I met up with Christine of the newly-named Actors for Human Rights. We discussed what issue she would like to focus on in a campaign and she resolutely said extraordinary rendition. Extraordinary rendition is the name given to the kidnapping of suspected terrorists by the CIA around the world, who are then held in secret prisons and are not allowed to contact their families, their embassies or legal representation. According to many accounts, they are also tortured. The practice gets a mention in Wikipedia and there is a fact sheet about it on the American Civil Liberties Union website. There was also a film about this released last year (starring Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal).
AFHR has a script about rendition which uses the testimony of three guys who each experienced rendition and were then released. They all claim torture and that the governments of their respective countries didn't help (one is British, one Canadian and one German). This will be used as the basis of our viral campaign.
We also talked about what we want the campaign to achieve. Essentially it will be about raising awareness of the issue as well as the profile of AFHR. We want to direct people to the website, where they will then be offered ideas about what they can do, which organisations are working in this area, booking a show by AFHR and how they can find out more information. Our target audience will probably already be left-leaning and sympathetic to human rights issues, but maybe they are unaware of the extent of the rendition problem and/or have never heard of Actors for Human Rights. Directing people to the website will also provide a way for us to track the success of our campaign to some extent, by keeping an eye on website hits etc.
More to come.
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