"The staggering scale of arrests, imprisonments and flogging sentences reveal the extreme lengths the authorities have gone to in order to suppress peaceful dissent.
"The scale of the arrests, imprisonment and flogging sentences reveal the extreme lengths the authorities have gone to in order to suppress peaceful protesters," said Philip Luther, Amnesty International's director of research and advocacy for the Middle East and North Africa.
Are gay people to be used as scapegoats to make failing politicians popular?" "The notion that it is 'un-African' to be gay puts gay Africans in an impossible position," said Kay. "First you have to argue that you are as African as the next African, then you're flogged, sentenced to life imprisonment, ostracised and while all that's happening to you, you're stripped of your racial identity too.
How then to explain the silence of the Maldives' liberally-inclined President Mohamed Nasheed at the flogging sentences handed out to 150 of his countrywomen in July for extramarital sex?
Throughout the year, 11 lawyers, 50 media workers and 91 students were also detained arbitrarily, with at least 20 media workers sentenced to long jail sentences or flogging after unfair trials, according to Amnesty.
Interceding with a Saudi prince to get a British lorry driver's sentence to flogging commuted.
It's comedy, but it's also their means of protest; it comes just after a man has been sentenced to flogging for playing the sport.
This was neatly captured in a report by Amnesty International, detailing issues ranging from routine discrimination against women, the illegality of homosexuality, and sentences of flogging.
In 2010, the case of Lubna Hussein, a Sudanese U.N. official, sparked international furore when she was sentenced to flogging for wearing trousers.
And this was a world that controlled its poor through debtors' prisons, workhouses (sweatshops for the destitute) and harsh sentences, from flogging to prison to exile to death, for stealing even life's basic necessities.
