FULL CIRCLE

Peter Benenson (The Telegraph, February 28th, 2005)

Peter Benenson, who died on Friday aged 83, was the founder of Amnesty International, the organisation set up to bring pressure on governments to release people imprisoned for voicing their political or religious opinions - people for whom Benenson coined the term "prisoners of conscience". The impetus for the founding of Amnesty was a newspaper article Benenson read, when travelling on the London Underground, in November 1960: two Portuguese students had been arrested and sentenced to seven years' in jail for drinking a toast to liberty - the government of Portugal was then in the hands of the dictator Antonio Salazar - in a cafe in Lisbon.

Incensed, Benenson, a barrister who already had experience of human rights work, came up with the idea of a one-year campaign to draw public attention to the plight of the world's political and religious prisoners. With Eric Barker, a Quaker, and the barrister Louis Blom-Cooper, Benenson launched "Appeal for Amnesty 1961", which on May 28 that year appeared on the front page of the Observer newspaper.

Entitled "The Forgotten Prisoners", the piece began: "Open your newspaper - any day of the week - and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government. The newspaper reader feels a sickening sense of impotence. Yet if these feelings of disgust all over the world could be united into common action, something effective could be done."

In October, as part of the campaign, Benenson published Persecution 1961, a short book which contained the stories of a handful of men and women from varying political and religious outlooks who had suffered imprisonment for expressing their opinions. By the end of that month Amnesty had accumulated 840 case files from 31 countries and the outlook was promising.

Amnesty International, one of the original and most successful transnational NGOs, was a child of a post-war, post-Holocaust morality that wrenched human suffering out of the realm of political ideology and culture. It began with a very concrete and noble concern for imprisoned and mistreated “prisoners of conscience”, but it declined to accord any causal significance to either the nature of the imprisoning regime or the cause of the imprisoned. In perfect accord with the zeitgeist of the immediate postwar decades, it dovetailed nicely with popular movements like world federalism, French existentialism and progressive anti-colonialism. It held that, by definition, all governments were equally suspect and all dissenters equally noble. Its brilliant letter-writing campaigns offered participation in the grand sweep of international politics to one and all, and only the churlish would begrudge the pride and satisfaction of those thousands of ordinary folks who tirelessly penned appeals on behalf of some wretched prisoner half a world away.

But choices must be made, and from the very beginning its “apolitical” stance pulled it in an anti-Western direction, if only because it was much more effective dealing with accessible autocratic thugs than with the far more murderous and closed communist world. Nothing succeeds like success and the squeaky wheel gets the grease, not to mention the financial contributions. It is telling that Mr. Benenson’s inspirational rage was triggered by two Portuguese students in the same year Mao-Tse-Tung was orchestrating the death by starvation of untold millions. Knowing full well that all the letters in the world could not sway a fanatic and dogmatic totalitarian, they aimed at softer targets and, in the process, convinced themselves that these were the epicentre of human depravity. Amnesty didn’t just battle injustice, it came to define it.

Today, Amnesty bears little resemblance to a grassroots movement worrying about individuals. It has been taken over completely by that scourge of modern Western life, the professional activist, who finds individuals rather a bore. As with many other successful NGOs, it now spends most of its time in the much more exciting enchanted kingdom of UN diplomacy--issuing press releases, commissioning studies, hurrying to conferences and passing resolutions to promote the secular apocalypse of abstract, universal “human rights”. Many of these rights have little to do with human freedom and dignity. They also have much more to do with words on paper than with the real lives of human beings. And, perhaps most importantly, they increasingly require coercion to enforce. Let us be thankful that a great humanitarian like Mr. Benenson will not live to see his brainchild become an agent for the imprisonment and oppression of those fighting for true freedom.