Samantha Power calls for freeing Savchenko and 19 other female prisoners

Samantha Power, US Ambassador to the UN, has tweeted that the US State Department is launching a campaign, Free the 20, aimed at releasing 20 female prisoners all over the world. These women are serving a prison term for political or other reasons and their destiny arouses concern. Among them is the Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko, journalist Khadija Ismayilova and human rights advocate Leyla Yunus from Azerbaijan, civil activist Matluba Kamilova from Uzbekistan, as well as female convicts from Burma, Venezuela, Vietnam, Egypt, Iran, China, North Korea, Syria, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. “In naming these women, we are sending a message to their governments and others like them: If you want to empower women, don’t imprison them on the basis of their views or on the basis of the rights that they are fighting for. Free these 20 women and free the countless women and girls like them behind bars, because these 20 women only represent a tiny fraction of the women currently being unjustly imprisoned,” Samantha Power said. Campaign organizers will be publishing the story of one of these 20 women every working day that are left before the opening of a women’s rights conference at the UN headquarters in New York on September 27.