Amnesty Shares Video of Trump, Putin, Kim, Assad, Duterte and Orbán to Commemorate Its 58th Birthday

Donald Trump Kim Jong Un
President Donald Trump walks with North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un during a break in talks at the second U.S.-North Korea summit at the Sofitel Legend Metropole hotel in Hanoi on February 28. SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

The human rights campaign group Amnesty International shared a video on Facebook to mark its 58th birthday—showing world leaders it has criticized attempting to blow out the candle in its logo.

"The harder they blow, the brighter we glow. We're 58 today and still going strong. Happy Birthday to us," posted Amnesty to its Facebook page, which has more than 2.2 million likes.

Featured in the video is U.S. President Donald Trump, North Korea's Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, Russia's President Vladimir Putin, Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, and Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

In the U.S., Amnesty has recently criticized the ongoing use of the death penalty, American military interventions across the world, the plight of migrant children detained at the southern border with Mexico, and the Trump administration's anti-transgender policies, among other issues.

Amnesty has focused in North Korea on the Kim regime's use of barbaric prison camps to crush dissent and opposition, where inmates are subjected to torture, forced labor, and executions, among other abuses by those in power. Free expression is nonexistent in North Korea.

In Russia, the crackdown on democracy, serious opposition to Putin, the LGBT purge in Chechnya, widespread state corruption, the harassment of Jehovah's Witnesses, are all among the targets of Amnesty's recent campaign work.

The rights group has also campaigned prominently on the Assad regime's relentless war crimes in the Syrian civil conflict, supported by Russia, which includes bombardment of civilian areas, torture, chemical attacks and other uses of banned weapons, and the crushing of opposition.

In the Philippines, Duterte's war on drugs, which has led to thousands of extrajudicial killings, has been condemned by Amnesty, as has the harassment of his critics by the authorities.

And in Hungary, Amnesty continues to raise the alarm over the Orbán government's "systematic crackdown on the rights of refugees and migrants," its punitive restrictions on critical foreign-funded NGOs and universities, and widespread state-endorsed anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Founded in 1961, Amnesty International was born as a campaign against the imprisonment of two Portuguese students who toasted freedom in a cafe. The British lawyer Peter Benenson rallied people together for the cause of the students and in support of prisoners of conscience more broadly, and Amnesty was born.

Benenson, who died aged 83 in 2005, once said of Amnesty: "Only when the last prisoner of conscience has been freed, when the last torture chamber has been closed, when the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a reality for the world's people, will our work be done."

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