During the last weeks of December before Christmas break, our group ‘Voices for Refugees’ contributed to the event ‘Write for Rights’ advocated by Amnesty International. It consisted of a ’24 hours writing marathon’, where students could write different letters to various heads of states, concerning human rights abuses. This a big event that every year, many people and organizations take part in from all around the world, and the fact that our school has been part of it for 4 years now thanks to our group, is of great pride to us. Write for Rights takes up much of our commitment and focus of the first term.

We started working on the organization around October and every session was dedicated to it. Being that our group mostly focuses on human rights violations related to refugees, based on previous years decisions, we chose to prepare different case studies about refugee issues around the world. Some of our final choices were: EU, Indonesia, Rohingya and UK. Being that I come from Europe and that I am interested in the refugee situation regarding the European Union, I proposed myself as head of the “EU” group. Our goal was to write to the European Commission about the severity of the situation going on in the Mediterranean sea, in front of Europe’s eyes.

In the end, we met our goal and in total 1937 letters were written and sent, and while this has already had an impact on us who have put so much effort to reach this point, we hope that it will have a following out in the world as well. Aiming to get the attention of some of the states’ leaders we addressed is a bit unreachable, but ‘hope is the last thing lost’ they say.