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 News from Around the Americas | March 2005 
Amnesty International Founder Benenson Dies
 Reuters
Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International, the organization that placed human rights in the global consciousness, has died at the age of 83. (Photo: AFP/HO-AI) |
London - Peter Benenson, the British lawyer whose outrage at the jailing of two Portuguese students in 1960 spawned the Nobel Prize-winning human rights group Amnesty International, has died at the age of 83.
His organization, with its symbol of a burning candle wrapped in barbed wire the bane of human rights abusers the world over, now numbers 1.8 million members and supporters.
Current campaigns include a warning of a human rights disaster looming in Nepal, a call for an end to child executions in Iran and demands for justice for those responsible for ethnic rape and killings in Sudan's Darfur.
The group has also called for the release of all detainees at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, which it has described as "an icon of lawlessness." It was the students' toast to freedom in Antonio Salazar's dictatorship in Portugal, leading to their arrest and sentencing to seven years in jail, that first fired Benenson into action.
He wondered how to get them released, hitting on the idea of bombarding the authorities with letters demanding they be freed.
"Peter Benenson's life was a courageous testament to his visionary commitment to fight injustice around the world," Amnesty International Secretary-General Irene Khan said in a statement.
"He brought light into the darkness of prisons, the horror of torture chambers and tragedy of death camps around the world," she added.
Amnesty drew its share of controversy, with critics including former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, ex Chilean ruler Augusto Pinochet, the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran and Iraq's jailed former leader Saddam Hussein.
The group was criticized for its approach to the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany in the 1970s. While the group was killing prominent German figures, Amnesty was lobbying hard for better prison conditions for incarcerated gang members.
British Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell said that despite occasional differences with Amnesty International over policy, the government had no doubts about Benenson's legacy.
"Peter Benenson made a huge contribution to the furthering of human rights through founding Amnesty," he said in a statement read out to Reuters.
Benenson began Amnesty as a one-year campaign for the release of six prisoners of conscience before it grew into a worldwide movement for human rights.
The approach was simple -- local Amnesty groups adopted "prisoners of conscience" and pestered governments to release them while also writing letters of support to the prisoners themselves.
"This idea, characteristically British -- parochial, low-key, frugal, committed to working across ideological, religious and racial boundaries - was amazingly effective on the world scene," said author Jonathan Power.
His book, "Like Water on Stone," chronicles the development of Amnesty, which was once described as "one of the larger lunacies of our time," into an organization with supporters in dozens of countries and territories.
Benenson died on Friday in Oxford, England, Amnesty said. |
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