Amnesty International Protect the Human Week

During the final week of term Warwick Amnesty hosted the highly successful ‘Protect the Human Week’. Sarah Clayton, one of ‘Protect the Human Week’s’ organisers, stated that its principle aim was to ‘provide information and provoke debate’ as it seems that many Warwick students simply aren’t aware of the human rights abuses carried out both in this country and abroad.

The week began with a slum-making master class from ‘Engineers without Borders’ and the technology activist Vinay Gupta. Using only cardboard, pieces of discarded wood and tarpaulin the team managed to construct temporary shelters on the piazza in which intrepid Amnesty members then spent the night. The sleep out was designed to raise awareness of the forced
evictions which are currently taking place in the slums of Nairobi.

A heated Question Time style debate on the subject of ‘Terrorism and Security’ took place on Monday. Speakers included David Davis MP, the former Conservative party chairman, and Robin Simcox who works for the ‘Centre for Social Cohesion’. The panel discussed the controversial issues of control orders, detention without trial and the future of the Guantanamo Bay. David Davis spoke passionately against the government’s willingness to sacrifice human rights in order to protect homeland security declaring: “Don’t give up your freedoms in defence
of your way of life because your freedoms are your way of life.”

The letter writing session held on Tuesday afternoon gave Amnesty members and other interested individuals the chance to voice their discontent at the ill treatment of prisoners who have been denied the right to a fair trial. Amnesty International promotes letter writing amongst its members as it helps “show solidarity with victims of possible human rights abuses” and the subsequent pressure applied to government authorities by this international scrutiny does “bring about real changes in the lives of the detainees.”

Wednesday saw a performance of the ‘Asylum Monologues’ by the ‘Ice and Fire’ theatre company which told the stories of three asylum seekers and their battle to be granted British citizenship. The actors were keen to stress that the stories they were narrating were entirely factual accounts given by genuine asylum seekers. The actors presented the audience with the particularly poignant and emotive testimony of ‘Marjorie’, a Ugandan woman who was
repeatedly raped and tortured as punishment for her husband’s political activism. The performance highlighted the failings of the Border Control Agency and the Home Office. and managed to explore the issue of asylum from a fresh perspective, moving away from the traditional ways in which immigration and asylum claimants are presented by the mainstream media.

A week full of thought-provoking events was brought to a close on Thursday evening with a discussion of the death penalty by Nawaz Hanif of the charity Reprieve and Angelika Pathak from Amnesty International. The speakers specifically focused on Pakistan which currently has the largest death row in the world with 7,000 prisoners awaiting execution. Nawaz Hanif talked movingly about his own experience of torture in a Pakistani jail after being wrongly accused of murder at the age of eighteen. Both speakers told of the frustration they encounter trying to negotiate the release of prisoners with the Pakistani police force which is reputed to be corrupt and has a completely different conception of justice from that of international human rights law.

Protect the Human Week is a nationwide Amnesty initiative with events such as the sleep out taking place in 32 towns and cities across the country. As a direct result of Amnesty action both at Warwick and elsewhere twenty more MPs have signed a declaration giving their support to the proposed deal to allow asylum seekers the right to work in the UK.