Another brick in the wall

In last week’s blog I told how myself and Bernard O’Hear (Amnesty’s Country Co-ordinator for China) weren’t allowed to present the Chinese Consulate with 2,500 campaign postcards collected in support of Hu Jia during the Edinburgh Festival.

Hu Jia is a human rights campaigner who has been sentenced to three and a half years simply for the peaceful expression of his views. So there’s an element of irony in the Consulate’s attempts to stop all these people from registering their complaint as to his treatment.

I indicated last week that, having retired to lick our wounds, our next step would be simply to post the cards on, and so we did. Alas when the good representative of City Couriers ("Scotland’s only environmentally friendly courier service") arrived with our box, they refused to take that too. And so all those campaign cards are back on my desk again.

"The mail must get through" was the rallying call of the old Wells Fargo coaches travelling across America’s Wild West. Rest assured that Amnesty takes a similarly robust approach to delivering the messages entrusted to us across the slightly more sedate West End of Edinburgh.

It looks like we will have to send the cards, bundle by bundle, in a series of small envelopes in the normal post. So be it. It’ll cost a bit more in postage, but I suspect they will be much more noticeable than if they arrived in one big box.