Peter James Henry Solomon Benenson

Abstract

Lawyer who founded the human rights group Amnesty International. He was born on July 31, 1921, in London, UK. He died of pneumonia on Feb 25, 2005, at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, UK, aged 83 years. When Peter Benenson founded Amnesty (later Amnesty International) in 1961, he envisaged it as a year-long campaign for the release of six prisoners of conscience. But more than 40 years later, Amnesty International has grown into an organisation with a presence in over 150 countries and some 1·8 million members. Famously, Benenson's decision to act came in 1960, when he read a newspaper article about two Portuguese students imprisoned for drinking a toast to liberty in a Lisbon cafe. “At the time, the family joke was that he had written the idea on the back of an envelope while having a bath”, his friend Hallam Tennyson wrote in UK newspaper The Guardian recently. “It seemed impossibly idealistic at the time. He was not an outstanding public speaker, but his absolute conviction and the brilliant novelty of his idea was irresistible.” On May 28, 1961, Benenson published an article in The Observer headlined The Forgotten Prisoners. “Open your newspaper”, he wrote, “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. The newspaper 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.” The article triggered an important and surprising public response. One of those who answered Benenson's call was the young Financial Times journalist Hugh O'Shaughnessy. “I was 26 at the time, and when I read his piece … it really thrilled me, so I phoned up and they said I should come along”, he told The Lancet. O'Shaughnessy thus became part of the initial Amnesty kernel. “Peter struck me as a very forceful person, a very good person, a very impulsive person”, he said. “We were all surprised at the level of the response to the article … I felt very much that we were on the crest of a wave.” “He was very much into human rights in the 1950s, and of course we learned later that it was something that dated back to his school days”, said Lord Peter Archer, who first met Benenson in the mid-1950s when they were both working as barristers. Benenson was schooled at Eton, where his complaints about the poor quality of the food prompted the school to warn his mother of her son's “revolutionary tendencies”. Later, at Balliol College, Oxford University, UK, he studied history, and after graduating he joined the army where he worked for the Ministry of Information before moving to Military Intelligence. After the war, he studied law and left the forces to become a practising lawyer; he also joined the Labour Party. In the early 1950s, he had been sent by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to Spain as its observer at trials of trade unionists. Later, he advised Greek Cypriot lawyers whose clients had fallen foul of the British, and organised legal observers for political trials in Hungary and South Africa. In 1959, however, Benenson stopped practising law. Later, he wrote, “I became aware that lawyers themselves were not able sufficiently to influence the course of justice in undemocratic countries. It was necessary to think of a larger group which harnessed the enthusiasm of people all over the world who were anxious to see a wider respect for human rights.” A wealthy man, Benenson was Amnesty's leader and financial backer in its early years, but in 1966 an internal crisis erupted when he alleged that the organisation was being infiltrated by British intelligence. An independent investigation refuted that claim and he retired from the organisation, but maintained his campaigns—founding a society for patients with coeliac disease and taking up the chair of the Association of Christians Against Torture. In the 1980s, Benenson resumed closer ties with the organisation he founded, but perhaps Benenson was more suited to starting a movement than running it? “Perhaps”, Archer said. “After all, I doubt very much whether Jesus would have made a very good Archbishop of Canterbury.” Ultimately, Archer says, Benenson should be remembered for two things. First was his new understanding of political prisoners, which held that they should be defended irrespective of their views. “His second great insight was his capacity for seeing that ordinary people could change the world.” Benenson was divorced from his first wife, Margaret, who died in 2004. He is survived by their two daughters, and by his second wife, Susan, and their son and daughter.