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Amnesty International (commonly known as Amnesty or AI) is an international, non-governmental organization with the stated purpose of promoting all the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international standards. In particular, Amnesty International campaigns to free all prisoners of conscience; to ensure fair and prompt trials for political prisoners; to abolish the death penalty, torture, and other treatment of prisoners it regards as cruel; to end political killings and forced disappearances; and to oppose all human rights abuses, whether by governments or by other groups.

History

Amnesty International was founded in 1961 by a British lawyer named Peter Benenson and a Quaker named Eric Baker. Benenson was reading his newspaper and was shocked and angered to come across the story of two Portuguese students sentenced to seven years in prison – for the crime of raising their glasses in a toast to freedom. Benenson wrote to David Astor, editor of The Observer newspaper, who, on May 28, published Benenson's article entitled The Forgotten Prisoners that asked readers to write letters showing support for the students. The response was so overwhelming that within a year groups of letter writers had formed in more than a dozen countries, writing to defend victims of injustice wherever they might be.

By mid-1962, Amnesty had groups working or forming in West Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Canada, Ceylon, Greece, Australia, the United States, New Zealand (Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand), Ghana, Israel, Mexico, Argentina, Jamaica, Malaya, Congo (Brazzaville), Ethiopia, Nigeria, Burma, and India. Later in that year, a member of one of these groups, Diana Redhouse, designed Amnesty's Candle and Barbed-Wire logo.

In its early years, Amnesty focused only on articles 18 and 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights – those dealing with political prisoners, or more precisely, prisoners of conscience who espoused non-violence.

Amnesty and its writers campaigned for the release of prisoners in many oppressive regimes around the world; all such regimes were pressured equally, no matter which side (if either) of the Cold War they might align with. For example, the Spring 1986 newsletter campaigns for the release of specific prisoners from Guatemala, South Korea, South Africa, Syria, the U.S.S.R., and Vietnam.

Amnesty International was in particular a thorn in the side of the Soviet Union; they published detailed reports both of conditions in Soviet prisons and of how the Soviet political system as a whole was structured to prevent dissent and political freedom. Soviet internal security documents later found in archives indicated concern about Amnesty's anti-Soviet activities. Natan Sharansky is one of the more famous Soviet prisoners whose eventual release was secured with the help of Amnesty.

Amnesty was also very active in condemning oppressive regimes which commited murders, disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and outright massacres against their own citizens. For example, the September/October 1988 newsletter's lead article was an appeal to the United Nations Security Council to "act immediately to stop the massacre of Kurdish civilians by Iraqi forces" under Saddam Hussein.

In 1977 Amnesty won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work defending human rights around the world.

During the 1980s, Amnesty increased its visibility via popular culture events, including The Secret Policeman's Balls series, the 1986 U.S.-based A Conspiracy of Hope Tour, and the 1988 worldwide Human Rights Now! Tour.

Over time, the organization has expanded its mission to work to prevent and end grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity, freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the context of its work to promote all human rights. Amnesty is currently running global campaigns to "Control Arms", "Stop Violence Against Women" and to end the "Death Penalty", amongst others. Amnesty also works directly on behalf of individuals suffering human rights abuses. In 2000 alone, AI worked on the cases of 3,685 named individuals – and in over a third of those cases, an improvement in the prisoner's condition occurred. Today, there are upwards of 7,500 AI groups with almost two million members operating in 162 countries and territories. Since AI was founded, it has worked to defend more than 44,600 prisoners in hundreds of countries.

Goals and strategy

AI aims to maintain every human's basic rights as established under the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. In accordance with this belief, Amnesty works to:

• Free all Prisoners of Conscience (a "POC" is a person imprisoned for the peaceful exercise of their beliefs, which differs somewhat from the typical use of the term political prisoner).
• Ensure fair and prompt trials.
• Abolish all forms of torture and ill-treatment of prisoners, including the use of the death penalty.
• End state-sanctioned terrorism, killings, and disappearances.
• Assist political asylum-seekers.
• Co-operate with organizations that seek to put an end to human rights abuses.
• Raise awareness about human rights abuses around the world.

To fulfill these goals, Amnesty sends teams of researchers to investigate claims of human rights abuses. It publicizes its findings and mobilizes its members to lobby against the abuse — by letter-writing (to various government officials), protesting, demonstrating, organizing fund-raisers, educating the public about the offence, or sometimes all of the above.

