Taking action together for Human Rights
If you’ve been following us on Facebook or Twitter for the past few months, you’ll have spotted our concerns for the people of Syria keeps growing. From our in-depth report of the crackdown in Tell-Kalakh (our very own Neil Durkin talks about one protestor’s torture on our press blog), to video footage that appears to show an unarmed man shot by a sniper, the situation in the country is getting worse and worse – over 20,000 Syrians are now refugees in Turkey, trying to escape the bloodshed.
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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.
Two years ago at the Amnesty UK Media Awards, we honoured Azerbaijani newspaper editor Eynulla Fatullayev with the AIUK Special Award for Journalism Under Threat. Eynulla is an outspoken journalist who has been imprisoned since 2007 on a series of trumped up charges, including defamation, terrorism and incitement to ethnic hatred.
Even though the European Court of Human Rights have quashed some of the charges and called for his release, he remains under lock and key on a more recent conviction for drugs possession brought to dodge the ECHR ruling. We firmly believe that all the charges against Eynulla have been fabricated to silence his critical reporting of the Azerbaijani government, and that Eynulla is a prisoner of conscience.
As we prepare for the 2011 Media Awards, we’re renewing our calls to free Eynulla Fatullayev with a twitter action led by Channel 4’s Jon Snow. Journalists will be taking the action at tonight’s awards – we need you to join them.
What to do:
Have a look at the pictures being tweeted to @presidentaz in our lovely twitter widget:
UPDATE, 25th May: What an amazing response! We’ve seen well over 600 tweets so far, and an unexpected response from Azerbaijan – check our new blog post for details.
It’s an important day for us as we publish our latest annual report – The State of the World’s Human Rights Today.
And it’s not just important for us here. It’s a big day for any of us who, possibly for the first time, felt we could truly get involved as events such as the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa or the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. As social media went fully mainstream, images and videos that would hardly have been visible to an international audience before were suddenly available to anyone searching minutes after they were uploaded.
We didn’t just have to watch. We were able to show our support on Facebook, Twitter and on our own blogs. As internet outages started in Egypt, Twitter users and bloggers were able to help spread ways the protesters could circumvent blocks on social media sites. The level of interest and visibility across the world meant web giants like Google and Twitter felt they had a mandate to act – creating services such as ‘Speak2Tweet’ as internet outages become full-on blockages. It’s not surprising that Egyptian protester Wael Ghonim called the Egyptian protests “an Internet Revolution” in the Wall Street Journal.
As our report says, we’re standing on the threshold of change as a new generation comes of age and says ‘enough’ to repression and corruption. Social media isn’t leading the protests, but it is being used to outflank and expose governments whilst their leaders are still coming to terms with the power such sites give individuals.
But it is just the threshold of change. In China, artist Ai Weiwei continues to be held by the authorities, who are scared of their own ‘jasmine revolution’. And in Syria, we’ve had reports of over 580 people killed since protests started in mid-March, with army tanks in cities like Dera’a shelling residential areas.
You’ve never been more important in helping change happen. So don’t stop now! We need to keep the pressure up on governments like Syria.
Take action and sign our petition demanding an end to the bloodshed in Syria
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