Just a few days before Christmas, on 21 December 2020, Amnesty Westminster Bayswater and Letters with Wings invited everyone to watch a Facebook live stream for Yalda Night in support of prisoners in Iran. Yalda Night is an Iranian feast which marks the longest and darkest night of the year. Yalda means rebirth (of the sun). Family and friends gather to share food and drink and read poetry (in particular by Hanfez and Sa’adi).

In this post we would like to say thank you to everyone who joined our event and also share the links to our new YouTube channel which has a recording of the event and all the individual clips which were submitted. 

If you read the previous post, you know that we asked people around the world to be the voice of a political prisoner in Iran and make a recording of themselves reading a poem or another text (often an excerpt from a letter) which was written by a political prisoner in Iran and help that their voices will be heard across the prison walls and not silenced. We asked people to tweet their contributions with the hashtag #GiveThemAVoice and submitted to us via a Dropbox link.

The resonance was very positive and we had in the end 82 files in our Dropbox folder. We received contributions from all over the world, in particular many clips from different parts of the UK, from Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, USA, Canada and Australia. Many individuals sent their clips, some of them are associated with Amnesty International, some are not. In addition a good number of Amnesty Groups in the UK and beyond participated in the campaign. I want to mention and thank in particular the Amnesty Group Reading, Amnesty Group Richmond Twickenham and Amnesty Group Mayfair & Soho (all UK), as well as Amnesty Group Furesø, Denmark and Amnesty Toronto Iran Action Circle, Canada for their support and their wonderful clips.

We recorded the event which was hosted by one member of our group and by Viviana Fiorentino, Letters with Wings. You can find the event on our new Amnesty Westminster Bayswater YouTube channel: Video clip of our Give Them A Voice Yalda Event

We received contribution in support of the following prisoners (and former prisoners): 

* Anoosheh Ashoori

* Aras Amiri

* Arash Sadeghi

* Golrock Iraee

* Atena Daemi

* Fariba Adelkhah

* Kylie Moore Gilbert

* Maryam Akbari Monfared

* Narges Mohammadi

* Nasrin Sotoudeh

* Clip about executions

* Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe

* Niloufar Bayani

* Sadigeh Vasmaghi

* Soheil Arabi

* Zeynab Jalalian

You can find also all individual clips on our new YouTube Channel. Please subscribe to the YouTube channel. Please watch and share in particular the individual clips and like them. There are playlists for each prisoner which you can also share.