Causes for concern – but also for optimism

COLM O’GORMAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL IRELAND

COLM O’GORMAN, executive director of human rights organisation Amnesty International Ireland, looks back on 2016 and ahead to 2017.

‘2016 has been a dark year in many places. When you see what’s happening in Aleppo and Idlib in Syria, it doesn’t exactly lead to a reason to feel optimistic about 2017.

‘Next March will mark the sixth anniversary of the start of the Syrian war, and it will mark six years of absolute failure of the UN system and the international community to either protect civilians in that conflict, or to give them protection when they flee it.

‘What’s especially worrying is that political leaders in governments, and indeed many people, don’t seem to recognise that the same people fleeing Assad’s barrel bombs, or the atrocities of the Islamic State, are the same people who are drowning in the Mediterranean or being held in detention centres on Greek islands, before they are shipped back to Turkey by the EU.

‘Earlier on in 2016, we saw, following the coup in Turkey, the really vicious crackdown on human rights and civil liberties in Turkey, but this is the country that the EU, including Ireland, says is safe for refugees. All of our research shows that it isn’t.

‘Back in Ireland, at the end of 2016, a year of commemorations of the Proclamation of the Republic, we see activists seizing a building to try to provide shelter for homeless people over the Christmas holidays, and whatever people think of the tactics involved, it is surely shocking that such an approach is deemed necessary in 2016.

‘When we look at the world post Brexit and post the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of populist and often extreme politics across the world, there’s a lot to be concerned about.

‘But at the same time, we have lots of reasons to be optimistic too. Right across 2016, we’ve seen prisoners of conscience freed because of the work done by Amnesty International activists and supporters in Ireland and across the world.

‘One example that I personally found very significant was the release of Maria Teresa Rivera in El Salvador. This 33-year-old mother of one was sent to prison for 40 years in 2011 after she suffered a miscarriage, because she was young and poor, and because of El Salvador’s draconian laws on women’s healthcare. She was falsely accused of procuring an abortion, and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

‘I visited Maria Teresa in person in El Salvador in late 2014, and met her eight-year-old son, so it was a powerful moment when she was finally exonerated and released in May.

‘She is one of hundreds of people whose release Amnesty has worked to secure over the past year, all of which shows no matter how desperate the situation, each and every one of us has enormous power to effect change if we work together, so that’s the hope I bring into 2017.