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.

Send a message to the President of Azerbaijan – @presidentaz on twitter

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

Don’t have a twitter account?

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

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

A simple Twitter message, repeated by just a few hundred users, and the world’s biggest company was scrambling to set up an online dialogue.

The request was for an opportunity to discuss Amnesty’s recent report ‘Petroleum, Pollution and Poverty’, which highlighted human rights abuses in the Niger Delta, where despite vast profits for oil companies, 31 million people are living in poverty.

The details were soon finalised. It was to happen on the Shell Dialogues site, with a parallel and open chat right here on Protect the Human.

On one side was Shell, with a panel of five senior staff, a slick introductory video and a well-oiled PR machine. On the other, the 445 individuals who had registered to take part, including experts from Amnesty, the Remember Saro-wiwa campaign, Friends of the Earth and local organisations based in Nigeria.

The stage was set.

What followed was an endless stream of questions about Shell’s human rights record, including why they continue with gas flaring despite a government ban, why they haven’t published their environmental assessments, and why they have failed to adequately clean up oil spills.

It didn’t take long before cracks began to appear in their positive PR machine, with country chair Basil Omiyi admitted that ‘Yes’, Shell does believe that pollution and environmental damage associated with the oil industry has contributed to poverty and conflict in the Niger Delta. Their assertion that ‘the oil industry’s footprint is impacting on small parts of the delta’ was an understatement of epic proportions, and their claim that ‘Shell is giving all spills immediate attention’ was completely dismissed by those working in the Niger Delta.

We should give Shell some credit for at least being willing to discuss these issues, though their rose tinted view fooled no one.

The next step is to watch this space, for a promised transcript of the dialogue, along with answers to the questions they didn’t have time to answer. In the meantime we are analysing their answers and plotting our next move.

If you’ve not yet sent an email to Shell’s new CEO, please take a moment to do this. If you have, why not send a message to @shelldotcom on Twitter, asking them to respond to the 3500+ emails that have been sent.

Thanks to everyone who took part in the Shell webchat. We’ll be analysing Shell’s responses over the next few days, so watch this space!

If you were involved, please add your thoughts as a comment below.

The background

Thanks to you, and the hundreds of messages you sent to Shell via Twitter, we got them listening.

Shell agreed to host a webchat on their site Shell Dialogues about the Niger Delta. We took this opportunity to ask tough questions about Shell’s human rights and environmental practices in the Niger Delta.

We pulled together a bunch of information, from key facts all the way through to our full report to help you ask some hard questions, like “Will Shell commit to cleaning up all oil spills in the Delta?‘

_{Full Report (PDF) |  Summary (DOC)}

NEW: 20 questions Shell won’t answer (DOC)

Find out more about our campaign

Friday morning, waiting for 1:10, was nerve-racking;  When we asked all of you to change your status updates or tweet simultaneously, we really had no idea how it would go. As the time came however, it became apparent that it would all be okay, as the tweets started to mount up.

As we sat and relentlessly clicked refresh on  our Twitter search screens, we were astonished by just how many of you chose to take part. We’ve been busy crunching some numbers since then, trying to find ways to quantify this online action and see its real world results. We’re not quite finished yet, but here are just a few things we’ve already discovered.

Twitter

The effect of our action was most apparent on Twitter. Using data from sites like TwitScoop, we think people mentioned ‘oneten’ around 3000 times over the course of the day. We quite liked this graph that demonstrates the bubbling activity and peak in the hours surrounding 1:10.

It was fascinating to watch as the message spread and how it was amplified when Twitterers such as @Dave_Gorman and @JemimaKiss with larger followings than our own picked the message up.

Blogs

We also owe quite a few bloggers a big thank you as they were instrumental in helping us get the message out.  It was also on the blogs that we saw the most heated debate. Our own blog has received over 75 comments  debating the ins and outs of the campaign or just pledging support. The fiercest debate however took place on BoingBoing and Liberal Conspiracy and it was great to see such an engagement with the campaign.

Results

I’m also thrilled to be able to say that this campaign didn’t just create a noticeable moment online, it also referred over 8,500 to oneten.org.uk to learn about the issue and how they could make a difference.

We’re still waiting for final figures on how many people went on to email their MP, but will be sure to share that as soon as possible. What we do know is that the amount of actions taken via ProtectTheHuman.com trebled from its usual weekly average and a vast majority of the actions being taken were part of our Stop Violence Against Women campaign.

This is a fantastic result so far, and all of us at Amnesty UK would like to say an enormous thank you to everyone that took part, who spread the word, or who debated the issue. Hopefully we’ll be able to tell you even more about how your actions have helped over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

What next?

