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For Immediate Release
April, 13 2012, 11:57am EDT
Contact:
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7413 5566,After hours: +44 7778 472 126,Email:,press@amnesty.org
Amnesty International Human Rights Briefing on Bahrain
WASHINGTON
Amidst debates around the scheduling of the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Bahrain, Amnesty International is today releasing a short briefing for media summarising the continuing human rights crisis in Bahrain.
A full report, Flawed Reforms: Bahrain fails to achieve justice for protesters, will be released on 17 April at 0001hrs BST. The report will detail the information contained in this media briefing in greater depth, drawing on examples of specific cases and providing legal background and context.
For more information please contact the Amnesty International Press Office on +44 (0) 20 7413 5566 or email press@amnesty.org
Amnesty International is a worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights for all. Our supporters are outraged by human rights abuses but inspired by hope for a better world - so we work to improve human rights through campaigning and international solidarity. We have more than 2.2 million members and subscribers in more than 150 countries and regions and we coordinate this support to act for justice on a wide range of issues.
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Critics Hammer Trump Admin's 'Taxpayer Funded Bribe' to Kill Massive Wind Energy Project
"The most corrupt presidency ever—and it's not even close," said one critic.
Mar 23, 2026
Critics slammed the Trump administration on Monday after it announced a deal to pay almost $1 billion to a French energy company to cancel its plans to construct wind farms across the eastern US.
As reported by The New York Times, French firm TotalEnergies has agreed to forfeit its leases in federal waters off the coasts of New York and North Carolina, and will instead invest the money it received from the Trump administration into oil and gas projects in the US, "including a facility in Texas that would export liquefied natural gas to global markets."
TotalEnergies paid nearly $928 million for the rights to access federal waters during former President Joe Biden's administration.
The Times described the agreement as "an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels, a main driver of climate change, while throttling offshore wind power."
Patrick Pouyanné, the chief executive of TotalEnergies, said that the firm decided to abandon its US wind farm plans due to "practical" considerations, while emphasizing that the firm wasn't giving up on wind power all together.
"When the Trump administration came to power and began setting US energy policy, we said that we’ll have to reconsider, clearly, these offshore wind project developments," explained Pouyanné, adding that "we continue to invest in onshore solar, onshore wind, batteries."
Many critics expressed disbelief that the Trump administration would go to such extraordinary lengths to kill a clean energy project, especially after the president sent oil and gasoline prices soaring earlier this month when he launched an unprovoked and unconstitutional war with Iran.
"Let’s call this what it is: a taxpayer-funded bribe to kill homegrown clean energy and hand the money straight to oil and gas executives," wrote climate advocacy organization Evergreen Action in a social media post. "Trump is once again making Americans pay more for energy so his Big Oil donors can rake in even more profits."
Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, expressed a similar sentiment.
"$1 billion of our tax dollars to kill a clean energy program that creates jobs, just so Trump's Big Oil donors can make more profit," D'Arrigo wrote. "The most corrupt presidency ever—and it's not even close."
Matt Gertz, senior fellow at press watchdog Media Matters for America, argued that the agreement was a corrupt bargain aimed at hurting the president's political foes, including the Democratic leaders of New York and North Carolina.
"Climate/renewables arguments aside, this is the president's administration paying a foreign company to invest in states where Republicans are in charge rather than ones where Democrats are in charge," Gertz wrote, "using tax dollars to punish people who didn't vote for his party."
US Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) said that the deal to kill the planned wind farms was yet another example of the Trump administration making life in the US less affordable.
"This administration just spent $1 BILLION of your money to make sure wind farms don't get built," Blunt Rochester wrote. "You''ll have them to thank for higher electric bills each month."
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Supreme Court Appears Poised to Allow ‘Brazen Republican Effort to Disenfranchise Millions’ Ahead of Midterms
Mail-in voting "is relied upon by nearly one million Americans serving in the military abroad and nearly 50 million Americans living in the US," noted one expert.
Mar 23, 2026
The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday in a case in which Republicans are trying to ban states from accepting mail-in ballots after Election Day—a development that opponents warned could disenfranchise many of the roughly 50 million Americans who voted by mail in 2024.
Watson v. Republican National Committee challenges Mississippi's grace period for accepting mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day. While most states require mailed ballots to arrive by that date, 14 states provide extra time ranging from days to weeks. Such grace periods allow the votes of people including US troops stationed overseas, Americans living abroad, disabled people, and others to be counted.
The case is partly driven by President Donald Trump's unfounded assertion that mail-in voting is riddled with fraud. Following Trump's 2020 election loss, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—created by the president in 2018—called the contest “the most secure in American history.” Trump promptly fired the head of the agency before leaving office.
The U.S. Supreme Court will consider a GOP effort to dramatically restrict mail-in voting Monday, when it hears oral arguments in Watson v. Republican National Committee. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
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— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) March 22, 2026 at 8:31 AM
Legal experts observing Monday's oral arguments said that some of the six Republican-appointed justices appeared sympathetic to arguments for restricting mail-in voting.
University of Michigan Law School professor Leah Litman said on Bluesky that Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas "sound like complete MAGA-pilled 'absentee voting/mail in voting is fraudulent' brains" who are "open to invalidating state laws allowing vote counting after Election Day—and perhaps more voting forms."
"They are doing what they often do in these cases with unhinged theories—invent far fetched hypos (could a state allow you to retract your vote, or say your vote is cast when you give your brother a ballot) to distract from what the case is about (is mail-in absentee voting going to be banned)," Litman added.
Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern said on Bluesky that Justice Samuel Alito "strongly implied that vote-by-mail, as practiced in most of the country today, is highly susceptible to fraud," adding that Gorsuch and Thomas "leaned in that direction as well," while Justices Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts "are harder to read."
"SO many questions from the Republican-appointed justices so far having little or nothing to do with the law—they're venting their evident frustrations about modern election laws that broadly authorize mail voting and fretting that they're spoiling elections with distrust and fraud," Stern continued. "Really bad!"
"It's also pretty clear that the Republican-appointed justices do not understand a great deal about how elections are actually administered," he added. "Their questions (and especially hypotheticals) are built on weird, paranoid fantasies that do not align with reality."
Others warned of the high likelihood of voter disenfranchisement should the justices limit mailed ballots.
“Watson v. RNC is a brazen Republican effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans seeking to vote in the midterm elections," said Court Accountability co-founder Lisa Graves. "Mail-in voting has been part of the American election system since the Civil War, and this method of voting is relied upon by nearly one million Americans serving in the military abroad and nearly 50 million Americans living in the US."
“Of course, the hyper-partisan Roberts Court is considering using the power of the nation’s highest court–again–to put its thumb on the scale of justice in ways sought by the Republican Party," Graves continued. "Three Trump appointees on the Supreme Court are poised to join three other Republican appointees to side with the radical ruling of a trio of operatives Trump appointed to the Fifth Circuit."
Last November, the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans struck down a Mississippi law that allowed mailed ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted as long as they arrive within five business days, setting up the Supreme Court showdown.
“Vote-by-mail is a secure and widely used way to participate in our elections," Stand Up America executive director Christina Harvey said Monday. "It’s a lifeline for military and overseas voters, voters with disabilities, elderly voters, and rural voters living far from their polling places. Nearly one-third of the votes cast in the 2024 election were cast by mail, proving just how essential this option has become."
“Watson v. RNC is part of a broader effort to dismantle voting options ahead of this year’s midterms," Harvey continued. "After pushing congressional Republicans to eliminate vote-by-mail and adopting [United States Postal Service] policy changes that could disqualify ballots sent on time, Donald Trump and his allies are asking the Supreme Court to finish the job."
"If the court rules in their favor, they’ll be making it easier for politicians to hold onto power without answering to voters," she added.
Critics allege that disenfranchisement is the point of policies like limiting mail-in voting or requiring voter ID. Republicans have implied—and even admitted outright—that these policies help Republicans win elections. During a 2020 interview, Trump said he opposed expanding mail-in voting, saying such a move would mean the country would "never have a Republican elected... again."
Last year, Trump signed the Orwellian-named “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections” executive order, which critics argued would do just the opposite by making it more difficult for millions of voters to cast their ballots. Among other things, the decree pushes states to require proof of citizenship when voting—a policy that opponents warn disproportionately disenfranchises lower-income individuals, elderly, and adopted people without easy access to their birth certificates and those born at home in rural areas whose birth records were never officially filed.
Congressional Republicans are also pushing the SAVE Act and Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act, the latter of which was described by one analyst as the “most dangerous attack on voting rights ever" proposed in Congress. The SAVE Act—which would require anyone registering to vote in federal elections to provide documentary proof of US citizenship—passed in the House last month.
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'Apocalyptic Wasteland' for GOP as Trump's Iran War Sends Economy Spiraling: Polling Analyst
"Trump’s numbers on the economy are radioactive."
Mar 23, 2026
As President Donald Trump's unconstitutional Iran war drags on into its fourth week, fresh polling analysis shows the president and his Republican Party are politically at their weakest point ever in the eyes of the American public.
Writing in The Argument on Monday, polling analyst Lakshya Jain made the case that Trump has created an "apocalyptic wasteland" for the GOP by combining "a cost-of-living crisis with an unpopular war and tariff policies from the 1930s."
Jain noted that Trump's approval rating in The Argument's latest monthly survey had fallen to 40%, while his disapproval rating has soared to 58%, resulting in the lowest net approval for the president so far in his second term.
What should be particularly disturbing to the president, Jain said, is that disapproval of Trump is being driven by dissatisfaction with the state of the economy, the only area in which he was rated positively by voters throughout most of his first term.
"Trump’s numbers on the economy are radioactive," Jain explained. "Every major demographic group of voters disapproves of his economic stewardship, including supermajorities of young and nonwhite voters. He's even underwater on this issue with white, non-college voters, a group he won in 2024 by more than 20 percentage points."
Voters are increasingly pessimistic about the future as well, as 50% of voters believe the economy will get worse over the next year, while just 37% say it will get better.
To top it all off, Jain said, Trump's wounds on the economy are self-inflicted, including his tariff policies that have raised prices for consumer goods and his war on Iran that has sent energy prices skyrocketing.
"Trump is doing the exact opposite of what people asked for," Jain said. "Tariffs have resulted in global economic upheaval. The war in Iran—which began before the fielding of this survey—resulted in an oil shock that has sent gas prices soaring. And Trump’s actions on immigration have shrunk the labor pool, leading voters to partially blame the administration’s immigration policies for exacerbating the cost of living crisis."
Jain wasn't the only polling analyst to find Trump's public standing at a record low, as Real Clear Politics revealed on Monday that the president's job approval in its average of polls had hit a second-term low of 41.6%.
Trump's net approval also reached its lowest level ever in polling analyst Nate Silver's polling average, and Silver said that it could go even lower in the coming days as gas prices continue to rise.
"Still going to be some lagging effects as polls catch up, but gas has increased from $2.93 per gallon to $3.94 over the past month," Silver commented on Sunday, "and Americans aren't liking that."
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