. You were in danger of being overtaken

by events -- you are. I got a message from Aung San Suji.

She said she wanted to express her gratitude to Amnesty. Her message

was interesting, saying that she hoped that in the next 50 years we

would not need and Mr International. I would share that hope. Let me

assure you that at this point back in time, with the Sudans, the

Chinas, everywhere I travel, people respect what we say.

You said a few weeks ago that the Arabs bring marks a watershed where

activists used new technology to speak truth to power. Are you over

estimating what has changed in the last 12 months?

No. What we have been saying in relation to the Middle East and not

Africa in general, the Middle East is a good example, is that the

dictator has gone but the systems of dictatorship have not gone. That

will take a long time to change, meaning we need truth, justice and

reparations. I was meeting with mothers of the first two martyrs

who gave their lives and there are security officials who conducted

killings and violations. Unless there is truth, justice and

compensation, we need -- we have a long way to go.

The people have lost loved ones, were winded themselves or

imprisoned. Where is the justice for any of these people? -- were

wounded. That is exactly what our same to

the general of the armed forces. By wonder whether you said you were

worried about the fact that they were rushing headlong into

parliamentary elections in September, when the basic

groundwork for democracy and civil society were not in place.

The first thing I talked about were the mid- Barak laws. They are still

in place, the emergency laws. -- been. The media is much more free.

They have started trials against the Interior Minister and Holzinger

Barak himself -- Hosni Mubarak. Up one of the facets we see more in

Syria is that the government also make Ten News the new technology.

They can use mobile and satellite technology to track protesters,

undertake surveillance in New Inn sophisticated ways. Are you worried

about that? We are very worried. We're talking

to the companies, technology companies, about this question.

We're developing our own strategies for the future on how we, on the

one hand, digital can be a massive enabling technology to organise

anonymously, but it is true companies Kent misuse it and there

are smart governments already doing that. -- can misuse it. In a sense,

this is a new area for Amnesty International and the human rights

community. A I talked about the warp speed at

which information can now flow, not least information about allegations

of human rights abuse. That is sometimes very dangerous. Let's

turn to Libya. Not long ago we had stories coming of mass rapes,

systematic rapes by Gaddafi's forces, coming through the new

media. I wonder if Amnesty International, after looking at

those reports, now believe most of them not to be true?

Research and interviewing people is some of the most important work

that Amnesty conducts. We have not had any direct evidence of rape

being used as a weapon of war. Rape been used as a weapon of war is a

serious human rights violation. If the UN and ICC have evidence, we

need to see that. We're not saying it didn't happen. We're just saying

we do not have direct evidence of that.

We now get to a very sensitive line that Amnesty has had to tread for

many years now. The war in Iraq, Afghanistan and maybe in Libya as

well. You have people on both sides of the conflict who want to

marshall facts. In Libya, one of the Western... The arguments used

by Western intervention powers was that had they not intervened there

would have been "A massacre" of tens of thousands of innocent

civilians in Benghazi. Does Amnesty International believe that to be

true? It is a kind of counterfactual

question. I can ask you if you believe it to

be credible. A Amnesty International is not an

organisation that pronounces its views with force. We work within

the human-rights framework. The important issue now is that all

parties have to observe the rules of war and the rules of conflict

and international humanitarian law and that is not happening. All

parties are violating that as we speak. That is why we have an

International Criminal Court. That is one of the pins Amnesty

International campaigned for four years. We're happy that arrest

warrants have come out now and we need to allow for a full

investigation to take place. Just sticking with the notion of

Amnesty's integrity and the enormous pressures it faces, I

talked about the enormity -- enormous conflicts we have been

through. Let's now talk about the war on terror, as it was

characterised by George W. Bush. Do you think it fits with Amnesty's

values to associate with, for example, former Guantanamo

prisoners, in your campaign on the issue of detainees in Wantirna Road.

-- in Guantanamo. In our view, in many cases, the

West has it wrong. We think, in Guantanamo Bay itself, 2.5 years

after President Obama said he would close Guantanamo Bay, we still have

200 detainees in there. We know this is not in line with most

international human rights standards and they are committed to

taking several of them to civil trial and they have now reversed

In that campaign you have run, you have worked closely with other

organisations. You used to work with the Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

Do you regret that association? There was a whole debate about that.

Did you get it right or wrong? was before my time. It was

independently done by two well respected people. They said there

could have been some minor changes we could have made. There was no

disagreement. We made the right choices. Was it the right choice to

work with a self acknowledged jihadi fighter in Bosnia who had

been to training camps in Afghanistan, who continues to talk

about political campaign and conflict in America. Was it right

to have him as an associate? work with a wide range of partners.

