Daily Archive

It must be that time of the year again.  The church we attended Sunday — near the in-laws, where stayed for the weekend — was the same one we attended regularly when we had lived in London.  Before Mass, at a table set up just outside the church entrance, once again this year the head of the “justice and peace” group was requesting parishioners sign cards of support addressed to “prisoners of conscience”; and, at the end of the Mass, the priest also urged worshippers to do so on their way out, if they hadn’t done it already.

Interestingly, the window placard announcing the campaign must have been the same one used last year – still partly visible, the words “Amnesty International” had been hastily covered up with white tape.  Moreover, even “Amnesty International” itself went entirely unmentioned in the parish newsletter.  The reason why is likely straightforward enough: the project is now probably run entirely locally by the church group only.  The BBC, June 2007:

The Vatican has urged all Catholics to stop donating money to Amnesty International, accusing the human rights group of promoting abortion…

One suspects, however, that their campaign’s general outlook is essentially unchanged. For while making our way past the table, we overheard that organizer also tell one prospective signer that a prisoner was “at Guantanamo Bay”. Curiously, though, while the parish newsletter had also informed us it might not be appropriate always to send “Christian wishes” to certain prisoners, it failed to specify also if that warning was meant to apply to messages sent to the Guantanamo detainees. (If so in their case, it must have been owing to America’s oppressive separation of church and state, of course.)

However, believing the message I would have wanted sent would not have come across as particularly Christian even in the most nebulously secular of senses, nor would have been well-received by the church group, I chose not to join in sending one; neither did I feel moved to offer the standard requested 50p contribution. The wife also couldn’t suppress a private scoff between us, as we walked back to our car after the service. “Support for the Guantamano detainees?, she said. “They want to kill us?“

Or, perhaps put another way, abort us, post-birth.  Picky, picky, picky, obviously, in anyone’s seeking to focus on such a triffling detail.  Apparently, though, one is no longer supposed to think too hard on the definition of what now constitutes a “prisoner of conscience”; it now evidently expansively includes those whose “conscience” moves them to “observe” at al Qaeda “military” camps.

And that’s a terrible shame, for the Amnesty-popularized notion of the non-violent “prisoner of conscience” is certainly valid enough.  Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa and Aung San Suu Kyi come to mind as just that sort of prisoner, past and present.  And trying to assist such people is certainly morally vital, because they were and are people actually imprisoned unfairly (and perhaps tortured) due to their agitating non-violently for political reform.

That being so, it is therefore decidedly unclear how those held currently at Guantanamo reasonably could be characterized as similar “prisoners of conscience”.  Indeed, labelling them such appears to make a total mockery of the entire idea; if Guantanamo detainees are now to be termed “prisoners of conscience”, well, Rudolf Hess must have been one also.  But, come to think of it, the The Independent probably already believes that.