S2 Assembly

After some of the senior members of the Amnesty group presented an assembly to S2 pupils about the current situation in Guantanamo Bay, we’ve had lots of new members and have been learning more about what’s happening there and taking action to stop it.

Amnesty strongly oppose all acts of terrorism in ant circumstances, and agrees that governments have the right to protect their citizens when they face such a threat. However, we think that governments should not use methods that go against an individual’s human rights or international laws that have been set up to protect human rights. Amnesty has concerns that basic human rights are gradually being undermined as a response to the threat of terrorism. Instead of making the world a safer place, many aspects of the war on terror are spreading fear, hatred and division.

Techniques of torture include forced standing and crouching, sleep depravation, exposure to loud noise, prolonged isolation and hooding, forced nudity, use of dogs and removal of religious items.

Secret Detentions: Amnesty and five other organisations have revealed the names of 39 people who are believed to have been held in secret detention facilities around the world by the USA. Their whereabouts now is unknown. The human rights organisation named the relatives of suspects who had been detained in secret prisons, including children as young as seven.

The most recent campaign that the school’s Amnesty group has been involved in is the Unsubscribe campaign. Unsubscribe sends out a clear message to the government that we will no longer tolerate the abuse of human rights in the name of 'the war on terror'. Most petitions ask you to sign up, we are asking to take your name off. It is a chance for you to say that you don’t agree with secret detentions, torture or the ill treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.