My name is Oliver Rothnie, and I am keen member of my local Amnesty group in Colwyn Bay in North Wales, which I joined around two and a half years ago. It is a very welcoming group, and I love the sense of community that it engenders. I am a second-year university student studying Mathematics at Durham University and I am also part of the student group there.
Last summer, I was thinking about how in the dark times we currently face, the role of human rights activism, both at home and abroad, is more important than ever. I believe that as a country, we need to be more aware than ever that democracy is something we all have to fight for. We only need to look at the United States to see that the “shining city on a hill”, a place of liberty, freedom and tolerance, is being unravelled in front of our eyes by one man - aided and abetted by a cabal of fiends - and his demagoguery.
I was thinking that a key way to fight this is to be aware. Aware not just of what is happening here, but what is happening elsewhere, for often the same forces of division, hatred and rage are in action. Would President Trump’s threats to take over Greenland have happened if we had respected the importance of international law in Gaza? Would the Reform candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election be talking about women needing a “biological reality check” without Orbán’s anti-women’s rights policies in Hungary?
This is not just for us activists, either: we have to enlist a broader base of people to help us. A civil society in which people set aside whatever time they can in their busy lives - even a minute a week is ample – to learn about the world, and to make a small difference.
For this reason, I decided to create “A Petition A Week”. After you sign up, every Tuesday at noon you will receive a petition, accompanied by a small background, concerning an issue related to human rights at home or abroad. Since the initiative started in September, there have been petitions concerning, among other things, arms embargoes to Israel and in Sudan, protest rights in the United Kingdom and women’s rights in Afghanistan.
Petitions have come from human rights groups such as Amnesty International, but also others – the intention is to link different groups, for we are stronger together – such as Greenpeace. I have also used the UK Parliament petitions service: something that I think is underused by the human rights community, with its 10,000-signature threshold to elicit a response from the government having the potential to be a very powerful tool.
It is about raising awareness so that we, as a society, know more about the world and its issues. Should I buy this orange that could have been grown in the occupied West Bank? Those protestors did disrupt my commute, but do they have a point? If we leave the ECHR, what happens to peace in Northern Ireland?
The intention is for this initiative to start with those who are already activists, and to emanate out to others in society. I believe that demagogues succeed when, and if, we do not have the knowledge to combat their deceits.
If you would like to sign up, either individually or as group, go to apetitionaweek.substack.com/subscribe and feel free to get in touch with me at apetitionaweek@outlook.com. Thank you
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