Here’s To You: Ales Bialiatski joins global campaign to sign for rights (video)

Viasna’s leader Ales Bialiatski has joined Amnesty Italia’s campaign “Here’s To You”, a global call launched by Roberto Saviano, an Italian writer and journalist, to highlight daily human rights violations across the world.

Roberto Saviano is under a permanent police escort because of his courageous stance of saying the truth against injustices and Mafia. He is considered a “national hero” by author philosopher Umberto Eco. He lives at a secret location in the States to avoid reprisal attacks. Amnesty Italia asked him to launch this campaign to involve more and more people in the fight for human rights.

The organizers asks people to sing “Here's To You”, a 1971 song written by Ennio Morricone and sung by Joan Baez, as a tribute to Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists who were unfairly condemned to death in 1927 in Boston because of a crime they didn’t commit. Amnesty Italia has produced a video and distributed it to show that the “fight against injustice is not over and that people like Sacco and Vanzetti in the world are not alone”.

Among the people who have joined Roberto Saviano’s call, there are some who have suffered human rights violations themselves. Amnesty Italia decided to give their videos a special place, because they believe that knowing what they have experienced could encourage more people to join Amnesty International.

“We believe that the world will be a better place when people feel the injustices of the world as if they were their own,” says the campaign’s website.