Sorry for the incorrect date on the title of our earlier post! To confirm:
Our next monthly meeting is next week, on Tuesday 8th April, at the Silver Street Baptist Church, Taunton, TA1 3DH. 8pm start.
All are most welcome to join us for campaign updates, news and actions and to find out more about human rights and the work of Amnesty International.
Central African Republic is in the grip of a humanitarian crisis. Muslims are being ethnically cleansed and millions need urgent help.
Please sign the petition telling President Obama its time to take the lead on establishing a UN peacekeeping force to effectively protect civilians, stop people being forced to flee their homes and to end the bloodshed.
For background information to the conflict, download Amnesty’s report here.
“The world’s worst humanitarian crisis”. March 15th 2014 marks the third anniversary of the Syrian uprising.
Amnesty, along with other humanitarian organisations such as Oxfam, Save the Children & Christian Aid, plans to highlight the plight of over 250,000 civilians trapped in besieged areas of Syria with little food, water or medicine. We are pressing for humanitarian aid to be delivered to Syria, shining a light these people’s plight.
We signed letters and emails to the Syrian Government and the main Opposition parties, urging them to deal with this appalling situation.
Our speaker this month was Ann Marcus of Amnesty International UK, who is the Country Co-ordinator for Egypt and spoke most interestingly and with great authority on the affairs of that troubled country.
After a period of hope for Egypt’s future after the events of the Arab Spring, and the election of Mohamid Morsi as the new President, a familiar pattern of repression has been re-asserted. There is, sadly, plenty of work for Amnesty to do.
We meet on the second Tuesday of the month at the Silver Street Baptist church; all are welcome.
In March 2010, Darius Evangelista was arrested by police in the Philippines, on suspicion of theft. Fellow detainees saw him brought back to their cell badly injured. “Get rid of him” a policeman ordered. They never saw him again. Neither have his family.
No one has been brought to justice for his torture, enforced disappearance and possible extrajudicial execution. As part of Amnesty’s focus this year on victims of torture, we wrote to the Director General of Police in Manila. Find out how you can join us in appealing for justice for the Evangelista family.
The Group held their AGM this month. Highlights have been Laura’s development our new website, our campaign for Dr Tun Aung of Burma, Barbara’s untiring efforts on the Death Penalty and Pat’s very successful Write for Rights day.
National feed-back on Write for Rights (where people are asked at Christmas to send greetings & appeals for those imprisoned or persecuted) has been encouraging. Ihar Tsikhanyuk of Belarus wrote: “When I feel left with no hope to fight, I’ll get a letter and it inspires me. The light of hope appears again.”
At our March meeting Ann Marcus of Amnesty UK will speak on the Middle East and North Africa. All are extremely welcome to attend at 8pm on Tuesday March 11th 2014 at the Silver Street Baptist Church, Taunton.
In March 2010, Darius Evangelista was arrested in Manila on suspicion of theft. Fellow detainees saw him brought back to their cell badly injured, before being taken from the police station. They never saw him again.
In August 2010, a video was broadcast on national television of a naked man crying out in pain on the floor, while a police officer beat and abused him. Darius’s wife is convinced that the man in the video is her husband as she recognised his tattoos. It’s the last time she saw her husband alive.
No one has been brought to justice for the torture, enforced disappearance and possible extra-judicial execution of Darius Evangelista.
What you can do to help.
1. Write to the Chief of Philippine National Police calling for justice for the Evangelista family. Address: PDG Nicanor Bartolome, PNP National Headquarters Camp General Crame, Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines.
2.Send a message via Facebook on the Philippines Police Chief’s Facebook page.
3. Send a message of support to the Evangelista family. Address: Margie Evangelista, c/o Center for International Law, Unit 1904 Antel Corporate Center, 121 Valero Street, Salcedo Village, Makati City, Philippines
All are welcome to join us at 8pm on Tuesday 11th February at the Silver St Baptist Church. Part of this meeting will be the group’s 2014 AGM. Click here to view location on a map.
Missed January’s meeting? Read all about it here.
The first meeting of 2014: an occasion to look forward to new plans and initiatives, and maybe, even, in hope.
One for whom we hope, and on whom we are still concentrating as the New Year begins, is Dr. Tun Aung, the Group’s adopted Prisoner of Conscience in Burma. He has been sentenced to 17 years’ imprisonment after an unfair trial, having been arrested following riots between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in Maungdaw, a town in western Burma, in June 2012. Independent eyewitnesses confirm that Dr Aung actively tried to calm the crowd during the rioting and played no role in the violence. Nevertheless, he was convicted of inciting riots and various other criminal offences.
Speaking in London in July 2013, Burma’s President Thein Sein gave his guarantee that all prisoners of conscience would be freed from his country’s jails by the end of the year; we continue to press him for Dr Tun Aung’s release.
We heard reports on the Death Penalty (possibly some improvement in China, Singapore and Saudi Arabia, but more, and more brutal, in Iran) and signed a plea for a prisoner in Iraq. One of Amnesty’s main campaigns for 2014 is for victims of torture.
The group’s AGM will be held in February; in March Ann Marcus will speak on the Middle East and North Africa. All are welcome at our meetings, 8pm the second Tuesday of the month at the Silver Street Baptist Church.
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All are most welcome to join us for our first group meeting of 2014 on Tuesday 14th January at 8pm, at Silver Street Baptist Church. For more information about our meetings and where we are, please click here.
Amnesty International Taunton Local Group 