Launch of JAILHOUSE LAWYERS by Mumia Abu-Jamal
Event date: July 01, 2011 19:00
Tagged as: repression social_struggles
Friends Meeting House, (Room 2), Mount St, Manchester M2 5NS, Wheelchair accessible
Places:
Click on a thumbnail for a slideshow view
From death row, award-winning journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal introduces us to fellow prisoners who litigate against their jailers, risking punishment or even death, to win justice for themselves and other prisoners.
“This is the story,” he writes, “of law learned not in the ivory towers of multi-billion-dollar endowed universities [but] in the hidden, dank dungeons of America – the Prisonhouse of Nations.”
Selma James’s Introduction presents the parallel universe of UK jailhouse lawyers who, like their US counterparts, are leading a justice movement inside prisons.
UK prisoners, denied the vote, are campaigning for this fundamental right. A legal challenge brought by a jailhouse lawyer supported by a dedicated legal team won a European Court ruling in 2004 that a blanket ban on votes for prisoners violates their human rights. Yet the government, in opposing votes for prisoners, acts as if those of us who are prisoners are less human, and deny that prisons and what goes on in them also frame the kind of society we all inhabit.
The UK publication of Jailhouse Lawyers is an opportunity for prisoners’ campaign for the vote and other efforts for fundamental reforms to be more widely known and supported.
Speakers: Selma James, Crossroads Books editor, Introduction to Jailhouse Lawyers, Ian Macdonald, QC, Wrote letter to US court on racism in Abu-Jamal’s trial, signed by over 100 UK lawyers
Contact email: crossroadsbooks@allwomencount.net
Upcoming events feed
