The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence

1. Conscience Denied: Amnesty International and the Antirevolution of the 1960s

1 Conscience Denied Amnesty International and the Antirevolution of the 1960s
On May 28, 1961, a small group of British lawyers, writers, and publishers, headed by Peter Benenson, launched a public campaign for the release of eight prisoners from around the world. The campaign began with the article “The Forgotten Prisoners” published in the Observer (England) and picked up the following day by Le Monde (France), the New York Herald Tribune (United States), Die Welt (Germany), Journal de Genève (Switzerland), Berlingske Tidende (Denmark), and Politiken (Sweden). In the notice, the authors announced the establishment of “an office in London to collect information about the names, numbers, and conditions of what we have decided to call ‘Prisoners of Conscience.’ ”1 This event now marks the birth of the most influential nongovernmental human rights organization of the twentieth century: Amnesty International (AI). It was also the international debut for the category of the prisoner of conscience (POC). Both the emergence of a new organization, Amnesty International, and a new concept, the “prisoner of conscience,” occupy important positions in post-1960 formations of nongovernmental modes of international political activism. AI is consistently reputed to be one of the most influential human rights organizations in the world, and this reputation has not faltered during its nearly fifty years of existence. While the proliferation of international, nongovernmental human rights organizations has certainly led to the development of competing models of human rights practice, Amnesty’s methods remain the best known, the most studied, and the most frequently replicated. With currently more than 1.8 million members in more 1 2 Conscience Denied than 150 countries in every region of the world, its enduring success as an NGO is remarkable.2 The durability and inordinate influence of this organization affords us a privileged vantage point from which to examine the formative basis of NGO human rights activism in the postwar era. A close look at the historical context within which Amnesty emerged and the manner in which the founders wrestled with the relative misuse or nonuse of human rights from 1948 to 1960 tells us a great deal about how and why human rights has subsequently become a formidable discourse in the post–World War II construction of what Edward Said referred to as a “new universality”: Constructing a “new universality” has preoccupied various international authorities since World War II. Milestones are of course the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and an impressive battery of protocols for the treatment of refugees, minorities, prisoners, workers, children, students, and women. . . . In addition, a wide range of nongovernmental national and international agencies like Amnesty, the Organization for Human Rights, and the Human Rights Watch committees monitor and publicize human rights abuses.3 It is neither insignificant nor incidental to Amnesty’s success as an organization that its first political category of intervention was the “prisoner of conscience,” a term that did not even appear in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Amnesty’s early focus on the prisoner of conscience has only expanded over its history , with more than forty thousand prisoners of conscience having been adopted by the organization, and it continues to constitute the core of its operations despite the exceptional growth of the organization and the frequent refashioning of its mandate. The impressive legacy that Amnesty has built around this particular concept raises a number of critical questions: Why did Amnesty make the figure of the prisoner of conscience so central to the structure of its international human rights practice? Why did they articulate a new concept of political imprisonment at this historical juncture and in these terms? Why did Amnesty’s founders surmise that individuals from around the world, or at least those in the wealthy North, would respond to the plight of “prisoners of conscience” regardless of their locations of confinement? Why did the whole complex of human rights coalesce around the figure of the “POC” such that it became “one of the most popularly Conscience Denied 3 used expressions in the human rights field”?4 Does the deployment of this concept tells us something specific about the politics of international, nongovernmental human rights activism, or at least how the early activists viewed such a politic? And lastly, does the development and deployment of the concept of the prisoner of conscience enhance our understanding of how these early activists conceived...