Inspired by events in the Middle East and North Africa, 19-year-old Jabbar Savalan used facebook to call for protests against the Azerbaijan government.

The next day he was arrested, and later convicted on fabricated drugs charges. He is now serving two and a half years in prison.

Jabbar turns 20 on Sunday 4 September. Despite efforts to appeal against his conviction, it now looks certain that he will spend his birthday behind bars.

We consider Jabbar to be a prisoner of conscience, convicted as punishment for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression.

As he prepares to turn 20 in a cell he shouldn’t inhabit, we want you to send Jabbar a birthday card and help us show him that he has the support of people around the world.

Post from the UK should take 7-10 days to reach Azerbaijan, so please try to send your card by Wednesday 24 August to ensure it arrives in time.

It would be great if you could include an Azeri message in your card – ‘Ad günün mübarək olsun Cabbar’ means ‘Happy birthday Jabbar’. We’ve created a handy document that means you can print this message onto labels and stick it straight in your card. Alternatively, you can download the Azeri message on an A4 word document and create your own personalised card.

• Download the message labels (word)
• Download the A4 Azeri message (pdf)

Since there’s a whole sheet of labels there, why not ask your friends, family and colleagues to send cards too?

Jabbar is a Liverpool fan so football-themed cards would be particularly appreciated.

Cards should be posted to:

Jabbar Savalan
Detention Centre No. 10
Muzaffar Narimanov Street
Narimanov District
Baku City
AZERBAIJAN

Please don’t send any religious cards or messages. You can include your own name and address if you like.

As well as asking people to show Jabbar their support, we are of course also campaigning for him to be immediately and unconditionally released. You can email the President of Azerbaijan to call for Jabbar’s freedom.

Earlier today, our main International site – the bit of Amnesty that does the majority of our research – was blocked by the Saudi authorities following our criticism of a proposed anti-terror law. The proposed law would allow authorities to class even small acts of dissent as terrorism – you can read our original news release here.

The main reason they’ve blocked it is because we’ve got full copies of the proposed law – here’s the draft law in Arabic. And here’s the Security Committee report, also in Arabic.

Although the Saudi authorities have blocked our main international site, they haven’t yet blocked any Amnesty UK site, as far as we know. So we’re hosting the Arabic version of the release for all to see. Pass it on!

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.

We’ve already handed in a 165,000-strong global petition calling on the Syrian authorities to stop shooting and shelling Syrian people, and with our current action you can call on UN Security Council members to back a resolution referring the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court.

And just as we’re using Facebook and Twitter to spread the word – so are Syrian government ultra-loyalists. Late yesterday, well over 1,000 comments have been posted on our Facebook wall telling us, quite simply, to butt out!

The majority of all of these comments come from a handful of accounts, and repeat the same messages – that we’ve no right getting involved, and that a rash of “armed groups” or “terrorists” means the army must be deployed.

All the evidence we’ve seen confirms our belief that innocent, unarmed protestors are being arrested, tortured, and even shot and killed – including children. Whilst states have a responsibility to maintain order, that’s got to happen within international human rights law. We’ve asked repeatedly for entry into Syria to investigate the authorities’ claims of “armed groups and terrorists” threatening stability, but they won’t let us in. Which is telling in itself.

This Facebook-spamming is just another way of trying to stop us highlighting human rights abuses. That they’ve felt threatened enough by Amnesty’s actions to spend time posting the same messages again and again suggests we’re on the right path. If you’ve not yet, call on key members of the Security Council to protect peaceful protestors. And if you have, share it. A few thousand copied Facebook comments aren’t going to stop us standing up for the rights of Syrians seeking an end to poverty, corruption and repression.

You never get a lot of notice of the Foreign Secretary’s travel plans. That’s why, when we found out he was in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, we knew we had just a couple of hours to make the most of the opportunity.

With 2 Saudi women, Rima bint Abdul Rahman al-Jareesh and Sharifa al-Saqa’abi, held following a protest calling for a fair trial of their loved ones, our Urgent Action Network was already swinging into action with faxes to the Ministry of the Interior and the King. The Foreign Secretary visiting gave us a great opportunity to try a new way of talking about our concerns – and as he’s a regular tweeter, we asked you to tweet him details of their case.

Over 120 of you retweeted us or sent your own messages to Hague, most of you within the hour. It might not sound a lot, but imagine if you got all of those on your phone in the space of 60 minutes!

We certainly got the Foreign Secretary’s attention, as once he was back he tweeted:

@AmnestyUK I have asked our UK Embassy to look into the case. Right to peaceful protest should be respected & legitimate aspirations heeded

Late yesterday, we received confirmation that al-Jareesh and al-Saqa’abi had been released on Wednesday evening! This is great news, especially as the Saudi authorities have a history of abuse and torture of detainees.

