Urgent Action Network

Urgent Actions are a vital part of our campaigning for individuals, families or communities at risk.

Our Network has 165,000 members worldwide, including 13,000 in the UK.

When you get an email, we will ask you to help by sending a letter or email. These messages help protect someone who is in danger.

The idea is simple. When a person faces serious harm, people from around the world send messages asking for the abuse to stop. This shows those in power that the world is watching. It can help keep that person safe.

Each year, the Network supports more than 300 new cases and shares around 300 updates on people we are already helping.

In February 1973, labour rights activist Professor Luis Basilio Rossi was at home with his wife Maria Jose, his daughter and a friend. Without warning, military police wielding machine guns suddenly burst through the door. They seized Rossi and his friend and cut the telephone cables so that Maria Jose was unable to get help.

Maria Jose did not know where her husband had been taken. He had been ‘disappeared’ by the police. Despite being kept under surveillance, Maria Jose managed to get a note out to a neighbour that eventually alerted Amnesty to the Rossis’ situation.

When Tracy Ulltveit-Moe, Amnesty’s Central America researcher at the time, heard about his case, she knew we needed to act fast. We had been receiving reports of political dissidents being tortured in the first 48 hours of detention and were concerned that Professor Rossi would be subject to the same treatment.

So she decided to try something new. She issued the first ever ‘Urgent Action’, asking people to:

The result was astonishing. When Amnesty supporters wrote letters to the Brazilian authorities Professor Rossi’s torture stopped and he was later released.