School Amnesty group making great strides

The Ryedale School Amnesty international Youth Group has been meeting regularly this term and with Jena Chen’s leadership and a little help from Ms Kesterton, they have achieved a lot!

Alex Gilhooley:

We started by creating a board showing how we value our British citizenship through examples of simple things such as education and access to free healthcare. With our British citizenship we sometimes take these things for granted whilst people around Britain are being denied their citizenship by making small posters about valuing our human rights, we have contributed to Amnesty’s national campaign to present the government with a petition made up of all of these posters to physically represent the breadth of support Amnesty’s cause has. Amnesty’s petition to the government is in response to the Wind Rush Scandal and the high citizenship application fees being charged to children who have grown up in the UK but because of their Commonwealth heritage have been suddenly told they aren’t British citizens.

The group decided to go one step further and write a letter to our local MP Mr Hollinrake about this issue and how we want him to take better, more progressive action about the matter than he has already done by supporting an early day motion in Parliament to reduce the fees being charged to young people to apply for British citizenship. The group believes that everyone; both nationally and internationally; should have the same rights and services that we have campaigned for as a country in the past. Since November we have been writing letters to support Amnesty’s Write 4 Rights campaign; whereby all around the world activists write letters to governments in support of Human Rights Defenders in different countries or send cards and letters to those imprisoned for defending Human Rights.

So far we have posted four sets of letters to different Politicians around the world! We look forward to carrying on campaigning for human rights in the new year.