Citing official misconduct in the investigation and trial, Amnesty International charges the U.S. Federal Government with holding Richard Marshall of the American Indian Movement as a political prisoner.
The American Indian Movement (AIM) is a Native American grassroots movement founded in July 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, initially centered in urban areas to address systemic issues of poverty, discrimination, and police brutality against Native Americans. AIM soon widened its focus from urban issues to include many Indigenous Tribal issues that Native American groups have faced due to settler colonialism of the Americas. These have included treaty rights, high rates of unemployment, Native American education, cultural continuity, and preservation of Indigenous cultures.AIM was organized by Native American men who had been serving together in prison. They had been alienated from their traditional backgrounds as a result of the United States' Public Law 959 Indian Relocation Act of 1956, which supported thousands of Native Americans in moving from reservations to cities, in an effort to enable them to have more economic opportunities for work. In addition, Public Law 280, otherwise known as the Indian Termination Act, proposed to terminate the federal government's relations with several tribes determined to be far along the path of assimilation. These policies were enacted by the United States Congress under congressional plenary power. As a result, nearly seventy percent of American Indians left their communal homelands on reservations and relocated to urban centers, many in hopes of finding economic sustainability. While many Urban Indians struggled with displacement and such radically different settings, some also began to organize in pan-Indian groups in urban centers. They were described as transnationals. The American Indian Movement formed in such urbanized contexts, at a time of increasing Indian activism.From November 1969 to June 1971, AIM participated in the occupation of the abandoned federal penitentiary known as Alcatraz, organized by seven Indian movements, including the Indians of All Tribes and Richard Oakes, a Mohawk activist.[4] In October 1972, AIM and other Indian groups gathered members from across the United States for a protest in Washington, D.C., known as the Trail of Broken Treaties. According to public documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), advanced coordination occurred between federal Bureau of Indian Affairs staff and the authors of a twenty-point proposal drafted with the help of the AIM for delivery to the United States government officials focused on proposals intended to enhance USIndian relations.
In the decades since AIM's founding, the group has led protests advocating indigenous American interests, inspired cultural renewal, monitored police activities, and coordinated employment programs in cities and in rural reservation communities across the United States. They have also allied with indigenous interests outside the United States.
Amnesty International (also referred to as Amnesty or AI) is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights, with its headquarters in the United Kingdom. The organization says it has more than ten million members and supporters around the world. The stated mission of the organization is to campaign for "a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments."Amnesty International was founded in London in 1961, following the publication of the article "The Forgotten Prisoners" in The Observer on 28 May 1961, by the lawyer Peter Benenson. Amnesty draws attention to human rights abuses and it campaigns for compliance with international laws and standards. It works to mobilize public opinion to generate pressure on governments where abuse takes place. Amnesty considers capital punishment to be "the ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights." The organization was awarded the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize for its "defence of human dignity against torture," and the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights in 1978.In the field of international human rights organizations, Amnesty has the third-longest history, after the International Federation for Human Rights and the Anti-Slavery Society.