Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) Local Group 30 is a community-based collection of volunteers who meet, write letters, and organize events to advance the principles of human rights promoted by Amnesty International. We meet once a month via Zoom.
Amnesty International is an independent worldwide movement working impartially for the release of all prisoners of conscience, fair and prompt trials, and an end to torture and executions. It is funded by donations from its members and supporters throughout the world.
AIUSA Group 30 tables at local street fairs, visits people on death row, conducts write-a-thons, lobbies on behalf of human rights and holds regular events and film screenings. We have been working on the following issues and campaigns:
- Death Penalty Abolition and Legal Justice Reform
- Abolition of Solitary Confinement and Torture
- Ending Gun Violence
- Clemency for Leonard Peltier – released to home confinement February 2025!
- Indigenous Rights
- Social Justice & Anti-Racism
- LGBTQI Rights
- Defending Ethnic Minorities in China
- Protecting Human Rights Defenders Worldwide
- Refugee and Migrant Rights
- Security With Human Rights
- Close Guantánamo
- Ceasefire Now – Stop the genocide in Gaza
- Southeast Asia Regional Actions
History
Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) 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 spans well over twenty five years and includes a large number of case files and work on nearly all of Amnesty International’s major country and regional campaigns. We met the family of a Moroccan politicized prisoner whose case we worked on for seven years (he telephoned us after his release). We’ve sent financial support to a Chilean Prisoner of Conscience 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 more than 25 years against the widespread use of torture in Turkey, especially against ethnic Kurds in the southeast of that country. We have worked on the cases of Tibetan Prisoners of Conscience, Ngawang Choezom, Phuntsog Nyidron, and Ngawang Phulchung, who were all released from Drapchi Prison in Lhasa, as well as the Tibetan filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen who moved to the Bay Area following his release from China.