LONDON – “Better to light a candle than curse the darkness” said Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International who has just died. To which I would add, quoting Nehru on hearing of Gandhi’s assassination, “A light has gone out of our lives”.
When Peter Benenson was born there was no Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today we have nearly a hundred international agreements on all aspects of human rights- from the abolishing of torture to the outlawing of the trafficking of women and children. Human Rights are now part of the world’s common culture. Yet to take issue with one of the two most important documents in the human rights’ canon, the American Declaration of Independence, there is nothing “self-evident” about it. Jefferson himself was a contented slave owner.
Professor Kenneth Minogue of the London School of Economics, has written that the idea of human rights is “as modern as the internal combustion engine”. But Professor Brian Tierney of Cornell convincingly argues that the father of subjective rights was the fourteenth century Franciscan philosopher, William of Ockham. At that time in Catholic marriage law it had become established that the simple consent of the man and the woman, without the need to go to church, was regarded as sufficient for a valid sacramental marriage. What a human right that was!
Benenson did not invent the cause of human rights. What he did in a stroke of genius was to popularize it and give it a political impact it had never possessed before. The idea of Amnesty International was the simplest of all ideas. That’s why at first it passed many of us by. We spent our weekends marching around South Africa House in Trafalgar Square trying with our trumpets to blow the house down. Benenson that year – 1960 – was as usual commuting to his law office on the Tube, reading his newspaper, when he saw a small item about two Portuguese students who had been arrested in a bar after loudly and perhaps a little drunkenly toasting the cause of freedom. This was the time of Salazar’s dictatorship.
Benenson thought for a moment and took himself off to St Martin in the Fields, the beautiful Wren church next to South Africa House. He sat there for nearly an hour and then the idea dawned. He wouldn’t protest publicly. He would get a few friends together and bombard the Portuguese authorities with letters. It was, as Martin Ennals, a future Amnesty secretary-general, observed later, “an amazing contention that prisoners of conscience could be released by writing letters to governments”.
As Benenson nurtured the idea it grew roots and branches in his mind. He thought why have just one campaign for one country, why not a one-year campaign to draw attention to the plight of non-violent political and religious prisoners throughout the world?
He persuaded his friend David Astor, editor of the British paper, The Observer, to run a full-page article. Benenson conceived the “threes network”- each group of Amnesty supporters would adopt three prisoners and work for their release. One would be from communist country, one from the West and one from the Third World. Le Monde carried its own piece and the next day newspapers as diverse as the New York Herald Tribune, Die Welt and the Statesman of India took it up.
Over 40 years later we can see what Amnesty succeeded in doing. Yes, it has successfully freed many political prisoners. Yes, it has built a membership of nearly 2 million activists all over the world- even in small up country towns in places like Nigeria where I have watched with astonishment their work in helping pacifying Moslem-Christian rioters. But out of these individual, small-scale, acts it has shifted the political culture in a way we ’60s protestors could never have done, no matter how many times we marched around a dictator’s embassy. Most important of all its victories was its success in persuading most of the world’s nations to agree to the UN Convention Against Torture- which finally showed its teeth when the former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, was arrested in London in 1998.
Today when you open your paper and read a review of the new film “Rwanda Hotel” or see that Croatia is in danger of losing the chance to enter the EU because of its refusal to hand over a general to The Hague war crimes’ court or the ongoing revelations of American and British torture practices you realize that although Benenson did not change the world he didn’t leave it as he found it either. More than ever before large numbers of people are conscious that we have a duty to work, as Benenson said, quoting Shakespeare, “against oblivion”.
