Amnesty International's Trial By Timeline

Raising Awareness Through Social Media

We all know how social media plays an important role on raising awareness for several important issues. We also know how that can lead to the online activism that can be criticized for being difficult to convert to offline action, slaktivism, clicktivism etc. Nonetheless, many times, good ideas rise! In this case, it is not directly involved with culture (which is the predominant topic on this blog), but I think that it actually permeates culture: human rights.

I don't think there is an order of importance or any kind of hierarchy here. Culture is just as important as human rights, simply because identity and sense of belonging are just as important as the right to be free and to have a fair trial, for example. It would be hard, and a bit pointless I would say, to try and put some sort of order of importance.

But I think human rights permeates culture in the sense that it is, in theory (and that can be a very long discussion), universal, whilst culture varies greatly. Culture can be one thing for a group of people but a totally different set of things for another. Human rights (again, theoretically) is the same for all humans of this planet.

I added the "in theory" part just because I know that there is a very wide philosophical debate about it, but I do stand on the side of the universality of human rights. The correlations between human rights and culture will soon become a serious investigation for me. Until then, suggestions for this topic are very welcome!

Well, without further ado:

New Zealand has the highest level of human freedom, according to the Canadian Fraser Institute. These are happy times for being a Kiwi! The New Zealand Amnesty International very wisely saw this as an opportunity to raise knowledge about the not-so-privileged-rest-of-the-world situation on human rights. Thus, they prepared a very smart Facebook app that will analyse your timeline and tell you how many crimes you would be violating in each country and all the following terrible punishments that come along.

I, for instance, would have been arrested 51 times and tortured 16 times among a number of beatings, persecutions and more.. Luckily, I've escaped being beheaded. Though it can appear a bit funny, at the end all you have left to think about is that there are a number of places in the world where the things that we judge so natural, like having a beer next to a non-married woman or joining a human rights group like Amnesty International, can be punished by death. It is sad and overwhelming.

www.trialbytimeline.org.nz/ 

What results did you get? Surprised to see some unexpected countries on your list?
A very good initiative by Amnesty International New Zealand. They seized a good moment to draw attention, not them selves, but to the rest of the world. I congratulate you!