Peter Benenson

THE pen may be mightier than the sword; but as a means of putting pressure on despotic governments, it hardly seems up to the task. A neatly typed missive from north London or Connecticut, addressed to “Dear General X” and ending “Yours sincerely”, cannot last long on a desk piled with spy reports and death warrants. The whimsical futility of the technique brings to mind the poet Shelley, who in 1812 stuffed copies of his “Declaration of Rights” (reminding the repressive Regency regime of the importance of free speech) into little waxed boxes and empty bottles, and set them afloat in the Bristol Channel.

When Peter Benenson, in 1960, first conceived his idea of freeing prisoners of conscience by a letter-writing campaign, he was thought just as foolish. Certainly the idea came out of the blue. He had got on the London Underground to go to work as usual, that November morning, in his chambers in the Temple, bowler hat on head and Daily Telegraph rolled under his arm. He ended up sitting for 45 minutes in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, thinking. What had caused him to change course was a story in the paper of two Portuguese students who, for raising their glasses in a toast to liberty in a café in Lisbon, had been jailed for seven years.

Mr Benenson had intended to protest outside the Portuguese embassy. But he was hardly dressed to strike fear into the regime of António Salazar. Nor, a mere lawyer, could he hope to wield much influence over him. As a leading member of the Society of Labour Lawyers, Mr Benenson had gone on several trips in the 1950s to observe trials of trade unionists and Basque nationalists in Franco's Spain. Both the trials and the prisons had outraged him but, unless he could collar the trial judge over dinner, he could find no audience for his passionate appeals on behalf of freedom of speech.

He decided, therefore, to mobilise middle England. In May 1961, in an article in the Observer newspaper, he outlined the cases of several “forgotten prisoners” for whom, he was sure, “if...feelings of disgust could be united into common action, something could be done.” He proposed a 12-month “Amnesty” campaign of letter-writing to free them. Within six months, thousands of letters had arrived. Within the year, Amnesty groups had been set up in a dozen countries, becoming the germ of what is now the world's biggest independent human-rights organisation. By last year, Amnesty International had taken on more than 47,000 prisoner cases and had closed 45,000 of them. Much of the world's consciousness of human rights and wrongs—even if that consciousness is still, in many places, lip service—stemmed from Mr Benenson's epiphany in the middle of Trafalgar Square.

Voltaire's example

Like many children of privilege—Russian oil money, private tutoring from W.H. Auden, Eton, Oxford—Peter Benenson became a socialist young, when he saw unemployed Welsh miners marching through the streets of Windsor. At school he protested in “revolutionary” fashion against the dinners, and raised money to rescue Jewish teenagers from Germany. As the head of Amnesty, however, he strove to be non-ideological. His first roll-call of “prisoners of conscience” included Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, imprisoned by the communists, as well as the victims of right-wing dictators. Despite his alliance, financial as well as moral, with the leftish Observer, he managed to promote Amnesty as simply committed to free speech and fair trials. His motto, he said, was Voltaire's: “I detest what you say, but I am prepared to die for your right to say it.”

Like any association of free-thinkers, Amnesty had its troubles. Several of them sprang from Mr Benenson's impulses to spend money freely, to disregard budgets (save what might be scribbled on the back of a cigarette packet), and to throw himself headlong into causes. In 1966, he became convinced that a colleague was covering up atrocities by the British forces in Aden; the suspicion was groundless, and he was obliged to resign. Reconciled again, after years in the wilderness, he embraced the cause of Mordecai Vanunu, the leaker of Israel's nuclear secrets. Amnesty as a whole disagreed with him, and kept its distance.

Mr Benenson was offered several honours, but refused them all. When an ingratiating letter came from a prime minister, he would write back politely with a catalogue of the government's own human-rights abuses. He always felt there was far to go, both at home and abroad. For him, Amnesty's logo of a candle in barbed wire represented not a flame of hope, but every prisoner who had died unreleased and every victim still tortured. He himself died in the very week that proposals for extra-judicial house arrest for terrorist suspects, a bald violation of civil liberties, were going through Britain's Parliament.

But his letter campaign had been effective beyond all precedent, in big ways and small. Julio de Peña Valdez, a trade unionist imprisoned in the Dominican Republic, remembered that when the first 200 letters arrived, in the summer of 1975, he was given his clothes back. When 200 more arrived, the head of the prison came to see him. When 3,000 came, the president, exasperated, ordered his release.