Prisoner of conscience (POC) is a term coined by the international human rights advocacy organization Amnesty International. It refers to anyone imprisoned because of their race, religion, color, language, sexual orientation, or belief, so long as they have not used or advocated violence. Human rights are rights which some hold to be inalienable and belonging to all humans. ... Amnesty International (commonly known as Amnesty or AI) is an international, non-governmental organization with the stated purpose of promoting all the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international standards. ... It has been suggested that Validity of human races be merged into this article or section. ... Historical data for native populations collected by R. Biasutti prior to 1940. ... Sexual orientation refers to the sex, sexes, gender or genders, to which a person is attracted and which form the focus of a persons amorous or erotic desires, fantasies, and spontaneous feelings. ... Look up belief on Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
Amnesty International has, since its founding, pressured governments to release those persons it considers to be prisoners of conscience. Governments, conversely, tend to deny that the specific prisoners identified by AI are, in fact, being held on the grounds Amnesty claims.
A political prisoner is anyone held in prison or otherwise detained, perhaps under house arrest, because their ideas or image are deemed by a government to either challenge or threaten the authority of the state. ...
External links
Information about prisoners of conscience (Amnesty International)
This politics-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
Prisoners of conscience are held by governments in all regions of the world; in countries with diverse political and social systems.
Some prisoners of conscience are held for actions undertaken as individuals; others are part of a group or movement.
When the facts show that individuals are prisoners of conscience, the cases are usually allocated to one or more of the movement's groups around the world.
Prisoners of conscience include labor and student activists, political dissidents, Muslim activists, Acehnese nationalists, and those advocating independence in East Timor and Irian Jaya.
At least eleven prisoners of conscience from Irian Jaya are believed to remain in prison, most of whom were imprisoned for their alleged roles in organizing peaceful demonstrations in support of independence for the province in 1988 and 1989.
Five East Timorese prisoners of conscience remain in custody following their conviction for allegedly organizing the peaceful march to the Santa Cruz Cemetery in Dili, the capital of East Timor, on November 12, 1991, which resulted in what has become known as the Santa Cruz massacre.
Feeds |
Contact