Amnesty International: For the women of El Salvador

One of the afterschool activities on offer this year is Amnesty International, a club which supports the charity of the same name, in which students can learn how “to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated.”

Here first year student Cassy Le explains what the group have been doing over the past few weeks:

In the Amnesty International group of EF Academy Oxford, we are currently focusing on the issue of women in El Salvador getting imprisoned for something that they have technically not done. In El Salvador, abortion is a crime, even though the women’s health is at risk or she has been raped. Many women face up to 40 years of imprisonment if they seek an abortion. The problem is that so many are accused and therefore punished of doing so, when really they suffer from miscarriages or other complications following their pregnancies. These women have to stay in bad living conditions and most can’t afford good lawyers to represent them and are likely to experience an unfair trial.

We have decided to take action and show support for all these who are evidently being violated of their human rights and demand their immediate release. To do so, we are making paper keys in which we tie ribbons with our names written on them, which will be sent to Amnesty International. The keys will be tied to a sculpture with solidarity messages that will be featured at the concert in November in San Salvador to show the international support.
The sculpture will then be delivered to the Minister of Justice and Public Security in El Salvador as a sign to urge him to free all the women that are imprisoned after suffering complications with the pregnancies.

We have been working on this for a couple of weeks now, working together to plan and efficiently create everything we need: cut out the keys (which was much more time consuming than we expected), tie them to ribbons, prepare a presentation to spread the word, etc… It has been hard work but also a lot of fun as we can chat and talk whist doing all this.

We’re trying to get as many as possible to support the cause and sign their names on keys that we would be able to send to Amnesty.

We hope many will join to take action!