Essay on Amnesty

WHO WE ARE
Amnesty International is a global movement of more than 3 million supporters, members and activists in more than 150 countries and territories who campaign to end grave abuses of human rights.

Our vision is for every person to enjoy all the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards.

We are independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion and are funded mainly by our membership and public donations.
Amnesty International (commonly known as Amnesty or AI) is an international, non-governmental organization with the stated purpose of promoting all the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international standards. In particular, Amnesty International campaigns to free all prisoners of conscience; to ensure fair and prompt trials for political prisoners; to abolish the death penalty, torture, and other treatment of prisoners it regards as cruel; to end political killings and forced disappearances; and to oppose all human rights abuses, whether by governments or by other groups.
Our history
Ever since we started campaigning in 1961, we’ve worked around the globe to stop the abuse of human rights.

Amnesty International - Goals and strategy
AI aims to maintain every human's basic rights as established under the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. In accordance with this belief, Amnesty works to:
• Free all Prisoners of Conscience (a "POC" is a person imprisoned for the peaceful exercise of their beliefs, which differs somewhat from the typical use of the term political prisoner).
• Ensure fair and prompt trials.
• Abolish all forms of torture and ill-treatment of prisoners, including the use of the death penalty.
• End state-sanctioned terrorism, killings, and disappearances.
• Assist political asylum-seekers.
• Co-operate with organizations that seek to put an end to human rights abuses.
• Raise awareness about human rights abuses around the world.
To fulfill these goals, Amnesty sends teams of researchers to investigate claims of human rights abuses. It publicizes its findings and mobilizes its members to lobby against the abuse — by letter-writing (to various government officials), protesting, demonstrating, organizing fund-raisers, educating the public about the offence, or sometimes all of the above.
Amnesty International works to combat individual offences (e.g. one man imprisoned for distributing banned literature in Saudi Arabia) as well as more general policies (e.g. the recently overturned policy of executing juvenile offenders in certain U.S. states). Amnesty works primarily on the local level but its forty-year history of action and its Nobel Peace Prize give it international recognition.
Most AI members utilize letter-writing to get their message across. When the central Amnesty International organization finds and validates to its satisfaction instances of human rights abuse, they notify each of more than 7,000 local groups as well as over one million independent members, including 300,000 in the United States alone. Groups and members then respond by writing letters of protest and concern to a government official closely involved in the case, generally without mentioning Amnesty directly.
Amnesty International follows a neutrality policy called the "country rule" stating that members should not be active in issues in their own nation, which also protects them from potential mistreatment by their own government. This principle is also applied to researchers and campaigners working for the International Secretariat to prevent domestic political loyalties influencing coverage.
Recently, Amnesty has expanded the scope of its work to include economic, social and cultural rights, saying that these concerns had arisen out of its traditional work on political and civil rights. Its 2004 annual report said that "it is difficult to achieve sustainable progress towards implementation of any one human right in isolation. ... AI will strive to ... assert a holistic view of rights protection. It will be particularly important to do so in relation to extreme poverty, and the human rights issues underlying poverty."[2] As an example it asserts that "The right to effective political participation depends on a free media, but also on an educated and literate population."[3]