Ready-Made
Human Rights Letters

Here are short letters that you can easily print and mail.

Select the address and text; copy and paste them into Word or whatever you use for writing. Arrange on the page to your liking.

Even better is to spend a few moments individualizing the text. You could change words, add your own remarks, use different points from the fuller information given.
A short letter in simple language is most likely to be understood. Stay polite.

Get back to us if you have a question. Or if you have the luck to receive a reply—it could be important. We'd love to know that you've written.

—Guy Ottewell and Tilly Lavenás, founder members of the Amnesty International groups of Greenville, South Carolina, and Lyme Regis, England.

The top letter on the home page is new. Others are about some long-term cases on which we keep working. More letters on them are always needed.
YOU CAN RECEIVE NEW APPEALS BY EMAIL. Please go to http://groups.google.com/group/humanrightsletters
By clicking "Join this group" (at the right) you can become a member of our “Google Group” and will receive sample letters whenever we have them ready.

If you don't see a "Join this group" link, or if you have received an email about “Ready-made human rights letters”, you are already a member.
Under "Discussions" you can see the emails we've previously sent.

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Postage for one sheet (mark envelope AIRMAIL):
from the USA 98¢ (to Canada 75¢, Mexico 79¢)
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Updates on past cases

You may submit a letter appeal for possible use. Please make it easy for us: Keep it short. Provide a summary of the fuller information (which we like to get in chronological order). Expect to be edited. Provide a web link if possible, or a citation of the authority for the information, e.g. for an Amnesty International Urgent Action, its number, date, and "write no later than" date. Send to guy@universalworkshop.com

Do letters do any good? Mostly they get no apparent response. But they bother the authorities and have been known to play a part in a prisoner's release. Often they cause atrocious conditions to be improved. If known about by a prisoner or other victim, they mightily ENCOURAGE.

“When the first two hundred letters came, the guards gave me back my clothes. Then the next two hundred letters came, and the prison director came to see me. When the next pile of letters arrived, the director got in touch with his superior. The letters kept coming and coming: three thousand of them. The President was informed. The letters still kept arriving, and the President called the prison and told them to let me go.” —Julio de Peña Valdez, trade union leader, after his release in 1974 from underground solitary confinement in the Dominican Republic

These “remhurls” have been sent by email to a list of friends at irregular intervals (monthly, sometimes less, sometimes more) since 1996. Since 2008 we have used this better method of distribution. We are responsible for them; they are not an official production of Amnesty International, Survival International, or any other of our sources.

Another resource for easily sending human-rights letters (it provides individualized texts or printed letters, for small fees per year or other period):
Appeals Worldwide, www.appealsww.com

More about Hakamada Iwao

You could also, or instead, call on the Japanese authorities
—to end the system of daiyo kangoku pre-trial detention (see below)
—or to improve prison conditions (see below) in accordance with the recommendations of the UN Human Rights Committee
—or to try a moratorium on executions

Having written your letter you could send it also to:
Prime Minister Aso Taro
Prime Minister's Office
2-3-1 Nagata-cho
Chiyoda-ku
Tokyo, 100-0014
Japan

Prison Warden Fukuoka Hisashi
Tokyo Detention Center
1-35-1 Kosuge,
Katsushika-ku,
Tokyo, 124-0001
Japan

Information condensed from Amnesty International documents (website, the Individuals at Risk portfolio, greeting-card actions)
Hakamada Iwao, now 73, has spent over 40 years on death row, 28 of them in solitary confinement. He was arrested in 1966 for the murder of his employer, his employer's wife, and their two children.
Held in a police cell, he was interrogated for 20 days under a system called daiyo kangoku ("substitute prison"). During this time there are no rules controlling the length of interrogations; sessions are not recorded; access to lawyers is restricted. Amnesty International has documented methods routinely used to obtain "confessions", including intimidation, beatings, sleep deprivation, questioning from early morning till late at night, and making the suspect stand or sit in a fixed position for long periods. No lawyer was present at Hakamada Iwao's interrogation. At his trial he said that he was beaten and threatened by police officers to coerce him into signing a onfession. He has repudiated it ever since, maintaining his innocence.
Used as evidence at the trial was a set of bloodstained clothing, found in a tank at the factory where he worked. The clothing was too small for him, but the prosecution claimed it had shrunk while in the tank. The knife he was supposed to have used was, according to his lawyer, too small to have made the fatal wounds. And the door by which he was alleged to have entered and left the victims' house had been locked.
He was convicted in 1968. Lawyers have made several unsuccessful appeals to the higher courts.
One of the three judges at the original trial, Kumamoto Norimichi, has publicly stated that he believed Hakamada Iwao to be innocent, but, outvoted by the other two, had to sentence an innocent man to death. This judge has now acually joined the campaign to get Hakamada Iwao freed. British Liberal Democrat MP Alastair Carmichael is working on the case with Amnesty International, made a recent trip to Japan, and commented (on the Amnesty Blog website): "I have never come across a campaign before claiming a miscarriage of justice where the campaign included one of the trial judges!"

Waiting to be hanged for 40 years, could be hanged tomorrow
In Japan, prison governors and wardens have wide discretion to set their own rules, and these rules are kept secret. Death row inmates are not allowed to talk with other prisoners, nor to engage in hobbies or other interests, nor watch television. Visits from family and lawyers are at the discretion of the governor. Rules control how many letters a prisoner may write, when he may go to the toilet, even the way he is expected to walk.
No wonder that after 28 years in solitary confinement Hakamada Iwao suffers mental illness.
Execution is by hanging. After appeals are exhausted, a prisoner may wait years or decades for this. Yet could be executed at any time. He is notified only on the morning of the day he is to die. It is done in secret. The family is informed only afterward.
The Ministry of Justice claims this secrecy protects the family of the prisoner from shame, even that it reduces mental strain on the prisoner. It does the opposite: the prisoner lives year after year in unremitting fear of imminent hanging.
In 1998 the UN Human Rights Committee found that prison conditions for death row inmates in Japan were incompatible with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ratified by Japan in 1979. In 2009 there is no apparent improvement.
The death penalty has wide support in Japan. This is at least partly due to the extraordinary secrecy that shrouds it from view. People do not have to think about it, and there is little information for potential public debate. Over the last two years the rate of executions has increased.