From left to right: Henna Joshi, Sofia Raiffa, Kayla Tawa, me (behind Kayla), Stella Elwood, Abbey Clark-Moschella, Darian Perez, and Javeria Kella
Seven other Mount Holyoke students and I attended Amnesty International’s 51st annual General Meeting last weekend. It was an incredible, rewarding experience, and I’m so thankful that Mount Holyoke funded a large portion of it, which allowed us to attend.
Amnesty International is a global organization that advocates for human rights such as the right to assemble and the right to a fair trial. They are also involved in acting against global issues such as torture and the death penalty and aim to protect people of many different nationalities, religions, and classes. The rights of groups they focus on are listed on their information page and include women’s rights, refugee and migrant rights, LGBT rights, and children’s rights. The annual meeting, dubbed the Human Rights Conference, took place from Friday, April 1st to Sunday, April 3rd.
Below are recaps of some of the panels on the trip as told by those who went:
Sofie Raiffa: One of the panels I attended was a general overview of human rights violations in different parts of the world, like arms trafficking and violence in Honduras, ethnic conflict in Burma, and Syria. Basically it dealt a lot with how the US sold arms to a lot of different countries and how they lost track of them and now they’re being used for murders and the homicide rate is extremely high, especially in Honduras. It was very interesting.
Javeria Kella: One of the panels I went to was “Unfollow Me”, it was about how everyone’s watching us, spying and all that and the second was “Women from Impacted Communities Don’t Need Saving”, which was about imperial feminism. So just because you come from an impacted community doesn’t mean you need saving by imperialist feminists.
Henna Joshi: I also went to “Unfollow Me”, it was about surveillance–they gave us packets on how to protect yourself from surveillance. Another one I went to was called “Youth Under Attack in South Asia.” Note: More info about how to protect yourself from surveillance here.
Stella Elwood: I went to a panel about the death penalty and how to abolish it. It was a lot of statistics and learning facts about the death penalty, but then they had brought in a woman who had survived being attacked by a man who killed her father in front of her and stabbed her and she survived. Now she lives to abolish the death penalty and fought the death penalty when they were trying to charge her father’s murderer with it… And yeah, she’s a way better person than I would be in that situation and so she made me cry.
Abbey Clark-Moschella: One of the things I learned in a panel was that the activism for racial justice and activism for human rights seem to be in two separate spheres and there’s not a lot of overlap between the two movements. They talked about that during what we now consider the “Civil Rights Movement”. Malcolm X and a lot of other activists were pushing for human rights and using that language but they were told to back off because it wouldn’t happen, which is why they moved to civil and political rights. So it was cool to learn about human rights, because it covers civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights all under human rights. We talked about how the Black Lives Matter movement is more of a human rights discourse than we’ve seen in the past because it’s speaking more to social, economic, and cultural rights than civil and political.
Kayla Tawa: “To Be Muslim in America” was a really good panel I went to, they talked about the world of pop culture and how there’s no representation of Muslims within American culture. They also talked about the fact that 2/3 of Americans don’t know anyone who’s Muslim, which is like a crazy number. That’s why it’s even more damaging to have only certain representations of them within popular culture. They said what you can do is seek a counter-narrative, alternative media outlets, and to use the power of social media to change perceptions.
Overall, there was a lot packed into two days. Throughout the conference and after, I felt as though I hummed with information but at times it was too much to fully process. That being said, there were a lot of issues I was prepped to know about specifically thanks to Amnesty at Mount Holyoke and I am so glad I went and was exposed to an awe-inspiring amount of activism and passion. I came away from the conference feeling more united with the organization at an international level and with the Mount Holyoke chapter.
This year, the Mount Holyoke chapter has participated in the My Body, My Rights campaign, collected signatures for prisoners of conscience, held an AmnesTea Write for Rights event, and has posted on a board in Blanch about several human rights violations, including the war in Yemen and torture. If you are a Mount Holyoke student and would like to join Amnesty International Mount Holyoke in our efforts to raise awareness and advocate for human rights, check us out in the fall at the org fair or join the email list by contacting Kayla Tawa at tawa22k@mtholyoke.edu.
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