History
Amnesty USA Group 30 has been around since the mid 1970s-no one is quite sure just when it was founded, since none of the founding members is still with the group. A core of members have been around since the early 1980s, though, and the collective memory of the group is long and strong.
Group 30′s portfolio of work over a twenty five year span is impressive. It includes a large number of prisoner files and work on nearly all of Amnesty’s major country and regional campaigns. We met the family of a Moroccan political prisoner whose case we worked on for seven years. He telephoned us after his release. We’ve sent financial support to a Chilean POC who escaped to Mexico City during the repressive years of the Pinochet regime. In 1987 a couple from the then-Soviet Union whose cases we had worked on for four years attended a Group 30 meeting-they were among the first to be released from the Soviet Gulag by Gorbachev and they emigrated to the U.S. Group 30 has also written on behalf of a Greek conscientious objector, a Laotian ‘education camp’ prisoner, a Shi’a moslem cleric in Iraq, and a Burmese medical student arrested for distributing pro-democracy leaflets. We have worked on the case of a Nigerian General imprisoned for advocating a return to democracy.
We have worked for 20 years against the widespread use of torture in Turkey, especially against ethnic Kurds in the southeast of that country. Our Tibetan Prisoner of Conscience, Ngawang Choezom, was released from Drapchi Prison in 2002. We then took on the case of another Tibetan monk, Ngawang Phulchung, who was given an early release in October, 2007. (More info about Ngawang Phulchung).