Organization Background
Amnesty International is a non-profit, non-governmental organization that was established in 1961 by British lawyer Peter Benenson. The organization strives to protect and uphold human rights by investigating and exposing abuses, raising awareness of violations and educating the public, initiating campaigns to take action, and transforming societies to create a safer and more just world. Amnesty International has more than 2.2 million supporters worldwide and activists and volunteers in over 150 countries.
The CMU branch of Amnesty International was founded in 2005 with the aim to act locally to raise awareness of and promote solutions to humanitarian issues ranging from the international to the local. Since that time we have been involved in a number of successful events on campus. In 2006 Amnesty brought a lecturer to McConomy as a part of a semester-long initiative to raise awareness of human-trafficking. During the spring 2008 semester, at the height of excitement for the Beijing Olympics, Amnesty worked to raise awareness of the genocide in Darfur, and China’s role in perpetuating that conflict. More recently, Amnesty was instrumental in hosting the G-20 Awareness Fair, a broad effort between student government and campus organizations to educate the campus community about G-20 summit in Pittsburgh. Later that semester Amnesty worked with Pennsylvanians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty to bring a speaker to talk to members and to show a documentary as a part of One Week on Death Row: Death Penalty Awareness Week, an effort to stimulate discussion about a topic that is often far from the mind of the campus community.
These events not only serve to inform the wider campus community, but also energize our dedicated core members. Amnesty members always turn out in large numbers to these events, time spent in addition to the time they put in every week learning about humanitarian crises and writing letters to politicians and prisoners-of-conscience.