A prisoner of conscience languishes in a dank, dark cell. He is worried that his protests have been in vain and that he has been forgotten. He then learns that people from around the world are petitioning the government who locked him up to release him, and his spirits are revived. Examples of such a scenario are repeated over and over in the annals of Amnesty International.
“Action is the antidote to despair,” says Joan Baez, a folk singer and this year’s Amnesty Ambassador of Conscience. And action is what the over 7 million members of Amnesty International do on a regular basis around the world. Their primary focus is to write letters on behalf of prisoners of conscience and call attention to those whose human rights have been violated.
Bo Tedards, Amnesty Taiwan’s director since 2013, says its primary function is letter and post card writing so as to bring global awareness to the plight of political prisoners.
Photo: Jerome Keating
“Post cards have become a unique way of spreading this awareness ... and see whose name and case is being protested,” Tedards said in an interview with the Taipei Times.
This is a reversal from the Martial Law era, when people from around the world adopted Taiwan for their letter-writing campaign because of the numbers of political prisoners incarcerated during that time. Today, the Taiwan chapter of Amnesty has its own letter-writing campaigns to other countries.
Amnesty traces it founding to Peter Benenson’s The Forgotten Prisoners, an article published in 1961. Benenson’s article served as a catalyst to gather like-minded people to raise global awareness of the plight of prisoners of conscience. Taiwan got on the radar of the human rights organization in 1964 when it was petitioned to look into the arrest of Peng Ming-min (彭明敏) and two associates for their attempted publication of A Declaration of Formosan Self-salvation.
“A strong movement is rapidly sweeping across Taiwan. It is a self-salvation movement for the 12 million [the population at that time] people of Taiwan, who are unwilling to be governed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or destroyed by Chiang Kai-shek [蔣介石],” Peng wrote. He was soon arrested.
A breakthrough came when Martin Ennals, Amnesty’s secretary general, visited Taiwan and was secretly given a list by former prisoners Roger Hsieh (謝聰敏) and Li Ao (李敖) of over 180 political prisoners. Amnesty Japan (founded in 1970) helped to keep track of Taiwan’s political prisoners and, as a result, the Republic of China (ROC) government finally admitted that it had political prisoners.
The admission would have lasting repercussions. When numerous arrests were later made at a Human Rights rally in Kaohsiung (1979), later to be known as the Kaohsiung Incident, the trials of all those prisoners were closely watched.
In 1994, Amnesty Taiwan officially registered as an NGO, after having worked with the organization since 1989, and Bo Yang (柏楊), a former political prisoner, became its first chairman.
LETTER WRITING
Every Amnesty group that sends letters keeps a record of how many it has sent and on whose behalf. Governments, even authoritarian ones, are bureaucratic by nature, so that when these letters arrive, they are read, registered and sent to the appropriate department to handle. Several people usually sign off on these letters as they go through appropriate channels. The letters later become part of the documentation.
Tedards wryly comments that when Amnesty letters written in English came to Taiwan in the early 1980s, it was Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), the English secretary to Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), who signed off on them.
“Many letters are now public record,” Tedard said.
In the past, each chapter would take three separate cases to work on, namely, one from a capitalist country, one from a communist country and one from a developing country. However, today, Amnesty’s headquarters will often select 12 cases per year from around the world and ask the members of the 150 countries and territories that Amnesty is represented in to focus on them so that there is global pressure.
Sometimes headquarters will ask for special help in particular cases. For example, when a case appeared in Swaziland, Taiwan was asked to pitch in because it has an embassy there.
Amnesty International has come under fire for its position on the death penalty, which is that, on principle, it feels that any taking of life by the state is an illegitimate use of state power. It has also come out in favor of LGBT rights.
Nonetheless, Amnesty does have its rules of engagement. The people it protests on behalf of must be innocent or prisoners of conscience; they cannot be advocates of violence. Amnesty also doesn’t act on the spur of the moment. Cases have to be documented. And the family involved may or may not want an individual case considered. This makes the process of selecting cases slow. Tedards likens it to turning an ocean liner or an aircraft carrier. They cannot turn on a dime but once turned, they can go with speed and force.
A recent case that Taiwan has participated in is that of Amos Yee (余澎杉), the 16-year-old dissident blogger in Singapore who was remanded for psychiatric assessment after he was convicted of obscenity and insulting religious freedoms. Yee had criticized late Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew (李光耀) and certain Christian beliefs. Amnesty Taiwan also participates in watching China where there has been an unusual crackdown and arrest of lawyers involved in civil rights issues.
“Human rights had never been China’s strong suit but why this sudden acceleration [is a mystery],” Tedards said.
For more information on Amnesty International, send them an e-mail at info@amnesty.tw. They can also be found at www.facebook.com/AITW0528.
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