[Marxism] Redgraves Launch Human-Rights Political Party In UK

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(The Redgraves have played a vital role in forming the
Guantanamo Human Rights Commission. Their website is:
http://www.guantanamohrc.org/)
======================================================

Redgraves Launch Human-Rights Political Party In UK

DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
November 27, 2004 10:03 a.m.

LONDON (AP)--U.K. actress Vanessa Redgrave and her brother,
political activist Corin Redgrave, Saturday launched a
political party devoted to human rights, called the Peace
and Progress Party.

The party, co-founded with Azmat Begg, the father of a
Guantanamo Bay detainee, says it will field candidates and
endorse politicians with strong human rights records in the
next general election.

Organizers discussed the party's platform and strategies at
a conference that drew several hundred people Saturday.

"Our goal is to ring the alarm bells about the human rights
abuses our government is sanctioning, and to act as a focus
for people who want to stand up against them," Corin
Redgrave said.

Party organizers will set an official agenda for the group
in early spring and will chose candidates then, Redgrave
said. In addition to fielding their own candidates, the
group will rate candidates from other parties on their
record of voting on human rights issues.

Redgrave suggested that four U.K. prisoners at Guantanamo
Bay could run as party candidates, as a means of protesting
their detention and the alleged human rights abuses at the
prison on a U.S. naval base in Cuba.

"It could be one highly effective way of sending a message
through the polls," Corin Redgrave said, noting how the
Irish nationalist cause was buoyed when the 1980s
hunger-striking prisoner Bobby Sands was elected to
Parliament.

Working for the release or fair trial of prisoners in
Guantanamo Bay will be a focus for the group, said Begg.
His son, Moazzam Begg, is one of the four U.K. citizens
held in Guantanamo.

"The mainstream political parties have shown no interest in
the human rights abuses going at Guantanamo Bay and in
Iraq," Begg said. "That's why a party based on human rights
as its central issue is so vital."

Other speakers at Saturday's conference included Burns
Weston, president of the University of Iowa Center for
Human Rights, and prominent Russian journalist Anna
Politkovskaya, a vocal critic of Russia's military campaign
against separatist rebels in Chechnya.





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