Write for Rights

I was arrested, tortured and imprisoned when I was just 16 years old. I was sentenced to death.

Police officers beat me with machetes and batons. The pain I went through was unimaginable. 

This May, my execution was halted and I walked free. Your Write for Rights letters saved my life. Thank you.

Please, help others who are being subjected to human rights abuses, as I was. Sign up for the 2015 Write for Rights campaign.

I am proof your Write for Rights letters work.

Without the thousands of letters sent in support of my case, I might never have been granted my freedom. Three other people were pardoned with me.

Amnesty International activists like you are my heroes. You’ve inspired me to become a human rights activist – to fight for others.

Will you join me? Will you fight to free the unjustly imprisoned as a participant in this year’s Write for Rights?

 By Sevag Kechichian, Researcher on Saudi Arabia at Amnesty International.

The death of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz has, once again, focused international attention to the oil-rich Middle Eastern country’s human rights record.

“What will be King Abdullah’s legacy?” everybody seems to be asking.

The answer is not simple.  

Since taking the throne in 2005, King Abdullah initiated some positive reforms.

Women, for example, have slowly been included in the Shura Council, a powerless consultative body to advise the King, and incorporated into the workforce – with some being allowed to work in courts as lawyers.

The late King is credited for opening a dozen new universities and providing thousands of Saudi Arabian citizens with generous scholarships to study abroad. He also initiated seemingly ambitious judicial reforms that have not really gone anywhere.  

He even decreed the founding of a formal National Human Rights Commission and allowed the establishment of a supposedly independent human rights organization.

But that’s where the good news ends.

“I have two of them now!” Jabeur Mejri is smiling and pointing at a flick book containing hundreds of photos of support taken by Amnesty International members. They were passed to Jabeur and his family while he was in prison in Tunisia over the last two years.

Jabeur was jailed for seven-and-a-half years in March 2012, for Facebook posts deemed offensive to Islam and the prophet Mohamed. “Prison was difficult,” he tells us. “The other prisoners used to harass me and beat me because of my views and none of the prison guards did anything to protect me.”

For the very first time, the Amnesty International Flag was raised at Barrie City Hall and will continue to wave to mark International Human Rights Day on December 10th. Mayor Jeff Lehman, students from Barrie Central, Maple Grove E.S., residents of Barrie and members of our local Barrie Amnesty International Action Circle were in attendance.

When we meet Shahzadi Bi in September, she is busy chaining herself to a fence. It’s not just any fence, but the one that surrounds the Chief Minister’s residence in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, where Bhopal is the capital. She is among a group of protesters demanding that the minister keep his promise of providing each survivor of the 1984 gas leak – the more than 570,000 who were exposed – 500,000 Indian rupees (US$8,170) as compensation.

Shahzadi, aged 60, lives in Blue Moon Colony, one of the 22 slums that surround the old pesticide factory formerly owned by Union Carbide India Limited. This area is blighted by water contamination, caused by chemicals from the abandoned factory site.

The disaster overturned her and her family’s lives. “Everyone has dreams,” she says. “I too had those. My dream was not about becoming a teacher or doctor… I wished that we would provide a good education to our children… but the gas leak shattered all these dreams.”