Taking action together for Human Rights
At Amnesty we love a good Twitter action. You may have taken part in some of our recent social media campaigns for Troy Davis, for Eynulla Fatullayev or for 2 Saudi protestors. We’ve rattled leaders of countries like Azerbaijan’s President Aliyev by using social media as a tool for change, and we’ll do it again as we keep highlighting human rights abuses. Read full post
Ramze’s wife has asked us to pass on her thanks for all of your messages of support and solidarity:
Dear supporters,
My name is Rabiha and I am the wife of Ramze Shehab Ahmed. I would like to thank all of the supporters that contacted Ramze and shared their grace. I appreciate all the emails that were sent.
I would like to inform you that I have told Ramze about all the emails and support I have received and he thanks everyone that was there for him and wishes you all the best.
I thank everyone that helped and wrote for Ramze, this really does help him in his crisis and also helps me feel that there are still good people that want peace.
Thank you for your time to read this message.
Best regards,
Rabiha
Please keep showing your support – your messages mean a lot to Ramze and his family.
Dual Iraqi-British national Ramze Shihab Ahmed, 69, was detained in Iraq on 7 December 2009 and held for over a year without charge.
For the first four months of his detention he was held incommunicado in a secret prison. He alleges that during this period he was repeatedly tortured, including being suffocated with a plastic bag, suspended by his ankles, and given electric shocks to sensitive parts of his body.
His trial for terrorism-related offences is now under way. He has been cleared of the initial charges. We are calling on the Iraqi authorities to guarantee that Ramze receives a fair trial without the use of evidence obtained by torture, and to independently investigate his allegations of torture in detention.
In the comments below, we’d like you to leave a message of support so that Ramze and his family know that we are watching out for him.
Find out more: Download Ramze’s casesheet (PDF)
Do more: Send an email to the Iraqi authorities
Ramze is part of this year’s Write for Rights Greetings Card Campaign. Send messages to other individuals at risk
20-year old Jabbar Savalan is in prison serving a two-and-a-half year sentence after being convicted on drugs charges trumped up to punish him for his peaceful anti-government activities – using Facebook to call for protests against the Azerbaijani government.
We’ve been campaigning for his release and many of you may have already sent him a birthday card when he turned 20 in September. Tomorrow (18th October) Azerbaijan celebrates its own 20th birthday, of independence from the former Soviet Union, so we’re stepping up with a new action to remind the authorities they can’t deal with peaceful protest through questionable jail sentences.
We know from our Twitter action for Eynulla Fatullayev that we can have an impact in Azerbaijan and our messages will be read.
So we’re starting a global twitter action with several other Amnesty sections today calling for Jabbar Savalan’s release – and strengthening that call by asking the Foreign Office to also raise his case. To join in, just press the ‘tweet’ button below to send your message:
Tweet .@foreignoffice please ask @presidentaz to release #Jabbar Savalan, 20, locked up in #Azerbaijan for a facebook post:
Then please send this tweet to share our twitter action with your contacts:
Tweet Call for the release of #Jabbar Savalan, 20, jailed for using facebook to call for peaceful protest in #Azerbaijan
Why not join Twitter and give our action a go? You’ll also find it’s a great way to keep up-to-date with our campaign work!
Alternatively, you could share the message above on President Aliyev’s public Facebook page. Copy the text and add it as a comment to his latest update.
For more detail on Jabbar’s case, and to keep up to date with new actions in the campaign for his freedom, visit www.amnesty.org.uk/jabbar
Do you remember our email and twitter actions for Azerbaijani newspaper editor Eynulla Fatullayev, imprisoned in an attempt to silence his critical reporting of the government? Or our paper-chain demonstration?
After more than 4 years in detention on a series of trumped up charges, Eynulla’s release on 26 May was a real cause for heartfelt celebration. So many people, in Azerbaijan and around the world had called for Eynulla to be freed, and we were deeply moved to receive this letter addressed to all Amnesty International activists. We can’t echo his words enough – whatever you did in our 4 year campaign, thanks!
We’re absolutely delighted for Eynulla and his family that he is now home. Throughout Amnesty’s campaign for Eynulla, we were impressed by his determination to say what he believed needed to be said, despite the great personal cost. And he’s continuing to bravely speak out on spaces such as Twitter.
We’re going to keep speaking out about the continued repression of freedom of expression in Azerbaijan (watch their crackdown tactics in this video). Our new priority case is a youth activist who has been targeted in response to his activities on Facebook.
