The campaign can be supported by additional signatures. Signatures, reports, pictures and information of actions can be sent to solidarityalive@riseup.net . These will be published on www.solidaritykeepsusalive.org of the campaign, with background information and letters from prisoners.
The destruction of nature, the environment and social life caused by capitalist modernity means that the Coronavirus pandemic poses great danger to human health and life. Previously, epidemics such as cholera, AIDS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, SARS I/II affected people’s lives on a mass scale. The spread of Covid-19 is the result of persistent attacks on nature and society in the name of capitalist modernity for maximum profit extraction.
For many states the current Coronavirus pandemic is an opportunity to be used against the most vulnerable people in society, especially the elderly and prisoners who are deemed economically unproductive. In particular, political prisoners are excluded from postponement and amnesty regulations issued to prevent the spread of the virus in prisons. They are effectively left for dead.
In many countries around the world, hundreds of thousands of political prisoners are kept in poor living conditions, with inadequate health care. Women and children are especially vulnerable and unprotected against the pandemic.
Arrangements in prisons made in response to the pandemic in various countries have only seen the release of mafia members, murderers and rapists. There is obviously a conscious bias against political prisoners who are considered enemies of anti-democratic regimes. They are particularly abandoned to deal with the virus in prison conditions. This injustice makes it obvious why our aim is to live in a society without a system of punishment and without prisons.
Prisons are spaces isolated from the public. With their high walls and barbed-wire fencing, they exist in order to silence the voice of political prisoners and isolate them from society. Even though it is always important for us to become their voice and bring the “inside” to the “outside”, this task becomes ever more essential and urgent while their health and lives are increasingly at serious risk from the Coronavirus pandemic.
We on the ‘outside’ should defend our sisters in resistance, voices of opposition, revolutionaries and political prisoners on the ‘inside’. It is our duty to protect their lives!
To protect and save vulnerable human life is a matter of morality and conscience. This constitutes an important dimension of building power for a free life, essential for a permanent exit from crisis and chaos.
We believe that you are in agreement with us. We ask you to join our campaign to release all political prisoners whose lives and health are at serious risk.
We propose the following in forming a campaign called, “Solidarity keeps us alive”,
- To establish meaningful contact between prisoners, especially women, relatives and supporters and to make the situation and voices of the prisoners heard in society.
- To set up initiatives in all countries to support prisoners and launch petition campaigns against the prison policies of governments.
- To demand the United Nations, Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) and similar organizations exert political and diplomatic pressure on the states in question, demanding the immediate release of all political prisoners.
The campaign can be supported by additional signatures.
Signatures, reports, pictures and information of actions can be sent to solidarityalive@riseup.net . These will be published on www.solidaritykeepsusalive.org of the campaign, with background information and letters from prisoners.
We want to lead this campaign together, step by step, and in the long run to success!
Solidarity keeps us alive!
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