Cross-posted at DailyKos. Thanks to Georgia10, and thousands of you who sent faxes and e-mails, and who made phone calls:
Amina al-Abduladif’s lawyer was with her in prison when the last-minute reprieve came. Shada Nasir told The Times: “She was shaking and crying. She had said her prayers and her farewells and was sure she was going to die. What we don’t know is whether the execution has been delayed for a day or a week as no one will tell us.
“She is still very frightened and confused about what happens now.”
Times UK || Special thanks to Sarahlee for sending me the link.
Our worries are not over. We must keep acting. More below … where your ideas are needed … and CONTACTS:
I suggest — preliminarily — these immediate actions:
1. We thank Amnesty International UK for its hard work: press@amnesty.org.uk
2. We berate all those in the press we contacted about her story, none of whom acted. You know who you contacted. Contact them to protest their failure to inform.
3. We find a way to communicate directly with Amina and send her letters of support, or whatever else we might be able to send to her. (To that end, I want to reach her attorney, Mrs. Shadha Mohammad Nasser, a lawyer at the supreme court. I’l try to find out how but if any of you know how, please share.)
More from the Times UK story today:
The President has asked justice ministers to look again at her case while her lawyers are demanding a new trial.
For the moment Mrs Abduladif remains on death row with her two-year-old son, who was born in jail after she was allegedly raped by a prison guard. She had gone on hunger strike after a prison official told her that he had read in a newspaper that her execution date had been set for yesterday.
“I have pleaded with her to eat something and to have hope,” Mrs Nasir said. “She is very grateful for all those abroad who protested about her case. We believe it was this international intervention that saved her, as here she had become forgotten.”
About the rape:
“What has been done to this young woman by the police and the judicial system is shameful,” Mrs Nasir said. “She has spent years in prison for a crime she didn’t commit and was raped while in their custody. I don’t know how much more she can take.”
About the history of her case:
About the imposition of the death penalty on someone of her age — she was 14 when the murder was supposedly committed, and she was sentenced to death when she was 16 — only confessing to the crime after being tortured:
About the fate of her son:
She had two daughters from her marriage — before age 14? And one has been killed?
What a life. Let’s discuss ideas on how we might help her further and how we might contact her directly through her attorney (see just below the fold).
CONTACTS YOU CAN USE:
It appears that it was the British government that did most, if not all, of the diplomatic work to save this woman from execution yesterday. However, we can continue to try U.S. State Dept. officials:
The Under Secretary for Political Affairs, R. Nicholas Burns
tel 202-647-2471 fax (202) 647-4780
Assistant Secretary C. David Welch, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA/FO)
tel 202-647-7209 fax (202) 736-4462
Director Alan G. Misenheimer, Office of Arabian Peninsula & Iran Affrs (NEA/ARPI)
tel 202-647-6184 fax (202) 736-4459
Yemen Country desk
tel (202) 647-6558
(I spoke to Tracy Roberts at this desk yesterday. I told her she seemed the best informed on Yemen, and she replied that that’s all she does, every day. She was helpful.)
Thomas C. Krajeski
U.S. Ambassador, Yemen
Telephone: (967) 1 303-155 to 159
Fax: (967) 1 303160/1/2/4/5
U.S. State Dept. Contact Form
Main Switchboard:
202-647-4000
TTY: 1-800-877-8339 (Federal Relay Service)
ALSO: The Yemeni embassy in D.C. was helpful. The secretary told me that she had passed on all of our faxes to the Yemeni ambassador directly.
Embassy of the Republic of Yemen
2319 Wyoming Avenue, NW
Washington DC 20008
Telephone: (202) 965-4760
Fax: (202) 337-2017
List of e-mail addresses at Yemeni embassy in D.C.
And don’t forget to re-contact all the media outlets you faxed and called over the weekend, and BITCH about their failure to provide ANY coverage.
Compare this story to “LG” in Florida…
The US society is rapidly becoming a backwards theocracy… worse… even the President of Yemen stepped in whereas Bush used to mimic the people he put to death in Texas.
I am going to maka a leap here….
This is exactly why we can not allow Democrats to run candidates like Casey in PA. There is too much at stake and running wingnut Dems just forces the Republicans to go further to the right.
It is all adding up:
enough is enough we can not afford Casey.
I agree completely…
Both: we have to keep up pressure and provide support for groups like Amnesty… now more than ever.
And we have to stop the Democrats from turning mealy in a mistaken priority of victory over principle.
Yes. By the way, I had interesting experiences calling my two Democratic senators yesterday. Sen. Murray’s staffer was dismissive. I’ll leave the description at that. Sen. Cantwell’s staffer was terrific — took a full report, promised to check on the faxes we’d sent Maria Cantwell’s office over the weekend. I haven’t heard back yet, but at least she was interested and took down my contact information.
I would suggest one thing to help is to keep her in the public eye, although I am not sure how to do that if the media doesn’t care. Possibly… writing up something about her situation, the work not only amnesty did but also the bloggers getting together and making a stink about it.. and submit it to places as a human interest story.
Different people could write up their different versions, adding whatever stuff they felt made it interesting and submit to different places.. not only to newspapers and mags and such, but to online lists and other things. There are lots of places where you can submit articles that will get read by lots of people, even if they are never actually published, like yahoo groups and such.
And, of course, each one containing information about what people can do. But if you start out with a victory of sorts, (the fact that her execution has been stayed) people will want to continue that.
Well done 🙂
The British government was much better than ours. … but their press hasn’t been much better. Only the Times has the story so far. Odd that The Guardian wouldn’t be on it. Surely they got the UK Amnesty appeal. (Of course, the appeals these groups put out is staggering … I’m on several HR lists, and I can’t begin to do stories on all of them.)
That is odd, about the Guardian. Hmmm…
Your mention of the HR email lists reminded me of a site that might be of interest to some. I dislike getting lots of huge lists in email (and don’t read them when I do, sigh) but this site, Progressive Pipes aggregates email lists from all sources, organized by type (HR, Action, Politics) etc, so that one can just go there and look through all sorts of lists. It’s very convenient, especially when you are looking for a specific something.
Not that you need anymore lists to look through, of course. But still.
[first posted at DailyKos, (corrected typo)]
This is great news, indeed!
To join in tooting horns and to add a potentially new contact site:
On Sunday, I used this web form on the site of Yemen’s Ministry of Human Rights to send a message to the Minister of Human Rights and (hopefully) the President. I haven’t received any acknowledgement from anyone, but I hope it went through. After all, the HR website seems to be updated daily.
This is the site of the contact form I used:
http://www.mhryemen.org/contactus/contactus.php
I am not at the computer from which I sent the message, so I can’t post it here. I used the names from jhwygirl’s post that forwarded AIUSA’s Urgent Network contact Ellen Moore’s information.
I do remember mentioning how the US Supreme Court here has recently ordered to stop executing people convicted of capital crimes they committed as minors and how this followed the Yemeni and other nations’ example.
Thanks much to jhwygirl, georgia10, SusanHu, Ellen Moore, President Saleh, all of you who wrote and called, myself!
THANKS! I’m so glad you came over and posted that info here!
P.S. I just called Democracy Now!’s NYC office. The producer and Amy will look at the story. Fingers crossed.
— And thanks to you, I just sent their HR office a note.