To mark International Roma Day, Taunton Amnesty are delighted to be hosting Ulrike Schmidt, Amnesty UK Country Coordinator for the Balkans, who will give a presentation:
Roma Rights are Human Rights! An investigation into discrimination and racism experienced by Europe’s largest minority.
Ulrike has led the Amnesty Roma Rights campaign for more than ten years.
We would welcome any local Amnesty supporters, members of other local Amnesty groups as well as members of other local and related groups who would like to join us.
The event will start at 7.30pm at the Taunton Quaker Meeting House, Bath Place, Taunton, TA1 4EP. Free car parking is available in The Crescent Car Park, The Crescent, TA1 4EA just behind the venue.
We welcomed some new members of the committee – Liz who has taken over as Vice Chair, Andrew, our new Treasurer and Lyndsay, our new Secretary. Special thanks go to Ben, Sue and Rosanna as they step down, for all their hard work for the group over the past years and we are glad that they will all continue to be active within our group.
Updates from our local groups newsletter included news from the Niger Delta. Public proceedings have started in the Shell vs Ogale and Bille case. These two communities have experienced the effects of Shell’s oil operations in their country which have caused chronic pollution and lost livelihoods. They hope to force Shell to fulfil their environmental obligations and clean up polluted sites and provide compensation. If this is successful, it could pave the way for other communities to take action against Shell too. Meanwhile, Shell has obtained approval for the sale of its business in the Niger Delta so it’s more important than ever that they are held accountable for the damage they have caused.
We watched a short film entitled Yellow about life in modern Afghanistan. Just 12 minutes long, it was a thoughtful portrayal of the impact of the chadari and is well worth watching.
Sue brought an action for Nasser Zefzafi, a Moroccan political activist, who has been in prison for more than 20 years for speaking out for better healthcare education and employment opportunities. His health is deteriorating and we signed and posted cards calling for his immediate release.
Pat is making great progress in building links with Richard Huish College who are holding a letter writing event for Oqba Hashad – more details about this case at https://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions/FreeOqba.
We ended the meeting with a discussion on how we could raise our profile, particularly at local events as we are keen to attract more members and public interest. Our wish list includes a small gazebo and banners – more information on this in due course…
Recommended reading includes My Dear Kabul, a collective diary of 21 women as their lives unfold under the Taliban.
Our next meeting is on Tuesday 8 April at 7.30pm – please do come along if you’d like to find out more.
The February meeting began with our AGM, all officers being re-elected unopposed.
The Chair gave an overview of the year’s activities, speakers and campaigns. North Africa and India have been prominent, with a new initiative on Zimbabwe and ongoing support of the Middle East & North Africa, Football Welcomes and the Death Penalty. We had speakers on Kashmir and Zimbabwe, and a talk on a fund-raising climb of Kilimanjaro for AI by a student whom we sponsored. We held three Write for Rights events in December.
The Secretary reported the perennial problem of access to the local press: the County Gazette has discontinued reports from local societies, and AIUK no longer presents Actions in a readily publicisable form. Suggestions for using other outlets, and our own experience of the Letters page may point a way forward.
Suggestions were made for broadening our appeal, perhaps using email to circulate those on AIUK’s local lists, and promoting hybrid meetings using Teams if this can be done without jeopardising our successful monthly meetings.
Our regular monthly meeting followed. The Groups’ Newsletter urged us to sign a number of AI petitions: for human rights defender Rita Karasartova of Kyrgyzstan; for freedom of expression in Jammu Kashmir; for justice and reparation in Peru after brutal repression of protests; for freedom of expression in Bangladesh before recent elections, and for charges against our adopted Zimbabwean prodemocracy activist Makomborero Haruzivishe to be dropped.
We were reminded of priority campaigns for AIUK: Ending Israeli Apartheid, and Protect the Protest – a call on the Home Secretary to scrap anti-protest laws.
We discussed a letter from Chris Ramsey, ex-SW regional rep, about Amnesty Futures, a group anxious to get back to campaigning on worldwide Individuals at Risk rather than disproportionately increasing the scale of work and deployment of resources on thematic UK-focused human rights issues. He will be addressing our March meeting to further clarify concerns about and hopes for AIUK.
Our Middle East lead had written to President al-Sisi about the detention and torture of Anas al-Beltagy, the son of an Opposition politician. Our India lead will be writing to the Indian High Commissioner about two members of the BK16 who are bailed but still in goal. Meantime another member is hoping to organise a speaker on Russia.
There is an Eat Festival in Taunton on 11 May – we are hoping to have a publicity stall at this.
