Washignton, DC – At the Amnesty International Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference, participants turned their attention to all corners of the globe but most particularly to a country in South East Asia where political activist Filep Karma is prisoner.

Karma was born in 1959in Biak, Papua, formally a Dutch colony and now a province of Indonesia. He became a leading figure in the Free Papua Movement which calls for complete secession from Indonesia and was jailed for ten months in 1998. On December 1, 2004, Karma was arrested for raising a flag to commemorate Papua’s independence from the Dutch. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for treason.

Since then, Karma’s case has received international attention for alleged human rights violations. In 2010 Karma told a local radio station that he was regularly abused by prison authorities and Amnesty International raised alarm bells when prison officials denied the request of Karma’s doctors to take him to Jakarta for proper medical treatment. As a result, this past year Amnesty International named Karma a “priority case” and on Saturday November 12, 2011, hey organized a protest rally of 275 people at the White House to bring attention to Filep Karma’s imprisonment. This is not the first rally – in fact, Claudia Vandermade, Case Coordinator for Filep Karma at Amnesty International, said that amnesty International organizes a regular rally in front of the Indonesian Embassy every Thursday.

Vandermade, who has been involved in amnesty International since her days as a high school teacher at James Roe High School in Fredericksburg, Virginia acknowledges that amnesty Internaitonal has been fighting for a long time. But she doesn’t give up hope.

“For every letter you write, you just don’t know what the tipping point is to changing someone’s life,” she said.

Vandermade has reason to hope. Yusak Pakage, a follower of Karma’s who was arrested a the same time, has since been released. Furthermore, in a recent visit to Indonesia, President Obama announced shifting attention from the Middle East to Asia. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is scheduled to visit Papua, which Vandermade says is a significant event. She is hopeful that human rights will be one of the issues addressed at these meetings.

“If Indonesia wants to be an emerging democrac in Asia, it’s hard for them to defend such human rights violations,” she said.

The three day amnesty International conference closed with a moving keynote from Filep Karma’s oldest daughter, Audryn Karma, that brought tears to many audience members’ eyes. Karma talked about the struggles of growing up as an adolescent without a father and her family’s continued efforts to bring him home.

“The surrounding community, including the church…looked down and isolated us from their activities,” she said. “When we were in the university, we often envy our friends because they had a family, their fathers and mothers often visited them on Christmas or birthdays and did things together as a family. We could not experience the same activities because our father is in jail and our mother has to work hard to support our needs.”

Karma is currently studying towards a dentistry license and hopes to use her skills to help others.