Death of Amnesty International founder
Peter Benenson, 31 July 1921 - 25 February 2005
Press release, 02/26/2005
The man who lit the fuse of the human rights revolution died this
week, having refused all honours and leaving behind him a world
changed by the countless protests and petitions he championed
Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International, was 83.
He was
He was
born into a world without the United Nations. Not a single
international human rights treaty was in existence. The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights had yet to be written. There wasn?t a
single one of today?s major human rights organizations on the
political landscape. Civil society was yet to be born.
Inordinately modest and self-effacing, the one-time lawyer who
launched Amnesty International in 1961 would never claim credit for
the sea-change of the last 40 years. He was offered knighthoods by
almost every successive British Prime Minister but he never accepted.
Each Prime Minister who wrote to him received a personal response from
Benenson - who typed his own letters until late in life -- in which
he would cite the current human rights violations Amnesty was
confronting in the UK. He would suggest, without mincing his words,
that if the government wished to take account of his work for human
rights, what mattered was to redress those abuses.
In comparison with the world into which he was born, Benenson left
behind him one changed so fundamentally that it is hard to conceive
of the scale of the transformation. Nearly a hundred human rights
treaties and other legal instruments are now in force
internationally. Over ninety percent of the world?s countries are
now party to the most comprehensive of these, the twin international
covenants on civil/political and economic/social rights. Almost all of
those states have now formally given the right to their citizens to
make international complaints.
In addition to the human rights bodies of the United Nations, there
are now regional intergovernmental bodies covering up to
three-quarters of the world?s nations.
Women?s rights, child rights, minority rights, workers? rights,
the rights of disabled persons - all of these have been codified and
strengthened by successive declarations, conventions and acts of
national legislation. Torturers have become international outlaws. As
we enter the 21st Century, more than half the countries of the world
have rejected the death penalty - either by abolishing it altogether
or ceasing to carry out executions.
However, the most extraordinary phenomenon - and the one on which
Peter Benenson left his indelible mark - is the birth of what has
come to be known globally as "civil society". Today there are well
over a thousand domestic and regional organizations working to
protect human rights. Among them, his brainchild Amnesty
International, is one of the best known, with almost 2 million
members, subscribers and supporters in more than 64 countries and
territories.
But to think of Peter Benenson merely as the founder of one
organization (indeed he started several others) is to misread perhaps
the single most distinctive political feature of the period from the
end of the Second World War to the present: the emergence of
organized, non-violent public opinion as an increasingly powerful
force in domestic and international politics. Historians may locate
its origins in any number of social changes following the war. But
there is one event that will incontestably be told and retold in any
social history of that period.
It is the story of a man in a bowler hat reading his newspaper on the
London underground in late 1960. He reads a small item about two
Portuguese students being sentenced to seven years? imprisonment
for raising their glasses in a toast to freedom. He is outraged,
decides to go to the Portuguese embassy in London to make a personal
protest and then changes his mind. Instead he gets off at Trafalgar
Square station and makes his way to the church of St Martin?
s-in-the-Fields. He goes in, sits down for three-quarters of an hour,
and thinks.
In his words, "I went in to see what could really be done effectively,
to mobilize world opinion. It was necessary to think of a larger
group which would harness the enthusiasm of people all over the world
who were anxious to see a wider respect for human rights."
That man was Peter Benenson, then a barrister in London. When he came
outside into the square, he had his idea. Within months, he launched
his Appeal for Amnesty with a front page article in The Observer
newspaper.
Nothing quite like it had ever been attempted on such a scale before.
The response was overwhelming, as if people worldwide were waiting
for exactly such a signal. Newspapers in over a dozen countries
picked up the appeal. Over a thousand letters poured in within the
first six months. And the post-bags of the world?s heads of state
changed forever.
Benenson?s idea was so simple, perhaps that?s why he remained so
shy of personal publicity throughout his life. Termed "one of the
larger lunacies of our time" by one of its critics, a network of
letter writers was set up to bombard governments with individual
appeals on behalf of prisoners jailed and ill-treated in violation of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In an age of self-aggrandisement, his modesty was almost hard to
fathom. He never went forward to receive the numerous accolades
showered upon Amnesty, known universally by its candle in barbed
wire. His mind was always fixed on what had not been accomplished and
the countless victims still to be rescued.
"The candle burns not for us," he declared, "but for all those whom we
failed to rescue from prison, who were shot on the way to prison, who
were tortured, who were kidnapped, who ?disappeared?. That is
what the candle is for."
In later years, as Amnesty?s impact grew exponentially and went on
to harness the power of the international news media, other groups
began to adopt and adapt its methods in support of their causes. The
extraordinary impact of the environmental movement twenty years
later, the women?s rights movement and a host of other single-issue
and coalition groups, working in their own countries or across
national boundaries, can often be traced to the early examination
they made of the methods Benenson?s organization was using.
Today we take the power of charities, voluntary groups and people?s
campaigns for granted. But before that day in Trafalgar Square - the
day on which a single newspaper reader decided it was time for a
change - that power had yet to shake the world.
Nothing has ever been quite the same since. As he said in 1961,
lighting the first Amnesty candle, "I?m reminded of the words of a
16th century man sentenced to death by burning: We have today lit
such a candle as shall never be put out."
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Richard Reoch, former head of public information at the
organization?s International Secretariat, worked and travelled with
Benenson in his later years.