Hello Amnesty people!

I hope everyone is having a lovely weekend! This is a roundup of the coming meeting and events, but please scroll down further to check out what our brilliant sister society, STAR (Student Action For Refugees) have coming up, too.

This week’s meeting

We’re in Committee Room 1 in the QMU, Tuesday at 5pm.

This week’s meeting is an exciting one as we have a guest speaker, Alieu Ceesay, coming to speak to us about the human rights situation in Gambia. He’s our first speaker of the year so be sure to come along! Along with Alieu there’ll be some members of the Glasgow-based Gambia group who will be more than happy to answer any questions we may have. After the talk we’ll do some actions, as well as continuing to make plans for the carol singing and PRing for the club night at Stereo.

Coming up

– Protect the Human club night at Stereo, Thurs December 1st: This is creeping up on us! The flyers have been printed so we’ll get together a PR team to distribute them everywhere! As well as PRing we need people to come and have a drink and a dance all in aid of Amnesty.

– Christmas caroling: We have a good amount of names down for this, as well as singers from the Choral Society (thank goodness). So Elena and Jessie will make some announcements on Tuesday about what happens next!

-Write for Rights Day, Sat December 10th: The anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is Amnesty’s biggest letter writing date. Check out this link for more info http://www.amnesty.ca/writeathon/. A couple of us are going to the Glasgow Daytime Amnesty Group to brainstorm some ideas for a bigger event we could hold on this date. Throw any ideas this way!

– The Secret Policeman’s Ball is confirmed for Saturday 4th February in Qudos- very exciting! Billy Kirkwood is confirmed as our compere and in the next month we’ll get going on a big publicity drive- there’s lot’s to do! Our posters are being prepared right now. This annual night of comedy has been more and more successful over the last couple of years, raising thousands of pounds for Amnesty, and we want to make this one the biggest yet!

– If you have any fundraising/campaigning ideas, please share them!

If you’ve not been to meetings so far, please come along- newcomers are always welcome. Our next meeting is on Tuesday, 5pm in Qudos in the QMU.

See you on Tuesday at the meeting!

Catherine

Website: http://www.guamnesty.org.uk/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/guamnesty
Please join our Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/guamnesty/

A wee bit of information from STAR (Student Action for Refugees) Glasgow

Recent changes in legislation have meant that the UK Border Agency is now able to forcibly remove families from their homes in order to deport them. This led to the dawn raiding of two families last week and then the detaining of a mother and her 5 year old son who. Dawn raiding was stopped a few years ago and the coalition promised when they took power to stop child detention, shortly before opening a ‘family removals centre’ however both of these things appear to be with us again. These actions breach human rights and are likely to be more frequent unless something is changed so a mass protest is being held next Monday (the 21st of November) at the Glasgow Home Office on Brand Street, 2 minutes from Cessnock Underground to call for them to be stopped.

Also coming up: A ceilidh this Thursday at 8pm in Qudos to raise money for John Oguchukwu, a student of our university who was deported and a Sleep Out this Friday to raise awareness for destitute asylum seekers in Glasgow.

More information on all of these events at www.starglasgow.wordpress.com