As always, we’ll never know exactly what changed their minds, but we do know that we successfully put their cases on William Hague’s agenda. Thank you if you tweeted and if you sent an Urgent Action fax or letter. And if you’re not a member, you can join the Urgent Action Network here.

On Sunday 3rd July, 15 women and 5 children were arrested in Saudi Arabia during a protest to demand fair trials for their relatives. All but 2 women have now been released after they were believed to have signed pledges not to protest again.

The 2 remaining women – Rima bint Abdul Rahman al-Jareesh and Sharifa al-Saqa’abi – have previously signed petitions calling for reform in the country. In addition, al-Jareesh is believed to have refused to sign the pledge or to have her mahram (male guardian) act as her guarantor to secure her release.

Saudi Arabia has form when it comes to protestors – people face gross human rights violations at the hands of the security forces including being denied access to lawyers, torture, and forced confessions. Women face even more discrimination in law, including the need for a male guardian to travel outside their own homes.

If these women were arrested solely for peacefully demonstrating in public, then Amnesty considers them to be prisoners of conscience, and they should be immediately and unconditionally released.

Take action – Send a tweet to William Hague

Today the UK Foreign Secretary William Hague is in Saudi Arabia for talks with the Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud. He’s most likely only there today, so we’ve just a few hours to ask him to raise the cases of al-Jareesh and al-Saqa’abi with the Prince Saud.

As William Hague is active on twitter, we’re hoping he’s checking his blackberry today! Let’s send him a message he can’t ignore. We’ve a couple of suggested tweets below – just press ‘tweet’ next the one you like most, or write your own – but keep it polite!

Dear @williamjhague, 2 Saudi women remain detained for asking for fair trials of loved ones. Will you raise their case?

Dear @williamjhague, Saudi women have been detained simply for asking for a fair trial of their loved ones. Please help.

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.

Our Twitter action yesterday for wrongly-imprisoned Azerbaijan journalist Eynulla Fatullayev certainly had an impact in Azerbaijan and here in the UK.

Our message to President Aliyev – “Eynulla Fatullayevi Azad et!”, or “Free Eynulla Fatullayev” was tweeted about 600 times to the President’s account. Top journalists at our Media Awards lent their support, including Jon Snow from Channel 4 News, John Mulholland from the Observer and Private Eye’s Ian Hislop. The message was tweeted and retweeted by supporters in Azerbaijan too.

But it seems that not everyone in Azerbaijan likes what we’re saying…

Some government supporters in Azerbaijan have reacted angrily online. If you took the action, you may have got some flak from these tweeters in response.

This was then taken a step further, presumably by the same people. Some of the photos taken at the Media Awards, of people holding up our “Eynulla Fatullayevi Azad et!” placard, were photoshopped with pro-Azerbaijan or anti-Amnesty messages and tweeted back. Cheeky.

To say that Amnesty is picking on Azerbaijan is ridiculous – take a look at our ‘actions’ page and you’ll see that Eynulla’s is just one of many cases we’re working on. It’s not even accurate to imply, as the doctored pics do, that we’ve failed to comment on the conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. There’s this comprehensive report that we issued at the time, for instance.

As far as we’re concerned, we’re happy that our action has rattled a few cages in Azerbaijan. After 50 years of speaking truth to power, Amnesty’s got a very thick skin: we’re quite used to governments and their supporters reacting angrily to our criticism of their human rights records.

We certainly won’t stop campaigning for Eynulla. In fact, supporters in the USA are now picking up the baton and promoting the Twitter action. We’re planning more work on his case, as part of a sustained campaign. Keep an eye on the www.amnesty.org.uk/eynulla page for updates.

Eynulla Fatullayev is a prisoner of conscience, imprisoned for the peaceful expression of his beliefs, and should be released immediately and unconditionally. A few photoshopped pictures aren’t going to stop us campaigning for him. Or you, we hope – thank you for making our Twitter action a success.

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.

Take our twitter photo action – Eynulla Fatullayevi Azad Et!

What to do:

1. Download and print our Amnesty placard (on white, or on black), or get creative with the message “Eynulla Fatullayevi Azad Et!”, which is  “Free Eynulla Fatullayev!” in Azeri.
2. Take a photo of yourself with our placard or your own version
3. Tweet your picture with the following message:
   I’m calling on @presidentaz to free wrongly imprisoned journalist #Eynulla Fatullayev in #Azerbaijan [link to your pic]
   Please keep both of the hashtags so we can find your image and so the message reaches people interested in Azerbaijan.
4. Send a second message encouraging your followers to take part:
   Join me and send your own message urging the release of Eynulla Fatullayev – find out how at http://amn.st/eynulla
5. If you don’t want to take a photo, please join in and send a tweet to @presidentaz – remember to add both hashtags so we can see it!

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