Amnesty International’s Human Rights Campaigns and Transnational Democracy in South Korea in the 1970s

Abstract

This article examines the intersection between Amnesty International(AI)’s global human rights expansion policy and South Korea’s pro-democracy movements in the 1970s. It argues that local pro-democracy actors vernacularized and mobilized AI’s concept of and global campaign for prisoners of conscience, thereby transforming their struggle into a transnational movement. In making this argument, the article highlights a multi-directional conflict over the meaning and uses of human rights between local and international actors. Against the backdrop of seeking to establish a local chapter of AI, pro-democracy actors challenged AI’s political neutrality policy by advocating for South Korean political prisoners as well as for prisoners in other countries; they also challenged the distinction that AI drew between political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. Finding the UN unresponsive to their appeals and recognizing the role of US Cold War policy in buttressing Park Chunghee’s authoritative regime, South Korean pro-democracy actors, acting in concert with liberal internationalists in the US Congress, shifted the primary stage for addressing international human rights abuses from the United Nations to the US Congress. This shift placed the spotlight on US foreign policies that facilitated the South Korean government’s human rights abuses, which in turn led both the US and South Korean government to devise counteractive human rights campaigns that drew on humanitarian and anti-communist rhetoric to preserve the status quo.