Prisoner of conscience

We also exclude those people who have conspired with a foreign government to overthrow their own.The primary goal of this year-long campaign, founded by Benenson and a small group of writers, academics and lawyers, including Quaker peace activist Eric Baker, was to identify individual prisoners of conscience around the world and then campaign for their release.

[2][3] This caused Alexei Navalny's status as a POC to be rescinded in February 2021 due to comments he made on migrants in 2007 and 2008[4] which Amnesty International regarded as "hate speech".

[8] Under British law, Amnesty International was classed as a political organisation and therefore excluded from tax-free charity status.

He had initially been adopted as a prisoner of conscience in 1962, when he was sentenced to five years in jail for inciting a strike of African workers.

[13] This was reversed after the Rivonia Trial showed that Mandela now had turned to violently opposing the South African regime.

Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mkhaitir was sentenced to death after he wrote an article critical of religion and the caste system in Mauritania . He later moved to France .
A protest outside the Saudi Arabian Embassy in London against detention of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi , 2017
Illustration depicting Russian artist Aleksandra Skochilenko , who was arrested in 2022 for replacing supermarket price tags with anti-war messages