Updates
Amnesty International Global Assembly 2024
Amnesty International’s Global Assembly met in Bangkok in August. The annual meeting of representatives from all Amnesty’s national sections is the international movement’s highest decision-making body.
The meeting was at times intense and challenging but also productive and inspiring.
Delegates heard from © Roxy Van Der Post, Myosotis Film & Photography Still in prison
Egyptian-British Alaa Abdel Fattah is still behind bars in Egypt five years after his detention started.
The prominent human rights activist, who has been named as English PEN’s writer of courage 2024, was detained in 2019 on trumped up charges. The Egyptian authorities refuse to count
Journalist rearrested
Less than four months after she was released from a Chinese prison, journalist and human rights
advocate
Zhang Zhan has been rearrested. Zhang Zhan was jailed in 2020 for reporting on the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. She posted on social media about how officials had detained independent reporters and harassed families of coronavirus patients. She was freed in May 2024. In August, she travelled to Gansu province and then to her home town in Shaanxi, where she went missing. She is reported to be in custody in Shanghai. Amnesty is urging the Chinese authorities to free her immediately.
34 AMNESTY WINTER 2024
time spent in pre-trial detention as part of his prison sentence already served and will not consider releasing him until January 2027.
Alaa’s family, supported by Amnesty, have long campaigned for his release and are frustrated with the UK government’s handling of the case.
Telling it like it is
Ever heard of ‘brown envelope syndrome’, aka fear of official-looking post? Or the ‘mushroom treatment’, where people half-jokingly talk about being kept in the dark and left to grow in isolation? Check out Untold Realities of Poverty in the UK, a new booklet telling real people’s stories in their own words, bringing to life the denial of economic and social rights – something we reported on in the last issue of Amnesty Magazine. Amnesty International UK is a partner of the Growing Rights Instead of Poverty Partnership (GRIPP), which produced the booklet.
Read the booklet at
gripp.org.uk/resources
front-line human rights defenders and the investigative reporter (and Nobel Laureate) Maria Ressa. We also heard from Asia-Pacific colleagues in a series of campaign spotlight moments. Significant decisions made by the Global Assembly include changes to the international finance system. These will see a gradual increase in the distribution of income from larger sections to smaller sections who cannot raise sufficient funds to operate. Many of these sections are in parts of the world facing pressing human rights challenges. The Global Assembly also
agreed
reforms to the global governance system. Most were technical, although of particular note was a decision that every section will take a youth delegate to future Global Assembly meetings. A number of proposals were deferred for decision at a later date.
Human rights policies on taxation, the
rule of law and the rights of indigenous peoples to self-determination were all approved and will inform our future human rights positions.
The lasting impression, perhaps more important than the decisions reached, is of a diverse movement, with often very different perspectives but willing to work together for solutions and, of course, united in its commitment to human rights.
Helen Horton, UK Section Board Chair, AIUK delegate to the 2024 Global Assembly
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