By Tracy Sorensen
Sydney will resound to the sound of pealing church bells for an hour from noon on May 28 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the human rights organisation Amnesty International.
Church services across the country will bring together Amnesty members and their supporters to "remember the value of our work and recommit ourselves to trying to bring about a world that's safe, liberated and peaceful", NSW campaign coordinator Rhonda Ansiewicz told Green Left.
Amnesty began when British lawyer Peter Dennison was having coffee with friends, and noticed a newspaper story about young Portuguese students who had been imprisoned for voicing their political beliefs. Dennison and his friends decided on the spot to conduct a campaign. It lasted a year, and Amnesty International was born.
The group's credibility is difficult for anyone to challenge. While information it collected about the human rights abuses of the Iraqi regime was used — selectively, a long time after it was originally released — by the US government to justify the Gulf War, other Amnesty campaigns have made Western governments squirm: the shoot-to-kill policy of British soldiers in Ireland; the rate of imprisonment of blacks in the US; black deaths in custody here.
"Thirty years down the track, that work is still being done, but its being done by tens of thousands of people from all corners of the globe who support human rights", said Ansiewicz. "In every part of the world there are prisoners who are sitting in dark, miserable, despairing situations where the only thing that is giving them any hope is that some ordinary people somewhere in the world care enough to do something."
While Amnesty can never claim that prisoners have been released as a direct result of its work, "released prisoners have told Amnesty that when they were in prison, before the first wave of letters that came to that prison they had been starved and kept naked in cold dank conditions. Then they got food. After the second wave they got clothing and after the third they got access to their family and legal representatives."
Information is gathered by regionally based researchers and carefully sifted at the international secretariat in London. Newspaper clippings, personal testimonies from prisoners and prisoners' families and any other information are collated to form a general picture of human rights abuses.
Letters from ordinary people to prisoners, their families and governments around the world form the mainstay of Amnesty's work. In NSW, there are 15,000 members of the group and an estimated 30,000 supporters.
"Wherever you go, there's little pockets of people doing their bit", said Ansiewicz. "For some reason every one of those people has been struck by the need to go out there and do something for human rights."
Amnesty firmly steers clear of aligning itself politically. This, says Ansiewicz, is the source of Amnesty's international credibility. On the other hand, she points out, Amnesty members are not apolitical, but tend to be "activist sort of people" who are often involved in other issues.
"Our basic concern is the human rights of every person on the face of the earth, no matter what they believe, their ethnicity, their religion, or what their political affiliation is. We're investing in the future, to make it better world." n