On the 9th December, the day before Human Rights Day, a small group of us gathered together online to find out more about Amnesty International’s Write for Rights campaign and to write some letters of solidarity for prisoners of conscience and/or appeal letters to figures in authority.
SELHuG committee member Sam Becker introduced everyone to the 2021 campaign and led them through various resources that are available through Amnesty International, including the write for rights booklet and links to information, and some template letters and ideas he had generated.
Emails, social media messages and petitions are all useful actions in addition to letters and cards, so we started by signing some petitions and firing off some tweets. Then everyone present wrote at least one letter and most had intentions of writing more following the meeting. These small actions have a very positive impact when multiplied by many people. More than 4.4 million messages of support and letters of appeal were sent as part of Write for Rights 2020.
Sam also briefly introduced the ‘urgent action’ network which is something you can sign up for if you want to write letters more regularly.
Involving ourselves with campaigns like this is about trying to transform Humanist thought into Humanist action, for positive change in the world.
We hope that more of you will be interested enough to find out more and perhaps join us for some letter writing for Write for Rights again in December 2022. If you want to get involved sooner, the local Blackheath and Greenwich group hold monthly letter writing sessions and would give any of you a warm welcome.
