Simon Cosgrove of the charity Rights in Russia came to our May meeting and talked at length about their aims and experience and rights in Russia today. A quotation from their website sketches the background:
‘Rights in Russia is a community of people committed to supporting the protection of human rights in the Russian Federation. The mission of Rights in Russia is to provide information about human rights in Russia and to support the work of human rights organizations based in the Russian Federation. We believe the voices of Russia’s human rights defenders should be more widely heard internationally, both by civil society and by governments. We wish to address a continuing shortage of accurate information in English about human rights in Russia.’
They’ve recently launched a new project, very familiar to Amnesty members, of writing letters of support to political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. These need to be in Russian, so they’ve established a group of translators to facilitate this. Contact http://www.rightsinrussia.org for further information.
In the rest of our meeting we signed cards prepared by Alun to BK16 prisoners in India and a letter Sue had written to the Public Prosecutor in Cairo about the detention without trial of 26 year old student Oqba Hashad.
On Saturday 11 May the group ran an Amnesty stall at the Taunton Eat Festival in the town centre. Very busy (and good weather!). We had petitions for visitors to sign for Russian Alexei Gorinov, imprisoned for protesting about the war in Ukraine, and Alaa Abdel Fattah, former hunger striker, former hunger striker, well known to us as the dual English/Egyptian national imprisoned for his human rights activism.
Our next meeting is at 7.30pm on Tuesday 11 June in the Quaker Meeting house, Bath Place, Taunton. We’d love to see you there!
Amnesty International Taunton Local Group 
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