Thurssday 17 July (at 8pm): open letter-writing evening

We'll be holding a letter-writing evening in support of Amnesty's 'Stop Torture' campaign open to all.

Why does torture still happen in well over half the countries in the world? And what can be done to stop it? The United Nations outlawed torture 30 years ago, but Amnesty has documented cases of torture in 141 countries in the last 5 years.  Now Amnesty has a new campaign to control this thoughtless, stupid barbarity - by insisting on simple steps being written into national laws and put into practice by governments, security officials, policemen and prison warders.  These include: access by detainees to medical staff and lawyers, and stronger rules against allowing evidence obtained under torture to be used in courts.

Gitti Dunham, Amnesty's country co-ordinator for the Former Soviet Union, told Kingston Amnesty's June meeting about the new Amnesty campaign against torture - which features people tortured in countries including Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, the Philippines and Uzbekistan.  We will be working over the next 18 months to ask the public in Kingston to help us push for new rules and practices that help to stop the routine - and pointless - infliction of terrible pain on people detained in police stations and prisons.

So please come and join us!