On
the death of
Peter Benenson
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
March 6, 2005
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".
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Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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written for the
40th Anniversary of
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"Like
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