AIUSA Group 48 will host its annual Write for Rights and holiday potluck in December. Write for Rights is Amnesty International’s annual global letter writing marathon that generate millions of messages for people whose basic human rights are under attack.
Date: Thursday, December 14, 2017
Time: 7:30-9pm (set up starts at 7:00pm)
Location: Buchan Building at First Unitarian Church (church map)
1011 SW 12th Ave, Portland, OR
Amnesty International
Press Release
September 14, 2017
Amnesty International can reveal new evidence pointing to a mass-scale scorched-earth campaign across northern Rakhine State, where Myanmar security forces and vigilante mobs are burning down entire Rohingya villages and shooting people at random as they try to flee.
The organization’s analysis of active fire-detection data, satellite imagery, photographs and videos from the ground, as well as interviews with dozens of eyewitnesses in Myanmar and across the border in Bangladesh, shows how an orchestrated campaign of systematic burnings has targeted Rohingya villages across northern Rakhine State for almost three weeks.
“The evidence is irrefutable – the Myanmar security forces are setting northern Rakhine State ablaze in a targeted campaign to push the Rohingya people out of Myanmar. Make no mistake: this is ethnic cleansing,” said Tirana Hassan, Amnesty International’s Crisis Response Director.
On Wednesday July 5th, Turkish authorities detained Amnesty International’s country director, Idil Eser, along with eight other human rights activists and two foreign trainers as part of a raid on a human rights workshop that Idil was attending.
For over 24 hours, they weren’t allowed to contact their families or see a lawyer — and no one even knew where they were.
Idil and the others were doing nothing wrong. Some are being questioned on suspicion of “membership of an armed terrorist organization,” a baseless and ridiculous accusation.
“The absurdity of these accusations against Idil Eser and the nine others cannot disguise the very grave nature of this attack on some of the most prominent civil society organizations in Turkey. If anyone was still in doubt of the endgame of Turkey’s post-coup crackdown, they should not be now. There is to be no civil society, no criticism and no accountability in Erdoğan’s Turkey.” – Salil Shetty, AI Secretary General.
Group 48 will be getting together for a Picnic in the Park! This is just an opportunity for us to have fun and build community as a group. Friends and family are welcome.
Saturday, June 17th
1pm
Sellwood Park
SE Miller St & SE 7th Ave, Portland
Please add a comment to this post to indicate what you will bring for the potluck.
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Next week, Arkansas will start up what many are calling an “assembly line of death”. Don. Bruce. Stacey. Ledell. Jack. Marcel. Jason. Kenneth. These are the eight men that Arkansas plans to execute over the course of ten days.
Eight executions in ten days is more than any state has undergone since the Supreme Court reinstated the capital punishment in 1976. So why the rush? Arkansas has exactly eight doses left of a crucial drug used to perform lethal injections, and it’s set to expire at the end of April. So, Governor Asa Hutchinson has scheduled eight executions packed into a ten-day period – as if the justice system was a conveyor belt. This rush to execute is wrong and reckless.
