[Deathwatch] Peter Benenson, "Amnesty International" founder, 83

[Deathwatch Central]

MOre thanks to a reader for this submission - Ed.

Peter Benenson, Founder of Amnesty Group, Dies at 83
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Published: February 28, 2005

Peter Benenson, a British lawyer whose outrage over the imprisonment of
two Portuguese students for drinking a toast to liberty spawned the
human rights organization Amnesty International in 1961, died Friday in
a hospital in Oxford, England. He was 83.

The cause was pneumonia, said Brendan Paddy, a spokesman for the
London-based organization.

What Mr. Benenson first envisioned as a one-year letter-writing
campaign on behalf of "prisoners of conscience," who were being
persecuted for their beliefs, eventually grew into the world's largest
human rights organization, with 1.8 million members, chapters in 64
countries and a perennially powerful voice against torture, unjust
imprisonment and the death penalty.

Amnesty International, which won the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize for
"defending human dignity against violence and subjugation," has
campaigned for decades against violations of the rights of women,
children, political prisoners, minorities, religious groups, workers
and disabled people, among others. Today, it is fighting the execution
of child offenders in Iran, warning of human rights violations by Nepal
and demanding the release of prisoners at the United States detention
camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

"Peter Benenson's life was a courageous testament to his visionary
commitment to fight injustice around the world," the organization's
secretary general, Irene Khan, said in a statement. "He brought light
into the darkness of prisons, the horror of torture chambers and the
tragedy of death camps around the world."

Educated at Eton and Oxford, Mr. Benenson was a passionate advocate for
human rights in fascist Spain, British-ruled Cyprus and repressive
South Africa. He was almost 40, a bowler-topped barrister on the London
Underground in 1961, when he read a news item about two Lisbon students
sentenced to seven years in prison for toasting freedom in Portugal,
then under the dictatorship of António Salazar.

In what he called "The Forgotten Prisoners" and "An Appeal for
Amnesty," which appeared on the front page of The Observer, a British
newspaper, he wrote about the two students and four other people who
had been jailed in other nations because of their beliefs.

"Open your newspaper any day of the week, and you will find a report
from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or
executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his
government," he wrote. "The reader feels a sickening sense of
impotence. Yet if these feelings of disgust all over the world could be
united into common action, something effective could be done."

He called for a one-year campaign of letter-writing to repressive
authorities, demanding enforcement of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1948 but was
widely ignored. The result was an outpouring of letters, telegrams and
publicity that swelled into a permanent campaign and the formation of
Amnesty International.

In its early years, Mr. Benenson ran the organization, provided most of
the money, traveled widely to investigate cases and promoted its causes
in journals and newspapers. He stepped down as the leader in 1966 after
an independent investigation did not support his claim that the group
was being infiltrated by British intelligence.

But he continued to have an active interest in the organization's
affairs, helped to found and support similar groups and observed
Amnesty International's 25th anniversary by lighting a symbolic candle
outside St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the church off Trafalgar Square where
he had first envisioned the organization. Its logo is a candle wrapped
in barbed wire.

Peter Benenson was born in London on July 31, 1921, the son of a
British army colonel. He was tutored privately by the poet W. H. Auden
and began his first campaign at Eton - for better food. At 16 he
organized fund-raising for orphans of the Spanish Civil War, and later
raised money to get two Jews out of Nazi Germany.

After service with the Ministry of Information in World War II, he
became a lawyer, was an official observer at the trials of trade
unionists in Franco's Spain, advised lawyers for defendants accused of
resistance to British rule in Cyprus and prodded London to send
observers to Hungary during the 1956 uprising and to racially divided
South Africa during a treason trial.

For his role in founding Amnesty International, he was recommended for
a knighthood by various prime ministers, but always demurred,
responding with a litany of human rights violations that, he said,
needed more urgent attention. In the 1980's, he became chairman of
Association of Christians Against Torture, and in the 1990's he
organized aid for Romanian orphans. He also founded a group to aid
victims of celiac disease - a faulty absorption of gluten in the
intestines - which he had.

Mr. Benenson's family issued no statement. Amnesty International, which
announced his death, listed his survivors as his wife, Susan; a son,
Joe; a daughter, Manya Scarffe; and two daughters by a previous
marriage, Natasha Benenson and Jill Ackroyd.