Monday (December 10) is Human Rights Day, but Manx Amnesty International members start their week of action before that. And they want the public to join in.
On the next two Saturdays members of the public can be part of ‘Write for Rights’, an international event which will mean thousands of letters being written to and about people who despots wish were long forgotten.
At two Manx venues there will be a display of 15 cases including feisty Afghan women’s right group Young Women for Change, Mehman Huseynov (facing five years imprisonment in Azerbaijan for using the Eurovision Song Contest to draw attention to that country’s appalling human rights record) and the 30,000 displaced people of Tawargha town, in Libya, which was burned down in 2011 by opposition fighters.
Tomorrow (Saturday) ‘Write for Rights’ is at Jabberwocky, the Douglas café. The following Saturday, December 15, it is at the Northern Lights Centre, Ramsey, from 2pm to 5pm.
At both venues, for the price of a foreign stamp, you can send a brief message of hope to people who badly need it.
Manx Amnesty activist Stuart Hartill said: ‘This is an event anyone can join in with, even if only for a few minutes. Just have a look at a highly varied list of individuals and organisations. Some have simply expressed opinions we would consider common sense. Others live under daily threats of state violence, or have had relatives murdered or “disappeared”.
‘There are full case details and we have cards and even foreign language translations of messages to be sent to both representatives of the governments concerned and their victims.’
Dates in the Manx Indepedent story on this are wrong. Apologies for that.