Trade Unionists

Abstract

The right of everyone to ‘form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests’ is guaranteed under article 23 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is clear, however, that many governments do not implement this guarantee. In April 1977, Amnesty International listed 283 individual cases of trade unionists imprisoned (or ‘missing’) as a result of their union activities. This represented an increase of 72% over the number of individual cases known to AI in the previous year. And these figures in turn can only account for a small proportion of those harassed by police, sacked from their jobs or forced into exile or clandestine activity as a result of having attempted to organise their work-force outside, or in defiance of, official structures.