www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56659-2005Feb26.html
English Lawyer Founded Amnesty International By Patricia Sullivan Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, February 27, 2005; Page C08 Peter Benenson, an English barrister whose outrage over the imprisonment of two students prompted him to found the human rights organization Amne sty International 43 years ago, died of pneumonia Feb. Mr Benenson's organization, which now counts 18 million members, won th e 1977 Nobel Peace Prize for "defending human dignity against violence a nd subjugation," by focusing on human rights and cases of torture and un just imprisonment around the world. Amnesty International grew out of Peter Benenson's call to action, printe d in a newspaper. Search Paid Death Notices Call (202) 334-4122 to place a paid death notice. Search Death Notices: Go Death notices are searchable for 30 days.
Sign Up Now He launched a movement as well as an organization. Amnesty International is considered the largest of the independent, nongovernmental organizati ons that play a powerful role in domestic and international politics. As he later said, it started when Mr Benenson, wearing his bowler hat an d reading a newspaper on the London Underground in 1960, came across a s mall article about two Portuguese students at a Lisbon restaurant who to asted freedom, were arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison. He wrote an appeal that was sent to the Observer newspaper and printed on t he front page, calling for a one-year campaign to address the conditions of six "prisoners of conscience" around the world. "He brought light into the darkness of prisons, the horror of torture cha mbers and tragedy of death camps around the world," Irene Kahn, Secretar y General of Amnesty International, said in a statement. "This was a man whose conscience shone in a cruel and terrifying world, who believed in the power of ordinary people to bring about extraordinary change." In subsequent years, Mr Benenson remained a modest and self-effacing man , shunning attempts to glorify his role and avoiding personal publicity whenever possible. When the group won the Peace Prize, the organization was represented by its chairman, Thomas Hammarberg of Sweden, not Mr Be nenson. Almost every British prime minister in the past 40 years has offered to r ecommend him for knighthood, but he responded to each with a personal le tter suggesting "if they truly wished to honor his work, they would clea n up their own backyard first, and then he would set out a litany of hum an rights violations the British government was complicit in," said Kate Gilmore, the deputy secretary general of Amnesty International. "It was a clever and inspired pitch, and it was heartfelt. In an era of ego and self-aggrandizement, it was almost hard to conceive that such a man . Mr Benenson's career as an activist began with a youthful complaint abou t the quality of food at his school, Eton, which prompted the headmaster to warn his mother of her son's "revolutionary tendencies." In his teen s, he led his first campaign, to garner the school's support for orphans in the Spanish Civil War, and he raised money for Jews fleeing Hitler's Germany. He studied history for a year at Balliol College, Oxford University, then joined the British Army during World War II, where he worked in the Min istry of Information press office. After the war, took his bar exams and became a leading member of the Society of Labour Lawyers. In the early 1950s, sent to Spain, then under the Franco regime, to obser ve the trials of trade unionists, he confronted the judge with a list of complaints. He advised Greek Cypri ot lawyers battling the British rulers. He agitated for lawyers to send observers to Hungary during the 1956 uprising. These efforts led to the formation of Justice, a British-based legal and human rights group. Amnesty International began with a simple idea: pressure governments to f ree political victims by inundating them with postcards and letters from volunteers. The tactics expanded to include meticulously researched annual reports, n ews releases and in-person lobbying. it regularly criticizes the United States for its military operations and prison executions. Critics have noted that open societies in which information-gathering is easier sometimes become the objects of criticis m from Amnesty International that is much more severe than such places a s North Korea, which does not welcome outsiders investigating human righ ts. The organization does not keep statistics on how many prisoners its appea ls have freed, partly because it works with many other groups and partly because it prefers to focus on the unfinished work. Gilmore noted that when Mr Benenson began, there were few international legal standards that would hold governments to accoun t for violations of the United Nations' 1948 Universal Declaration of Hu man Rights, but there are now conventions against torture and other egre gious acts. The organization also receives letters such as the one from former Soviet dissident Vladimir Balankhonov, who spent years in a Siberian labor cam p He said his knowledge of the group's efforts helped him "to remain al ive and unbroken despite my uncertainty of what was going on behind the impenetrable barrier of walls and barbed wire surrounding the hell of th e gulag." Mr Benenson inspired many individuals and the formation of many nongover nmental organizations that work on human rights and civil rights of all types. Gilmore called it "this audacious, outrageous conspiracy of hope he contaminated the world with." Mr Benenson, who funded Amnesty International in its first years, never stopped organizing. He also founded a society for people with coeliac di sease, and in the 1980s he became the chair of a newly created group, th e Association of Christians Against Torture. In the early 1990s, he orga nized help for orphans of Nicolai Ceausescu's Romania. His family, speaking through Amnesty International officials, said Mr Be nenson had been ill for several years and entered the hospital Feb.
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