Amnesty International, which celebrates its 40th birthday this month, was the product of the imagination of one man. Peter Benenson, a Catholic lawyer of Jewish descent, born of English and Russian parents, was described by some who knew him as a "visionary," even a saint. According to others, however, at one point he lost faith in the creature he had created and, as a result, he nearly destroyed it.
Benenson was 40 when the idea for Amnesty came to him, and had been active in the area of human rights for some time. In November 1960, his imagination was fired by a newspaper report about two Portuguese students in Lisbon during the dark days of the Salazar dictatorship. They had been arrested and sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for raising their glasses in a toast to freedom.
How, Benenson wondered, could the Portuguese authorities be persuaded to release these victims of outrageous oppression? A way must be devised to bombard the Salazar regime with written protests.
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 public attention to the plight of political and religious prisoners throughout the world?
He approached two people in London who he thought would be interested in the idea and whose reputations and contacts would help give it momentum: Eric Barker, a prominent Quaker, and Louis Blom-Cooper, an internationally known lawyer. The three men decided to call the campaign "Appeal for Amnesty, 1961," and it was launched in The Observer newspaper on May 28 that year.
At Benenson's office in London, they collected and published information on people whom Benenson was later to call "prisoners of conscience." The three men soon had a nucleus of supporters, principally lawyers, journalists, politicians and intellectuals.
Today, AI's membership stands at more than a million worldwide and is still increasing. It has supporters in over 160 countries and territories. In its 40 years of existence, Amnesty has dealt with the cases of 47,000 prisoners of conscience and other victims of human-rights violation. More than 45,000 of these cases are now closed.
Thirty years ago, the secretariat employed 19 people and had an annual budget of PND35,000 (US$48,000 at present-day parity). Today, its staff is 357 with an additional 93 volunteers, and it has a budget of PNDS19.5 million (US$27.7 million), none of it sought or accepted from governments.
When Amnesty was formed, Tribuna, the organ of the central committee of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia, claimed it occupied "a prominent position in the scheme of anti-communist subversion" while in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini denounced it as a "lackey of satanic powers."
Other detractors over the last four decades have included Uganda's Idi Amin, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Chile's Augusto Pinochet and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
Many have sought to destroy it. Ironically it was Benenson himself who, inadvertently, inflicted some of the hardest blows when, in 1966, Amnesty produced a report on torture in the British colony of Aden. The Swedish section of Amnesty had carried out an investigation and had found evidence of the use of torture of Arab prisoners by British soldiers. Benenson was convinced, however, that Amnesty International's secretary-general, Robert Swann, was colluding with Britain's foreign ministry in suppressing the report's findings. In the end, Benenson had the report published in Sweden.
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