Members of Winchester's branch of Amnesty gathered at the Friends Meeting House in Colebrook Street to consider the organisation's revised mandate.

Liz Robertson, who sits on the board of Amnesty International, and lives in Hyde Street, Winchester, said it now wanted to see a world more in accordance with the 1948 United Nation's Declaration on Human Rights.

It now had a vision of a world in which every person enjoyed a reasonable standard of human rights, together with a mission to undertake research, act to prevent grave abuses of physical and human rights and to campaign for freedom of conscience and freedom from discrimination.

She said Amnesty would also campaign on wider issues such as abuses by companies and campaign with other non-governmental organisations. Grave abuse was defined as torture, unfair trials, and the use of landmines.

The issues to be campaigned on would emerge with each country under investigation. For instance, in Nigeria there had been a campaign on behalf of the Ogoni people who, it was felt, had not received the benefit of oil discovery in their region and had been persecuted by their government and denied hospital care.

In the interval, Mrs Newport gave a talk on how the Winchester group had campaigned for Myo Min Zaw, a 27-year-old Burmese condemned to 50 years' imprisonment for forming a political party in Burma