Our recommended Media of the Month is Jon Ronson’s BBC podcast series ‘Things Fell Apart’ – human stories from the history of the culture wars.
Our next meeting is at 7.30pm on Tuesday 12 March at the Quaker Meeting House, Bath Place, Taunton. Newcomers are always welcome!
We based the first part of our meeting on the Amnesty Group Report for August. This updates us on the activities of other Groups and alerts us to current actions within AIUK.
There is concern over El Salvador, where a State of Exception – in effect a state of emergency – has run since March. Over 60,000 people have been imprisoned and more than 150 have died in custody. There’s an online Amnesty petition demanding their government should end the state of exception and respect the human rights of all their citizens – this can be found on the AI website.
There was a debate earlier in the month in the House of Commons about British Nationals detained abroad – Alaa Abdel Fattah in Egypt, and Morad Tahbaz and Mehran Raoof in Iran – we are anxious to keep our MPs briefed and working on these cases.
Our plans for Write for Rights in December were discussed – we’ll probably aim again, if it’s possible, for St Mary Magdalene Church in Taunton.
Sue, our Middle East & North Africa lead, wrote a detailed letter (signed by all) protesting about the prolonged detention in inhumane conditions, and the 5 year imprisonment, after an unfair trial, of Egyptian Badr Mohamed. The reason? Involvement in an alleged protest in 2013 when he was 17. She also wrote to the Algerian authorities about Slimane Bouhafs, an Algerian activist kidnapped from Tunisia and brought back for trial in Algeria. He has been imprisoned for 3 years.
Alun re-capitulated the sorry story of the BK16 in India. The Minehead Group held a vigil for them earlier this month. Cherry Bird, Minehead Group and South Asia Co-ordinator, keeps us up to date with South Asia briefings.
Media of the Month – several suggestions here:
Bringing Down Goliath: How Good Law Can Topple the Powerful – Jolyon Maughan KC
Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters – Adam Wagner
The Last Colony – Philippe Sands – about the British Indian Ocean Territories
Homelands – A Personal History of Europe – Timothy Garton Ash
Living Next Door to Putin – A two part piece on BBC1 by Katya Adler, Europe Editor.
Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 10 October, 7.30pm as usual at the Quaker Meeting House in Bath Place. Do join us there!
Our next monthly meeting will be on Tuesday 9th May at 7:30pm in The Quaker Meeting House, Bath Place, Taunton – all welcome. If you’d like to join remotely via Teams then please email amnestytaunton@gmail.com and we’ll send you a link.
The main focus of this month’s meeting was a Zoom call, with other Groups, on the role of AIUK North Africa Country Co-ordinators. One of our own group works on North Africa, and AI’s Country Co-ordinators, all impressively well-informed volunteers, are extremely active in sending through updates and calls for actions.
They try to keep in close contact with Groups, updating and supporting; they produce an ezine every 3 months and make extensive use of social media. They aim to produce a good spread of cases. On the advocacy side they maintain links with the FCDO, who are respectful of the materials Amnesty produces.
We have been working on the case of Egyptian housing officer Ibrahim Ezz el Din who, by happy chance, was released the day before our May meeting. We were especially pleased as two of our Group have organised a letter bombardment on his case, sending some 50 letters. We now plan to turn our attention to the campaign for Alaa Abdel Fattah, a human rights advocate who also has UK nationality.
We discussed Ukraine – there’s a letter for signature online urging the PM to help the people fleeing Ukraine, our response so far having been ‘slow, chaotic and insufficient’ – and other allied issues of migrant and refugee rights. The Nationality and Borders Bill has been passed, ‘ripping up the Refugee Convention (a long-standing international agreement) and shamefully abandoning the responsibility it owes to refugees’.
Amnesty is launching a Right to Protest campaign next month (in part a response to the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill) and continues to focus on the threat to human rights in our own country newly underlined by the new Bill of Rights announced in the Queen’s Speech.
We received reports from members on the Death Penalty campaign, Football Welcomes and India. Our India co-ordinator had prepared cards of support for us to send to members of the BK 15 group of political prisoners. We noted that the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, had commented that the US are monitoring the state of human rights in India.
The Death Penalty report contained the usual depressing list of those imprisoned for decades before execution, or of the mentally impaired executed – Singapore recently executed Nagaenthran Dharmalingam, a man with an IQ of 67.
We’re planning a Taunton town centre stall on 25 June – more details next month.
Our next meeting will be at 7.30pm on 14 June at the Quaker Meeting House, Bath Place.
Amnesty International Taunton Local Group 