June 2024 Meeting

Our next meeting is Monday June 3rd 2024 in Trinity Methodist Church. This is the anniversary of the terrible massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989. We remember those who lost their lives just for speaking up for the freedom of speech. Shocking today as it was back then, except we have seen the extension by the China government in Hong Kong to further clamp down on freedom of speech and demonstrations (link to AI global's news report) . Back in January, we sent a letter supporting Chow Hang-tung, a barrister being held in detention for wanting to commemorate the massacre. Steph will bring a further letter to sign for the detention of the media Jimmy Lai (and others) to tomorrow's session.  We will be organising a China event later in the year for which hopefully we will get a speaker!!

Primary purpose of the meeting will be to discuss how we move our group forward. We have successfully proven we can continue as a group, but we need to look at other ways of growing our group, particularly the numbers of active members. We will be look to revamp the "About Us" section of the Woking website. We are also thinking of widening our network by looking to involve more of the Hong Kong Chinese who have recently moved to the UK. If you have any other ideas, please feel free to contact us.

There are a number of Kent and Surrey Border events happening in the next few months: one for awareness is next week and relates to Eritrea being organised by the Guildford group.

• Amnesty Guildford group has organised on Tuesday 4th June at 7pm on Microsoft Teams. Their speaker is Alex, Eritrea country coordinator and will talk about the current human rights situation. This is a chance to understand who Amnesty Country Coordinators are and how important is the work they’re doing in Amnesty UK. You can get the Teams link by emailing one of us.

We'd love to have more of you join us regularly, so please do come along.  The more we have, the more difference we can make!

So a reminder of the details are as follows:

Trinity Methodist Church, Woking, GU21 6BG at 7:30pm and also online (contact us for the login)

Best wishes,

Steph, Monica, Keith 

Co-Chairs Amnesty Woking Group