19-year-old Jabbar Savalan posted on Facebook on 4 February calling for protests against the government. The next evening he was arrested, and then sentenced on 4 May to two-and-a-half years in prison on fabricated drugs charges. We believe the real reason Jabbar was convicted was to punish him for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression.
Help us call for his release – email President Aliyev and call for Jabbar Savalan’s freedom.
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“Yet if these feelings of disgust all over the world could be united into common action, something effective could be done.” Peter Benenson
'It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.' Chinese proverb
May 1961. Elvis Presley is on the radio. Spurs fans are celebrating topping the football league. President Kennedy announces plans to put a man on the moon.
And one man is outraged by a news report on two Portuguese students imprisoned simply for raising their glasses in a “toast to freedom”. Amnesty International is born.
Because that man, British lawyer Peter Benenson, resolved to turn his outrage into action. He wrote an article called The Forgotten Prisoners which was first published in The Observer on 28 May 1961 and reproduced around the world.
In it Benenson highlighted cases like that of the Portuguese students, coining the phrase ‘prisoner of conscience’. He called for like-minded people to unite in an ‘appeal for amnesty’ on their behalf – and readers responded to that call.
In 1962, we were officially named Amnesty International. And since then, what began as a small band of volunteers based in London has grown to a global movement of over three million supporters with a presence in 61 countries, from Algeria to Venezuela.
We have written letters, signed petitions, issued urgent actions, demonstrated outside courtrooms and embassies, launched hard-hitting media campaigns and lobbied officials directly. More recently, we have embraced the opportunities offered by social media and mobile communications.
As the world has changed, so have we. But our objective – to protect people when their rights are denied, and end discrimination, persecution and harassment – has remained constant. See the faces of some of the individuals helped by Amnesty in this beautiful video featuring the banners produced for our 50th anniversary AGM.
In the 1970s, we held the first Secret Policeman’s Ball here in the UK, featuring the likes of John Cleese and Monty Python, Eric Clapton and Peter Gabriel. In the 1980s we broadened our remit to include work on refugees and human rights education.
In 1991 we decided to broaden our scope further to promote all rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in 2001 we began to work on economic, social and cultural rights, paving the way for global campaigns on maternal mortality, slums and corporate accountability.
You can explore key moments in our history on the interactive timeline below.
For fifty years, we have shone a light on human rights abuses that previously went unseen and unpunished and we will continue to do so. But as Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, possibly the world’s most famous prisoners of conscience, said in her birthday message to us:
“I wish, on this 50th anniversary of Amnesty International, that its work will continue to be so successful, that there will no longer be any need for such an organisation.
“So I hope that we shall be able to cooperate together to bring about this sad, this happy day when Amnesty International no longer needs to carry on its work.”
Aung San Suu Kyi
Yes, it’s true, Eynulla Fatullayev has been freed under presidential pardon. What a rollercoaster of a couple of days!
On Tuesday, we launched a twitter action to free Eynulla Fatullayev, the Azerbaijani journalist who has been jailed since 2007 for trumped-up charges designed to silence his critical reporting of the Government. With the help of Jon Snow and John Mulholland, we asked you to take a picture of yourself with the message “Eynulla Fatullayev Azad Et!” – Free Eynulla Fatullayev in Azeri – to send directly to @presidentaz. You did us proud and started tweeting your photos, retweeting, and sending messages of support.
We’d obviously got some people in Azerbaijan rattled. During the Media Awards, photoshopped versions of the pictures we’d just taken were tweeted back at us with pro-Azerbaijan messages – you may have received some yourself.
Not that the messages and pictures were going to hold us back. We were fully expecting this to be the continuation of a long campaign – we’ve worked hard for years to free Eynulla – and then this afternoon we started to hear rumours that Eynulla Fatullayev was to be pardoned. At Amnesty, we’re very wary of rumours until we can confirm everything, and then the happy news came from one of our campaigners.
This was a great turn of events, especially so shortly after our mass tweet action! Eynulla gave our campaigner Max this message for everyone who has campaigned for his release:
“I am very happy to be released. I am extremely grateful to Amnesty International, who have campaigned since the beginning. In my opinion you saved me. Thank you to all those who tweeted.”
Over 800 tweets were sent to @presidentaz since Tuesday, and we know that without making a noise, be it by protests, letter-writing or mass-tweeting, we could never get any prisoner of conscience released. So thank you.
I’ll leave you with a video taken today of Eynulla with his family. It’s in Azeri, but the sentiment and the emotion are crystal clear.