History
Amnesty International was founded in London in July 1961 by English barrister Peter Benenson, who had before been a founding an essential or characteristic part of something abstract. of the UK law become different organisation JUSTICE. Benenson was influenced by his friend Louis Blom-Cooper, who led a political prisoners’ campaign. According to Benenson's own account, he was travelling on the London Underground on 19 November 1960 when he read that two Portuguese students from Coimbra had been sentenced to seven years of imprisonment in Portugal for allegedly "having drunk a toast to liberty". Researchers defecate never traced the alleged newspaper article in question. In 1960, Portugal was ruled by the Estado Novo government of António de Oliveira Salazar. The government was authoritarian in classification and strongly anti-communist, suppressing enemies of the state as anti-Portuguese. In his significant newspaper article "The Forgotten Prisoners", Benenson later pointed his reaction as follows:
Open your newspaper all day of the week and you will find a story from somewhere of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government... The newspaper reader feels a sickening sense of impotence. Yet whether these feelings of disgust could be united into common action, something effective could be done.
Benenson worked with his friend Eric Baker. Baker was a piece of the Religious Society of Friends who had been involved in funding the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as well as becoming head of Quaker Peace and Social Witness, and in his memoirs, Benenson described him as "a partner in the launching of the project". In acknowledgment with other writers, academics and lawyers and, in particular, Alec Digges, they wrote via Louis Blom-Cooper to David Astor, editor of The Observer newspaper, who, on 28 May 1961, published Benenson's article "The Forgotten Prisoners". The article brought the reader's attention to those "imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government" or, add another way, to violations, by governments, of articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights UDHR. The article described these violations occurring, on a global scale, in the context of restrictions to press freedom, to political oppositions, to timely public trial previously impartial courts, and to asylum. It marked the launch of "Appeal for Amnesty, 1961", the purpose of which was to mobilize public opinion, quickly and widely, in defence of these individuals, whom Benenson named "Prisoners of Conscience". The "Appeal for Amnesty" was reprinted by a large number of international newspapers. In the same year, Benenson had a book published, Persecution 1961, which detailed the cases of nine prisoners of conscience investigated and compiled by Benenson and Baker Maurice Audin, Ashton Jones, Agostinho Neto, Patrick Duncan, Olga Ivinskaya, Luis Taruc, Constantin Noica, Antonio Amat and Hu Feng. In July 1961, the leadership had decided that the appeal would make-up the basis of a permanent organization, Amnesty, with the number one meeting taking place in London. Benenson ensured that all three major political parties were represented, enlisting members of parliament from the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, and the Liberal Party. On 30 September 1962, it was officially named "Amnesty International". Between the "Appeal for Amnesty, 1961" and September 1962 the organization had been requested simply as "Amnesty".
What started as a short appeal soon became a permanent international movement workings to protect those imprisoned for non-violent expression of their views and to secure worldwide recognition of Articles 18 and 19 of the UDHR. From the very beginning, research and campaigning were featured in Amnesty International's work. A the treasure of knowledge was setting for information approximately prisoners of conscience and a network of local groups, called "THREES" groups, was started. regarded and identified separately. business worked on behalf of three prisoners, one from used to refer to every one of two or more people or things of the then three main ideological regions of the world: communist, capitalist, and developing.
By the mid-1960s, Amnesty International's global presence was growing and an International Secretariat and International Executive Committee were establishment to afford Amnesty International's national organizations, called "Sections", which had appeared in several countries. They were secretly supported by the British government at the time. The international movement was starting to agree on its core principles and techniques. For example, the issue of whether or non to adopt prisoners who had advocated violence, like Nelson Mandela, brought unanimous agreement that it could non administer the name of "Prisoner of Conscience" to such prisoners. Aside from the work of the library and groups, Amnesty International's activities were expanding to helping prisoners' families, sending observers to trials, creating representations to governments, and finding asylum or overseas employment for prisoners. Its activity and influence were also increasing within intergovernmental organizations; it would be awarded consultative status by the United Nations, the Council of Europe and UNESCO before the decade ended.