It was just not on that issue alone. His group was described as a

leading human rights group which says more of them just working with

you on this specific issue. issue was about whether the

comments he had made, which were kind of derogatory towards women's

rights. Amnesty International, for us, women's rights is paramount.

What were you doing associating with him? When you have people in

prisons, we do not interview them for their views. This was after he

left prison. The reason this is important is because people inside

the organisation and outside it are worried about the degree to which

Amnesty is prepared to work with people who do not share the

universal values that Amnesty claims it represents. People are

worried that Amnesty International has tended to align themselves with

extremists. The nice thing is that we get criticised from all sides.

It is a reminder that we have to remain objective. In the Middle

East, North Africa, many people came up to say how we are so anti-

Islamist. I think Amnesty, without question, maintains its objectivity

through all the processes that we carry out. That is why we are so

valued. Before you toore you too another official said that Amnesty

has become rather famous - thinking about the role of jihad in self-

defence. Aren't such views not right? He said no. Do you believe

notions of jihad are antithetical to human rights? We were the first

to criticise the Taliban for killing innocent civilians at the

Intercontinental Hotel. Any kind of killing of civilians, using any

kind of jihad or whatever is unacceptable. But he believes jihad

is not antithetical to human rights? I am not going to go there.

I am saying if there is any evidence that civilians have been

killed, it is not acceptable. you cut your ties to caged

prisoners? He was associated with an alleged Al-Qaeda mastermind.

Have you cut or your ties with them? We have a specific campaign

with them on Guantanamo Bay. I worked with Caged Prisoners. What

about Israel? In the last few years, Amnesty spent too much time on

Israel and Palestine and not at what was actually going on in the

Arab world? If you look at Tunisia, Egypt, these were major investments

On Israel, Palestine, if you are talking about how we make sure of

objectivity and balance, we work with that criticism. After the 2008

and 2009 conflicts, we said their research conducted into human

rights was inadequate. The head of Amnesty International's Finland

branch described Israel as a scum state. Have you removed him?

stand for freedom of expression. Someone might say something that is

not representative. So he still speaks as the chief Amnesty person

in Finland? We have been cleared that is not Amnesty International's

view. We have dealt with that. I do not know the specifics of the

circumstances but that is not Amnesty International's view.

wrote it in a blog and it caused a great deal of upset in Israel. Some

believe there is an in-built bias. It is not about what one staff in

Amnesty said. The important thing is that the blockade is not

acceptable. People are suffering. We have done some very detailed

studies on water sanitation so that has been lifted. We have one of the

settlements there that has been destroyed 20 times. They are all

the things that we need to stop. just want to talk about the future.

You are the boss. Does it worry you that the most powerful emerging

nations in the world, and I am thinking of China, maybe the BRIC

countries, Russia, India, Brazil as well. These countries do not all

sign on to your views of what human rights really are. You cannot lump

all these countries together. It is a very big mix. They need to do a

lot more. I was in Brazil not so long ago and there was some big

challenges there. We were very worried that they are still

evicting a lot of people. And then you think about China. What did the

Chinese premier say in London the other day? He said stop lecturing

us. Stop lecturing us about human rights. Treat us as equals, don't

engage in finger-pointing and respect others on the basis of

equality. That may be a message that he is also delivering to you

as well. China had the Nobel Peace Prize going to a Chinese citizen

not so long ago. 10 years ago they would not worry about it but now

they are worrying about their international image. They are

concerned about their image more and more. They have to be held to

international standards. As we see Beijing rise and Delhi as well, the

power countries in the world, what you are doing may be even more

difficult to deliver. Brazilians and the Indians and the

Africans need to become part of the movement and raise their voices as

well. They need to have pressure coming from their own countries. I

think the idea that human rights is a Western concept has been exploded

recently. We have to leave it there. The weekend is approaching and the

weather looks like turning pretty nasty by Friday with wind and rain

expected. Before that happens, a reasonable weather today with

sunshine prevailing. Many places will be dry and the one exception

is the east of England with an active weather system bringing a

wet start to the day. Further west, a cool start but a lovely day with

sunshine. Things will warm up quite nicely. I've been to the mid-teens

by mid-morning. A touch of frost in the northern Highlands and things

warming up after that. No real problems weather-wise in the

Midlands. It is the east of England that will have the cloud and wet

weather. Fringing in two parts of Kent, and further west a lot of

sunshine. As we go through the day not much changing - wet weather in

the east of England, blustery wind. Further west - dry, bright and of

lighter wind. Temperatures in the low 20s but chilly. The Open, a lot

of cloud and blustery wind back. Challenging conditions and coverage

will be all over the BBC. Toward the evening, the wind will move

east. Things will dry out. A largely dry start to Friday. Much

warmer for parts of East Anglia, the south-east. Weather fronts are