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Urgent Action (UA) appeals are usually sent for a specific purpose and are required to be sent by a specific date. Contact Amnesty International for further information. Recommended actions take the form of sending telegrams/telexes/faxes/express/airmail letters in Russian or your own language (note that Belarusian is not understood by the President of Belarus). For example, the most recent Urgent Action appeal asked Amnesty International members to express serious concern for the health of Yury Khadyka and Vyacheslav Sivchyk.
The organization is also concerned about the apparent pattern of ill-treatment and imprisonment of members of the opposition during peaceful strikes and demonstrations in Belarus, such as the Independence Day procession in July, 1995, and the imprisonment of some of the leaders of the Free Trade Union of Belarus during a strike in August, 1995.
The names and addresses of government leaders to contact (of Belarus) are included in such appeals.
Amnesty International Contact Information:
Ray Mitchell (UK Section)
Amnesty International UK Section
99 - 119 Rosebery Avenue
London EC1R 4RE
ggabriel@amnesty.cl.sub.de (Germany)
Also: ua-de@amnesty.cl.sub.de (Germany)
"CPJ's mission is to promote freedom of the press throughout the world by defending the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal."
Call CPJ at (212) 465-1004. Call collect if necessary. Fax us at (212)465-9568.
Or, send an e-mail to one of our regional program coordinators.
If you would like to learn more about CPJ's work, are interested in becoming a member or would like to order one of our publications:
Use CPJ's Web site
Call us at (212) 465-1004.
Or, write us: CPJ, 330 Seventh Avenue, 12th Floor, New York,
NY 10001.
Tel: (212) 465-1004
Fax: (212) 465-9568
General Questions: info@cpj.org
Program Coordinator for Belarus (Central Europe and the Republics of the former Soviet Union): ?
At the Belarus Soros Foundation Web site in Mensk, Belarus: Belarus: Crushing Civil Society.
From the Human Rights Watch Press Release:
(New York, 31 July 97) Human Rights Watch/Helsinki charged today that Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenka has reversed nearly all the advances in the field of human rights and rule of law that had marked the perestroika era and the early 1990s. In presenting Belarus: Crushing Civil Society today at a press conference in Mensk, Jonathan Fanton, chair of the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki advisory committee is calling on the Belarusian government to cease its relentless attacks on free expression and association.
"Human Rights Watch works to end a broad range of human rights abuses, including summary executions, torture, arbitrary detention, restrictions on the freedoms of expression, association, assembly and religion, violation of due process and discrimination on racial, gender, ethnic and religious grounds. The standards we use are universal civil and political rights, as embodied in international law and treaties. We seek to curb abuses regardless of whether the victims are well-known political activists, factory workers, peasant farmers, illegal immigrants, women forced into prostitution, street children or domestic workers. We also address such war-related abuses as indiscriminate shelling or the use of starvation as a weapon of war no matter which side in a conflict is responsible."
"Human Rights Watch sends frequent fact-finding missions to countries where abuses take place. In several countries, we maintain our own personnel to gather information on a continuing basis. We interview victims and witnesses of human rights abuse. We meet with government officials, opposition leaders, local human rights groups, church officials, labor leaders, journalists, lawyers, relief groups, doctors and others with information on human rights practices. Our goal is to assemble as complete and accurate an account as we can of a government's human rights record. Even when governments refuse to let us in, we find other ways of obtaining reliable information."
"Human Rights Watch was founded in 1978 as Helsinki Watch (now Human Rights Watch/ Helsinki), in response to the call for support from embattled groups in Moscow, Warsaw, and Prague that were set up to monitor compliance with the human rights provisions of the landmark Helsinki accords. A few years later, when the Reagan Administration argued that human rights abuses by right-wing "authoritarian" governments were more tolerable than those of left-wing "totalitarian" governments, we formed Americas Watch (now Human Rights Watch/Americas) to counter this double standard. By 1987, we had honed a powerful set of techniques painstaking documentation of abuses and hard-hitting advocacy in the press and with governments and put them to use all over the world as Human Rights Watch, the largest U.S.-based international human rights organization."
"To maintain its independence, Human Rights Watch does not seek or accept financial support from any government or government-funded agency. We depend entirely on contributions from individual donors and private foundations. If you would like to join thousands of other concerned citizens in supporting the work of Human Rights Watch, please send an e-mail message to hrwnyc@hrw.org."
Web site: www.hrw.org
For additional addresses, telephone, and other contact information, refer to the Web site for information about the office you seek (for example, New York City, Washington, DC, London, or Brussels).
To Subscribe to the Human Rights Watch mailing list, send e-mail to majordomo@igc.apc.org with:
in the body of the message (leave the subject line blank).
"The League, now in its 58th year, is a New York-based human rights NGO in consultative status with the United Nations and ILO."
"The Belarus project is a part of the Human Rights Defenders' Project, originally launched in 1982 to defend individuals and groups who suffer reprisals for promoting human rights in their societies. Among those the League defended were Andrei Sakharov, Kim Dae Jung, and Jaime Castillo Velasco."
Contact: Matvei Yankelevich, Belarus Project Manager at (212) 684-1221, fax: (212) 684-1696 (in the USA).
"The Belarus project was established to support Belarusian citizens in making their cases before the U.S. government and public and international fora [forums] and intergovernmental organizations regarding President Alexander Lukashenko's wholesale assault on human rights and the rule of law in Belarus."
Tel: (212) 684-1221 or Fax: (212) 684-1696
e-mail: belarus@ilhr.org or e-mail: info@ilhr.org
Web page: www.ilhr.org
We are convinced that no problems or conflicts can be solved by violent means. Violence may only make the conflict situations deteriorate and lead them to a dead end. We believe that violence may be a result of evil will, which started or openly provoked the use of force, or a consequence of the lack of education and inability to solve the existing contradictions through constructive negotiations. We set as our goal to prevent and put an end violent activities and, as a first step, to bring the ongoing conflicts to the norms prescribed by international humanitarian law.
Web page: Nonviolence International-NIS
Contact: Andre Kamenshikov E-mail: ninis@glas.apc.org
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