Hello Northeast chapters! As I hope you all have heard by now, December 4 is our Northeast Regional Advocacy Institute at Tufts University in Boston. This is a fabulous event every year, very interesting and re-invigorating for the chapters that attend. You’ll hear about some issues PHR is currently advocating on, get new ideas for human rights education and advocacy, both on campus and in the wider political sphere, and meet some other equally motivated students. It’s also a great opportunity to network with each other, especially chapters that are near you, to coordinate joint actions and events.
At this year’s Insitute, we’ll hear from such exciting speakers as PHR CEO Frank Donaghue (who is always a treat), a representative of the Asylum Network, an expert on health and human rights in Burma, and a resident from Dartmouth, who will tell us about keeping yourself active in human rights advocacy through residency, something I’m sure we’re all interested in.
So, everyone should come, I promise it will be worth taking the time out of your busy schedule. You can register here. (And on that note, everyone in your chapter should also register themselves to receive updates and opportunities from the PHR National Student Program – you can do that here.)
Remember the calamitous end to Sri Lanka’s 26-year-long civil war back in May? Some 16,700 non-combatants were wounded and several thousand more were killed during the final onslaught. Fighting between the 150,000-strong Sri Lankan Army (SLA) and the 7,000-strong Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) armed forces resulted in 300,000 displaced minority Tamils.
Although both sides committed mass atrocities, recent video footage of apparent executions (warning: this video contains graphic images) of 9 Tamil POWs supports widespread allegations of war crimes by the SLA.
But the international community, most notably the UN Security Council, remains idle while it should be launching a commission of inquiry.