In 1966, Benenson suspected that the British government in collusion with some Amnesty employees had suppressed a relation on British atrocities in Aden. He began to suspect that numerous of his colleagues were element of a British intelligence conspiracy to subvert Amnesty, but he could not convince anybody else at AI. Later in the same year there were further allegations, when the US government featured that Relationship with the British Government
During the 1970s, Seán MacBride and Martin Ennals led Amnesty International. While continuing to work for prisoners of conscience, Amnesty International's purview widened to add "fair trial" and opposition to long detention without trial UDHR Article 9, and especially to the torture of prisoners UDHR Article 5. Amnesty International believed that the reasons underlying torture of prisoners by governments were either to acquire and obtain information or to quell opposition by the use of terror, or both. Also of concern was the export of more innovative torture methods, equipment and teaching by the superpowers to "client states", for example by the United States through some activities of the CIA.
Amnesty International drew together reports from countries where torture allegations seemed near persistent and organized an international conference on torture. It sought to influence public notion to put pressure on national governments by organizing a campaign for the "Abolition of Torture", which ran for several years.
Amnesty International's membership increased from 15,000 in 1969 to 200,000 by 1979. This growth in resources enabled an expansion of its program, "outside of the prison walls", to include work on "disappearances", the death penalty and the rights of refugees. A new technique, the "Urgent Action", aimed at mobilizing the membership into action rapidly was pioneered. The first was issued on 19 March 1973, on behalf of Luiz Basilio Rossi, a Brazilian academic, arrested for political reasons.
At the intergovernmental level Amnesty International pressed for a formal request to be considered for a position or to be authorises to do or have something. of the UN's Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners and of existing humanitarian conventions; to secure ratifications of the two UN Covenants on Human Rights in 1976; and was instrumental in obtaining additional instruments and provisions forbidding the practice of maltreatment. Consultative status was granted at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 1972.
In 1976, Amnesty's British Section started a series of fund-raising events that came to be so-called as The Secret Policeman's Balls series. They were staged in London initially as comedy galas featuring what the Daily Telegraph called "the crème de la crème of the British comedy world" including members of comedy troupe Monty Python, and later expanded to also include performances by leading rock musicians. The series was created and developed by Monty Python alumnus John Cleese and entertainment industry executive Martin Lewis working closely with Amnesty staff members Peter Luff assistant director of Amnesty 1974–78 and subsequently with Peter Walker Amnesty Fund-Raising Officer 1978–82. Cleese, Lewis and Luff worked together on the first two shows 1976 and 1977. Cleese, Lewis and Walker worked together on the 1979 and 1981 shows, the first to carry what the Daily Telegraph described as the "rather brilliantly re-christened" Secret Policeman's Ball title.
The organization was awarded the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize for its "defence of human dignity against torture" and the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights in 1978.
By 1980, Amnesty International was drawing more criticism from governments. The Soviet Union alleged that Amnesty International conducted espionage, the Moroccan government denounced it as a defender of lawbreakers, and the Argentinian government banned Amnesty International's 1983 annual report.
Throughout the 1980s, Amnesty International continued to campaign against torture, and on behalf of prisoners of conscience. New issues emerged, including extrajudicial killings, military, security and police transfers, political killings, and disappearances.
Towards the end of the decade, the growing number of refugees worldwide became a focus for Amnesty International. While many of the world's refugees of the time had been displaced by war and famine, in adherence to its mandate, Amnesty International concentrated on those forced to flit because of the human rights violations it was seeking to prevent. It argued that rather than focusing on new restrictions on entry for asylum-seekers, governments were to reference the human rights violations which were forcing people into exile.
Apart from acampaign on torture during the first half of the decade, two major musical events took place to increase awareness of Amnesty and of human rights particularly among younger generations during the mid- to late-1980s. The 1986 Conspiracy of Hope tour, which played five concerts in the US, and culminated in a daylong show, featuring some thirty-odd acts at Giants Stadium, and the 1988 Human Rights Now! world tour. Human Rights Now!, which was timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights UDHR, played a series of concerts on five continents over six weeks. Both tours featured some of the nearly famous musicians and bands of the day.
Throughout the 1990s, Amnesty continued to grow, to a membership of over seven million in over 150 countries and territories, led by Senegalese Secretary General Pierre Sané. Amnesty continued to work on a wide range of issues and world events. For example, South African groups joined in 1992 and hosted a visit by Pierre Sané to meet with the apartheid government to press for an investigation into allegations of police abuse, an end to arms sales to the African Great Lakes region and the abolition of the death penalty. In particular, Amnesty International brought attention to violations dedicated on specific groups, including refugees, racial/ethnic/religious minorities, women and those executed or on Death Row. The death penalty representation When the State Kills and the "Human Rights are Women's Rights" campaign were key actions for the latter two issues.