Amnesty International works to combat individual offences (e.g. one man imprisoned for distributing banned literature in Saudi Arabia) as well as more general policies (e.g. the recently overturned policy of executing juvenile offenders in certain U.S. states). Amnesty works primarily on the local level but its forty-year history of action and its Nobel Peace Prize give it international recognition.

Most AI members utilize letter-writing to get their message across. When the central Amnesty International organization finds and validates to its satisfaction instances of human rights abuse, they notify each of more than 7,000 local groups as well as over one million independent members, including 300,000 in the United States alone. Groups and members then respond by writing letters of protest and concern to a government official closely involved in the case, generally without mentioning Amnesty directly.

Amnesty International follows a neutrality policy called the "country rule" stating that members should not be active in issues in their own nation, which also protects them from potential mistreatment by their own government. This principle is also applied to researchers and campaigners working for the International Secretariat to prevent domestic political loyalties influencing coverage.

Recently, Amnesty has expanded the scope of its work to include economic, social and cultural rights, saying that these concerns had arisen out of its traditional work on political and civil rights. Its 2004 annual report said that "it is difficult to achieve sustainable progress towards implementation of any one human right in isolation. ... AI will strive to ... assert a holistic view of rights protection. It will be particularly important to do so in relation to extreme poverty, and the human rights issues underlying poverty." As an example it asserts that "The right to effective political participation depends on a free media, but also on an educated and literate population."

Organization

Amnesty International is governed by the International Executive Council (IEC) – a board of eight members elected for two-year terms by the International Council Meeting, which is itself composed of delegates from each country's Board of Directors. The IEC hires a Secretary General (since 2001, Irene Khan) and an International Secretariat, located in London.

National and local organizational structures vary. In the United States, individual members, regardless of age, and each individual organization votes to elect members to the 18-seat national Board of Directors for a three-year term. The Board of Directors hires an Executive Director and a staff.

Secretary Generals

• Peter Benenson, 1961–1966 (President)
• Eric Baker, 1966–1968
• Martin Ennals, 1968–1980
• Thomas Hammarberg, 1980–1986
• Ian Martin, 1986–1992
• Pierre Sané, 1992–2001
• Irene Khan, 2001–present

Finances

Amnesty International is a non-partisan organization financed largely by subscriptions and donations from its worldwide membership, and except for a small core of paid directors, 200 or so full-time researchers in the International Secretariat in London, and various coordinators and organisers in national sections, most of Amnesty's members and coordinators of local groups, and many supporters contributing time and energy to the organisation, are volunteers. It does not accept donations from governments or governmental organizations. Amnesty's budget for the 2002 fiscal year included:

• Membership Support: £2,816,800 (12%)
• Campaigning Activities: £2,387,100 (10%)
• Publications and Translation: £2,810,600 (12%)
• Research and Action: £5,828,800 (26%)
• Deconcentrated Offices: £1,720,400 (7%)
• Research and Action Support: £3,481,100 (15%)
• Administrative Costs: £3,918,400 (18%)
• Relief Payments: £48,000
• Total: £23,728,000 (including contingency)

See also

• Human rights abuse
• Universal jurisdiction
• Urgent action
• The Secret Policeman's Balls
• A Conspiracy of Hope Tour
• Human Rights Now! Tour
• Human Rights Watch
• International Freedom of Expression Exchange
• Freedom House
• Reporters Without Borders

Notes

• ^1 Khan's aside may have been partly inspired by a cover story a year earlier in the British weekly New Statesman, describing the system of extraordinary rendition as "America's Gulag".

External links

• Amnesty International's Website
• Amnesty International USA's Website
• Amnesty International UK's Website
• Amnesty International Australia's Website
• Amnesty International New Zealand's Website
• Amnesty International Canada's Website
• Peter Benenson: The Forgotten Prisoners The Observer, May 28, 1961
• William Schulz, Security Is a Human Right, Too, New York Times, April 18, 2004.
• AI's 2004 annual report on human rights abuses (Summary )
• AI's 2005 annual report on human rights abuses
• Registered Charity No. 294230 (UK Charity Commission)

link title

• 1961 establishments
• Amnesty International
• British charities
• Erasmus Prize winners
• Human rights bodies
• Imprisonment and detention
• Nobel Peace Prize winners
• Social justice