For human rights, against the death penalty
The article marking the foundation of AI.
Amnesty International celebrates five decades of campaigning – By Andreas Zumach
Open your newspaper any day of the week and you will find a story from somewhere of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government.”
Thus reads the first paragraph of an article entitled “The Forgotten Prisoners” by the British lawyer Peter Benenson, marking the foundation of the human rights group Amnesty International. Published in the Observer on May 28, 1961, it called on readers to send letters to governments demanding the release of political prisoners.
The trigger for Benenson’s engagement was a short newspaper report that he had read while traveling on the London Underground in November 1960. Two Portuguese students had been arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison for raising a toast “to freedom” in a Lisbon café – a word whose mention had been forbidden by Portugal’s dictatorship at the time.
Benenson’s call was reprinted in 30 large newspapers in a variety of countries. Within a few weeks, more than 1,000 people had volunteered. In July 1961, delegates from Belgium, Great Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and the United States founded Amnesty International at the first international meeting in Luxembourg as a “permanent international movement to defend the freedoms of opinion and religion.”
The AI section in West Germany was founded shortly afterward at the “Congress for the Freedom of Culture” in Cologne. The moving spirits behind the venture were the journalists and authors Carola Stern and Wolfgang Leonhard, as well as Gerd Ruge from the German public television broadcaster ARD.
“It was the peak of the Cold War, the differences and mistrust between East and West were getting increasingly acute,” Ruge recalls today. At the same time there were “many people who wanted to help political prisoners and people in danger without allowing themselves to be exploited by one side or the other.”
The idea from London was perfect: Each local Amnesty chapter would focus on three prisoners; one from the East Bloc, one from the West, and one from the “Third World.” Using this approach, the first AI chapter tried to win the release of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, a Jehovah’s Witness in Spain, and the South African communist writer Alex La Guma.
Despite, or perhaps because of their non-partisan mandate, solely committed to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, AI and its activists were regularly caught between the political fronts. Many politicians and media in the West considered them a communist fifth column, while in the East they were seen as imperialist CIA stooges.
However, what really counts over time is success. Of the total 4,000 prisoners around the world whose cases AI took up in the first 10 years after its founding, at least 2,000 were released. In 1977 the organization was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Today AI is much more than just an organization that helps political prisoners.
AI’s dogged campaign against the death penalty, started in 1977, has contributed significantly to increasing numbers of countries abolishing legalized state killing. And the number of executions worldwide has also declined.
In 1985 Amnesty International expanded its mandate to include protection for refugees and asylum seekers. And their engagement against impunity for political criminals, started in 1993 in collaboration with many other non-governmental organizations, helped ensure the founding of the International Criminal Court in 1998. Legal proceedings can now be pursued around the world for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide.
In February 2011, former US President George W. Bush had to cancel a trip to Geneva, planned months in advance, after AI filed charges against him with the Swiss authorities because of the torture he had personally approved in the Guantanamo military prison and in other American detention facilities.
Since 2003, AI has not just confined itself to campaigning for human rights but is also active in the struggle for economic, social and cultural rights. Today it is the largest of the approximately 300 human rights organizations registered around the globe, with more than three million members and regular supporters in over 150 countries. There are national chapters in 61 countries, mostly in Europe and on the American continent.
Despite its growth, the organization remains firmly independent of all political factions. And despite the end of the Cold War, AI’s work today is as urgently needed as it was during its founding. That is amply demonstrated by the sometimes vehement attacks against Amnesty from various governments around the world. They include, in the last five years alone, broadsides from Tel Aviv, Tehran, Riyadh, Kinshasa, Beijing, Hanoi, Moscow and Washington.
British weekly The Observer could re-print Peter Benenson’s 1961 article almost word for word today for AI’s 50th anniversary.