Merry Christmas, Binyam Mohamed

I spent last night with the other do-gooders of the Amnesty International Southwark group taking part in the AIUK Christmas Card Campaign. Excuse me, greetings card campaign - this is an important distinction. The idea is to send cards expressing solidarity to prisoners of conscience and those unjustly imprisoned across the globe. Given that a good portion of these people are in Africa, the Middle East and Asia many of them would be bemused at receiving a card with a manger scene of the Baby Jesus, Mary and poor cuckolded Joseph (and that's a bitch to be cuckolded by God, isn't it?).

Someone also brought a couple cards that showed a boy with a Santa hat scrunching up his face in disgust at the Xmas dinner table with the caption underneath: Bloody Sprouts! I'm not sure that bit of British culture would translate to the seven October Protesters student activists currently detained in Laos. Even the 'Happy New Year' cards might be in bad taste, as Earnest French Girl pointed out, to someone like Patrick Okoroafor of Nigeria who has been jailed since he was 14 in 1995 on trumped up charges: yeah, another year in Aba Prison is going to be just ducky.

So most of the cards we had last night were tasteful, 'Season's Greetings' type things. At some level it is a touch incongruous - there we were lawyers, journalists, accountants and TV people, sitting around in Sweet Steph's plushly appointed high-rise flat with its views of the London Eye scarfing mulled wine, mince pies and canapes (the spring rolls were delish!) writing cards to people who have gone through hell. How can we relate to what Binyam Mohamed (tortured at Guantanamo Bay), Ferhat Gercek (shot and paralysed by Turkish police for selling a left-wing magazine, awaiting trial), or Francois-Xavier Byuma (Rwandan human rights lawyer jailed after a show trial) have experienced?

Yet I quibble. If I was rotting away in a rat infested cell in Karachi or forced to wear orange pyjamas (surely worse than the waterboarding) in Gitmo I would be cheered to think that some people besides my friends and immediate family were thinking of me. And it is a little thing to do during the season whilst we wallow in drink and food and rampant commercialism.

In other AI news, on the 6th December all the London groups gathered near Tower Bridge for a little celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the end, we held glowsticks and arranged ourselves into the Amnesty logo. Here's the shot from the top of City Hall, which looks cool, I think.