Right now there a few things you can do to help this campaign further:

• Did you email your MP? Have they replied to you? Let us know in the comments on this blog.

• Let us know how you think the campaign went, what could be done better next time?

• To take further action on our Stop Violence Against Women campaign, or any of our other campaigns, then sign up to ProtectTheHuman.com and add your voice to an active online human rights community

Thanks again to all of you who have taken part already. We’re putting together a case study of what we did, why and how so keep posted for more news, stats and updates soon.

]]> http://pthblog.amnesty.org.uk/so-how-did-it-go/feed/ 9 http://pthblog.amnesty.org.uk/each-year-around-1-in-10-women-in-britain-experience-rape-or-other-violence/ http://pthblog.amnesty.org.uk/each-year-around-1-in-10-women-in-britain-experience-rape-or-other-violence/#comments Fri, 27 Feb 2009 10:21:35 +0000 agnes http://blog.protectthehuman.com/?p=67

One in four local authorities leave female victims of violence without the specialised support they need.  Scary, isn’t it?

Find out how the flashmob went to spread this message for International Women’s Day

Make a difference – email your MP now

Of course, this campaign has a concrete action.

End Violence Against Women’s new website ‘Map of Gaps’ shows exactly which services for women escaping violence are lacking where.

See what services are missing in your local area, and email your MP directly on Mapofgaps.org – it’s that easy to make a big difference.

Violence against women affects women globally, cutting across boundaries of wealth, race, and culture.  Here are a couple of actions relating to women outside the UK.

The most common impact of conflict on women is the use of rape as a weapon of war. In fact, it is now more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier in modern conflict.

Justine Masika Bihamba and her family have been attacked because of her work as coordinator of a women’s human rights organisation in the Congo. Although they can identify the soldiers, they have still not been arrested. Take action now

Women in Iran are second-class citizens in the family and before the courts – yet more than 60% of university students are women and they work in all kinds of jobs.

Many Iranian women want to challenge this discrimination and they have asked the international community to support them in their struggle. Sign the petition to end discriminatory laws in Iran

To do even more or to take action on our other campaigns then register at ProtectTheHuman.com

Snow, snow, snow. I know it’s all anybody has talked about all week but I’d like to chip in with Amnesty UK’s own snowy adventure.

As some of you may know, we’ve been getting quite into Twitter of late (along with everyone else and his dog) and have been using our slowly growing network as guinea pigs whilst we trial the idea of offering all of our followers one small way to help, every day. The idea is simple, if we have 1000 plus followers, and each of them has between 10 and 100,000 of their own, when we post an action its potential impact is huge. This is good news for human rights.

Some of the actions we’ve been trying out have been fairly standard. You know the sort; send an email, sign the petition, and so on. Sometimes they’re more about getting the word out and just occasionally we have the chance to do something that is a bit more fun.

So back to the snow.  London ground to a halt and our office was shut. As I started to work from home, all I could think about was the ankle-deep blanket of the stuff sitting just outside my front door. What excuse could I possibly have to play in the snow whilst working? Then it dawned on me. Snowmen for human rights.

I was half-joking when I emailed the rest of the team, but a quick collective approval sent me into action. Having been following the #uksnow tag on Twitter since the previous night, I knew that was my first port of call.

The reaction to the idea was fantastic and within a few hours we were in the top three most re-tweeted posts on Twitter. A first! From there the idea snowballed (excuse the pun), messages were sent on Facebook and members of the team headed out to their local parks to see what they could rustle up.

It wasn’t until the next day, when we made it back into the office, that a few photos began to emerge. After they were uploaded to ProtectTheHuman.com, I excitedly shared them on Twitter.  The Guardian then picked up on the idea and mentioned it in their live snow blog.

This, to me, is a great example of why Amnesty and Twitter can be a great match. It gives us a space to be part of conversations we otherwise wouldn’t be, as well as the chance to engage our supporters in new ways. Whilst this action wasn’t a direct one, the effect was a growth in our network. This means that the next time we have an urgent action; the number of people taking action and sending an email will hopefully increase.

We’re already seeing the effect of this in cases such as that of Larry Ray Swearingen and Bahman Salimian. Both were due to be executed and in the final 24 hours before their execution dates we asked our network on Twitter to send an email calling for them to be halted. The reaction was fantastic and around 400 emails were sent across the two cases with both being granted a last minute stay. Whilst the emails might not have been the deciding factor, they could have been, and as the volume of emails we can send at a moments notice increases, so does the effectiveness of our campaigning.