NET RESULTS:Amnesty Ireland has moved campaigns online, making it easier for well-intentioned supporters to get involved, writes Karlin Lillington

A LOT of us are well-intentioned people, always meaning to get around to doing something on behalf of a cause. In particular, I'd say a fair number of us are Amnesty International supporters (even if not paid-up members), who always mean to get around to writing some letters to repressive governments on behalf of the organisation's important human rights campaigns.

But somehow, we don't - we forget, we don't set aside the time, other things make demands on our time, and the moment of good intentions is lost.

But now, Amnesty Ireland has moved a range of campaigns online in a way that makes it very easy to understand the individual campaigns and actually to do something - right then, right away - by sending an appropriate e-mail.

Formally launched last weekend, Amnesty Ireland's Online Action Centre, www.amnesty.ie/actioncentre, already has hundreds of registered members and has carried out more than 3,000 actions.

Those actions have already helped achieve the release of a women's human rights defender in Iran, says Prerna Humpal of Amnesty Ireland.

The organisation believes the online centre will get many more people involved with such direct actions and notes that many long-time campaigners are already switching over to using primarily the online centre for information and to participate in campaigns.

The idea behind the centre is to make activism much easier by taking advantage of technologies that facilitate communication. Already, e-mail and the internet are transforming activism by human rights defenders themselves, who take advantage of anonymous web surfing, encrypted e-mail and the ability of anyone with some tech savvy to elude the restrictions governments try to place on internet access.

In this way, human rights defenders are safely able to get uncensored information through web portals, upload information themselves and communicate with other activists.

In addition, bloggers, whether human rights defenders themselves or supporters out on the web, can quickly get information and images out to the wider world through the internet.

The internet makes it very difficult to fully suppress groups or individuals anywhere. It whisks away the obscuring curtains of silence and obfuscation that authorities use to try to hide their activities while, conversely, providing a cloak of anonymity for human rights defenders themselves.

Using the centre is simple and you needn't be an Amnesty member (though you can also join online, or sign up for an e-newsletter and information on campaigns of interest).

On the site, you can read about a range of campaigns classified into specific areas such as China and the Olympics, the Darfur crisis, stopping violence against women, the death penalty, Zimbabwe, mental health and others - a very wide range of both domestic and international issues.

Once you are registered, you can choose to take an action in an area of interest. If you select "stop Violence against Women", you are told in more detail of a specific campaign and can then send an e-mail immediately to a relevant official, or you can take down the details to write or fax other relevant officials.

In this case, as in many of the sections, you can choose a domestic or an international issue - in one case, asking for the release from detention of two women activists in Iran, or asking for the Irish Government to take greater steps to counter the trafficking of women into sex industries in Ireland.

If you choose the mental health section, you can send an immediate e-mail to Ministers Dermot Ahern or Mary Harney to protest against the relocation of the Central Mental Hospital to a location beside the proposed Thornton Hall prison site in north county Dublin.

There's a pre-written e-mail message but you can also modify it - ideally an individual message tends to help most, but even the simple weight of a large number of the same message can have a great impact.

That, after all, is the basis of the letter-writing campaigns Amnesty has used for years to help gain the release of activists or spur action by governments to address particular situations.

Once you send an e-mail, that particular action no longer comes up, so the site manages your personal campaigns for you.

Amnesty is hoping Irish bloggers will post about the Irish online action site to get the word out to a wider, net-savvy community that would undoubtedly embrace this highly accessible way of direct action.

Please take the time to bookmark the site and return to it when you have a bit of spare time in front of your computer.

A few seconds' effort every week or month could mean the difference between life or death for a human rights defender, or faster change on issues you care about within Ireland.

klillington@irish-times.ie

Blog: www.techno-culture.com