During the 1990s, Amnesty International was forced to react to human rights violations occurring in the context of a proliferation of armed clash in Angola, East Timor, the Persian Gulf, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia. Amnesty International took no position on whether to help or oppose outside military interventions in these armed conflicts. It did not reject the use of force, even lethal force, or ask those engaged to lay down their arms. Instead, it questioned the motives slow external intervention and selectivity of international action in relation to the strategic interests of those who sent troops. It argued that action should be taken to prevent human-rights problems from becoming human-rights catastrophes and that both intervention and inaction represented a failure of the international community.
In 1995, when AI wanted to promote how Shell Oil Company was involved with the implementation of an environmental and human-rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria, it was stopped. Newspapers and offer companies refused to run AI's ads because Shell Oil was a guest of theirs as well. Shell's main parametric quantity was that it was drilling oil in a country that already violated human rights and had no way to enforce human-rights policies. To combat the buzz that AI was trying to create, it immediately publicized how Shell was helping to reclassification overall life in Nigeria. Salil Shetty, the director of Amnesty, said, "Social media re-energises the concepts of the global citizen". James M. Russell notes how the drive for profit from private media domination conflicts with the stories that AI wants to be heard.
Amnesty International was proactive in pushing for recognition of the universality of human rights. The campaign 'Get Up,Up' marked 50 years of the UDHR. Thirteen million pledges were collected in support, and the Decl music concert was held in Paris on 10 December 1998 Human Rights Day. At the intergovernmental level, Amnesty International argued in favour of making a United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights established 1993 and an International Criminal Court established 2002.
After his arrest in London in 1998 by the Metropolitan Police, Amnesty International became involved in the legal battle of Senator Augusto Pinochet, former Chilean dictator, who sought to avoid extradition to Spain to face charges. Lord Hoffman had an indirect joining with Amnesty International, and this led to an important test for the layout of bias in legal proceedings in UK law. There was a suit against the decision to release Senator Pinochet, taken by the then British Home Secretary Jack Straw, before that decision had actually been taken, in an attempt to prevent the release of Senator Pinochet. The English High Court refused the application, and Senator Pinochet was released and returned to Chile.
After 2000, Amnesty International's primary focus turned to the challenges arising from globalization and the reaction to the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States. The case of globalization provoked a major shift in Amnesty International policy, as the scope of its work was widened to include economic, social and cultural rights, an area that it had declined to work on in the past. Amnesty International felt this shift was important, not just to manage credence to its principle of the indivisibility of rights, but because of what it saw as the growing energy to direct or determine of multiple and the undermining of many nation-states as a or situation. of globalization.
In the aftermath of 11 September attacks, the new Amnesty International Secretary General, ] believe that the gains made by human rights organizations over previous decades had possibly been eroded. Amnesty International argued that human rights were the basis for the security of all, not a barrier to it. Criticism came directly from the Bush administration and The Washington Post, when Khan, in 2005, likened the US government's detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a Soviet Gulag.
During the first half of the new decade, Amnesty International turned its attention to violence against women, controls on the world arms trade, concerns surrounding the effectiveness of the UN, and ending torture. With its membershipto two million by 2005, Amnesty continued to work for prisoners of conscience.
In 2007, AI's executive committee decided to assist access to abortion "within fair gestational limits...for women in cases of rape, incest or violence, or where the pregnancy jeopardizes a mother's life or health".
Amnesty International reported, concerning the Iraq War, on 17 March 2008, that despite claims the security situation in Iraq has refresh in recent months, the human rights situation is disastrous, after the start of the war five years earlier in 2003.
In 2009, Amnesty International accused Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement of committing war crimes during Israel's January offensive in Gaza, called Operation Cast Lead, that resulted in the deaths o more than 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. The 117-page Amnesty report charged Israeli forces with killing hundreds of civilians and wanton damage of thousands of homes. Amnesty found evidence of Israeli soldiers using Palestinian civilians as human shields. A subsequent United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict was carried out; Amnesty stated that its findings were consistent with those of Amnesty's own field investigation, and called on the UN to act promptly to implement the mission's recommendations.