Amnesty International

Amnesty International (AI) is generally considered the most important international human rights nongovernmental organization (NGO) worldwide. A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977, it holds consultative status with a number of international organizations, including the United Nations and the Council of Europe, and claims a membership of nearly 2 million in 150 countries and territories. The London-based International Secretariat employs roughly 450 staff members, with an annual budget of more than £28 million. Over its 45 years of existence, AI has gone from a movement for the defense of freedom of opinion and religion, in reference to articles 18 and 19 of the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to a much broader organization, which campaigns for internationally recognized human rights.

AI was originally set up to seek the immediate and unconditional release of “prisoners of conscience,” people imprisoned only for having voiced an opinion, without resorting to violence or advocating the use of violence. Today, AI, drawing on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards, undertakes actions focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity, freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination.

AI started on May 28, 1961, first as a 1-year campaign for the release of prisoners of conscience under the name Appeal for Amnesty 1961, when London barrister Peter Benenson (1921–2005) published an article titled “The Forgotten Prisoners” in the English weekly The Observer. Benenson already had some experience in the fields of politics and human rights: He had been a Labour candidate at local elections, had attended political trials in other countries on behalf of the Trade Union Congress, and had taken part in 1956 in the foundation of the organization Justice, which brought together members from the three major political parties' societies of lawyers and subsequently became the U.K. branch of the International Commission of Jurists. After his conversion [Page 100]to Catholicism in 1958, he resigned from the bar in 1959 for health reasons.

Because Benenson played a key role in the creation of AI, he must be considered the actual founder of the movement. He led a group of jurists, academics, and journalists, which included, among others, Eric Baker, a prominent Quaker activist and chair of the British section of AI; Neville Vincent, a lawyer and businessman, who became AI's first treasurer; and Irish lawyer and politician Sean MacBride (1904–1988), secretary general of the International Commission of Jurists, chair of AI's International Executive Committee (1961–1974), and winner of both the Nobel Peace Prize (1974) and the Lenin Prize (1977).

Benenson's idea was to call on international public opinion and to involve ordinary citizens, not just lawyers, in the struggle for human rights. His article met with a favorable response and was reproduced in newspapers worldwide. AI's first members formed “Threes groups” at the local level, which each took the defense of three prisoners of conscience: one from the Western world, one from the communist world, and one from a nonaligned country. After a year, there were 70 active groups in seven countries. A central office was set up in London to provide information and coordinate groups' activities. Still in 1961, Benenson published the book Persecution ′61, which presented nine cases of prisoners of conscience, and AI adopted its official logo: the flame in barbed wire, designed by group member Diana Redhouse on an idea from Benenson. AI then became a permanent organization after a meeting in Luxembourg in July 1961, and the name Amnesty International was formally adopted the following year.

...