Tech hosts first Human Rights Awareness Week

Tech students regularly bear witness to strife and adversity, trundling towards future successes, failures and in-betweens. With such aspirations, it is easy to lose sight of that sense of community and consideration which should be inherent to all humanity, and to forget about the many others across the world who suffer injustice and need help.

This semester, however, a group of students from Tech's chapter of Amnesty International, led by third-year Physics major and current director Adnan Elhammali, joined together in a concerted effort to bring knowledge, understanding and an effective way to advocate human rights straight to campus.

The chapter sponsored Tech's first ever Human Rights Awareness Week, which premiered last week, April 2-6.

The week's events were organized into five main issues, with each day of the week focusing on one of the core challenges.

Daily events consisted of a day-long film screening in the library's East Commons, movements to pass out information on Skiles Walkway and a central presentation.

"The five issues chosen were issues that comprise Amnesty International's main focus, its main campaigns, especially in the United States. The idea was to give Tech students a general outline of what human rights violations the world is facing today," Elhammali said.

On Monday, the theme was "Stop Violence Against Women."

From 1-7 p.m., Dual Injustice: Feminicide and Torture in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua was looped in the library's East Commons.

Guest speaker Dr. Sylvia Maier presented a haunting lecture about the culture, the reasoning behind and the causes of honor killings, which are a form of retribution and punishment usually brought upon a woman by members of her own family. Oftentimes in these situations, a woman who is accused of supposed sexual crimes is not given the chance to prove her own innocence and is murdered in order to prevent dishonor.

Tuesday's challenge was "Stop the Conflict in Darfur," which was the week's most popular event.

After an hour-long documentary film, Darfur Diaries, guest speaker Jared Feuer, the Southeast Regional Coordinator for Amnesty International, gave a lecture on the crisis and what could be done.

The daily film screened in the East Commons, Invisible Children: Discover the Unseen, was a movie about the children of Uganda, who at the southern border of Sudan, are caught in the conflict between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan government.

"Invisible Children gave an extremely human perspective that I wouldn't have gotten from just listening to a speaker. When you see and hear the actual kids who are being hunted by the militia and forced to fight, you get a much more powerful sense of reality than when you listen to someone read off statistics," said Anna Finderup, a third-year IAML major.

Wednesday kicked off a round of open discussion forums surrounding the core issue of labor rights.

Amnesty's focus on labor and economic rights and fair wages has recently thrust the organization into the foreground of political and economic debate.

The guest speakers for Wednesday included Anna Avato, Atlanta chairperson of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and Terence Courtney, the Coordinator for Jobs with Justice.

On Thursday, the issue was "Abolishment of the Death Penalty," which was presented by Billy Neal Moore, a death row exoneree and ordained minister.

Moore spent 16 years sitting on death row for a crime he did not commit and was exonerated only seven hours before the time of his scheduled execution. The Exonerated was screened in the library's East Commons.

On Friday, there was a quiet protest against torture staged outside on Skiles-the most controversial of all the Human Rights Awareness Week events.

Two volunteers wearing orange jumpsuits and black bags over their heads knelt outside a life-sized prison cell for more than three hours.

They portrayed prisoners held without trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In front of the volunteers was a sign that said "Stop Torture."

While many passersby felt that the demonstration had merit, a few Tech students were upset with the display, deeming it unpatriotic and unnecessary.

One student even assaulted one of the demonstrators.

"Fundamentally, we have to rise above these violent reactions and we have to demonstrate peace through our actions. They are human beings, and they need for us to treat them as such," said Will Riley, a graduate student in the Digital Media program.

Later on in the day, as the feature presentation of Human Rights Awareness Week, Ngawang Choephel, a former Chinese prisoner of conscience, screened a finished portion of his in-progress documentary on music and song in Tibetan culture.

Choephel was originally sentenced to 18 years of imprisonment by the Chinese government for his attempt to create a documentary on Tibetan culture, which the Chinese authorities deemed to be insurgent material.

After serving six years, Choephel was released through the efforts of Amnesty International and supporters throughout the world.

One of the most effective parts of Human Rights Awareness Week was the Skiles activities, where students could learn a significant amount without devoting too much time to the cause.

Students could just grab fact sheets and read information on the go, and they could also sign petitions for immediate action.

"I think that an event like this is a new thing to Tech, and Tech has a past of being apathetic towards these sorts of issues. To see an event such as this have this magnitude of impact and success is evidence that the campus is changing, and we'll probably see more events like this in the future," Elhammali said.

Indeed, there are many Tech students who avidly believe in the promotion of global human rights and praised Human Rights Awareness Week.

"Here on campus, human rights is an issue that is grossly overlooked and underplayed. People generally take human rights for granted, so Human Rights Awareness Week was awesome. We definitely needed it," Finderup said.

"I think Human Rights Awareness Week is a great idea. It allows uninformed students to become more aware of the injustices that are occurring not only on campus but around the world," said Derrick Dunbar, a fourth-year International Affairs and Modern Languages major.

To the organizers of the weeklong event, the most important message that they wanted to send to students was that even by contributing just a tiny amount of time and effort, anyone can have a significant impact on human rights.

"You don't have to be an expert on every human rights violation to take action. I'd say just find something you're passionate about, whether it's women's rights or genocide," Elhammali said.

Members of Tech's Amnesty International chapter want students to walk away with hope instead of just ignoring these issues and assuming that nothing can be done.

"There's a lot you can do with one issue, so focus your attention on that. Certainly, if we all do that, we can make this world a better place for a lot of people," Elhammali said.