In 1968 Martin Ennals became Secretary General of Amnesty International, which at the time was an organisation with a growing but limited reputation and influence. Within a decade the organisation was at the vanguard of a political shift that historians would later describe as the ‘human rights breakthrough’, the moment ‘when human rights achieved a prominence that far outstripped even that of its founding epoch thirty years earlier.’[1] Ennals presided over the transformation of the organisation from one characterised by what one member called a British ‘muddling through’, an informally and loosely organised effort to make a difference, to one awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its invention of a new form of grassroots political action that, in the view of the prize judges, made a ‘very real contribution to the peace of this world.’[2]

            As such, Martin Ennals represented a new start for Amnesty when he took up the post at the organisation’s helm. At the same time, Ennals came from the broader, largely London-based political world that the organisation, its founder Peter Benenson, and its early leadership also inhabited. His appointment, and the organisation’s subsequent ‘new’ identity, was consistent with many of the political currents that had been present within and around the organisation since its formation in 1961. More than a complete transformation, then, his appointment represented a shift in the balance between the many conflicting tendencies and worldviews present both in Amnesty International and in the broader political world it was a part of. This shift allowed the organisation to overcome many of the teething problems that had hampered its growth and its consolidation of a clear organisational identity and mission.

            The events leading to Ennals’ appointment, and Amnesty’s early years more broadly, have been the object of historical investigation, but this work has focused more on Peter Benenson, Amnesty’s founder and the figure most associated with its unique identity. This article expands out beyond the imposing figure of Benenson with the aim of understanding how and why this transformation occurred. Yet rather than simply shifting to see Ennals as an alternative imposing figure indelibly shaping Amnesty, I use Ennals as a guide to the broader political world that Amnesty was a part of, showing how his actions both reflected and tapped into grassroots political interest in events across the Third World. This is not a story of a man with a vision, acting alone and with bigger purpose. It is a story of how multiple political tendencies and approaches to social change interacted with each other, and about the shifting balance between them over time, told through the lens of one person’s interactions with their peers. Ennals was reflective of a broader cohort of activists whose interest in human rights derived less from a belief in universalism and more from an identification with events across the formerly colonised world. As Amnesty’s Secretary General he made space for these activists by providing an organisational framework for both ‘traditional’ Amnesty tasks and for new initiatives, resolving many of the tensions that had developed between the two and that had hampered the organisation’s establishment. In doing so, he positioned Amnesty at the vanguard of a human rights internationalism whose imagined geography centred on the Third World.

            Amnesty International is an actor in almost all historical studies of human rights’ ascendancy in the 1970s, credited with playing a ‘crucial role in making the term ‘human rights’ familiar  to a wider political public.’[3] A smaller subset of this literature has drilled down to look at Amnesty as an internally heterogenous space. In his authoritative history of the organisation’s role in British human rights politics, Tom Buchanan has chronicled its difficult start, and both he and Jan Eckel have compared the organisation’s lacklustre 1960s to its later flourishing in the 1970s.[4] Both note the way the unresolved tensions in structure and leadership came to a head in an organisational crisis in the second half of the 1960s, while Eckel highlights the role that new techniques adopted after this crisis played in propelling the renewal of the 1970s. This article is indebted to the work of these historians and seeks to extend it by revisiting these moments and focusing on how and why these new techniques were adopted. Understanding why Amnesty changed in the way it did is key to moving beyond the question of why did human rights experience a breakthrough, to asking the question, why human rights?[5] After all, as Daniel Laqua points out, in the 1960s the peace and disarmament movement had many more adherents and was much more organised than the then-embryonic human rights movement.[6] Some historians have tackled this question of why human rights, focusing on anti-imperialists and their turn to human rights.[7] Understanding how and why Amnesty transformed at the end of the 1960s is another step towards answering that question.

            At the same time, in this article I want to connect the historiography of human rights to the historiography of internationalism. This requires going beyond looking at individual leaders of the organisation and their actions within it, and considering the broader worldmaking vision that these leaders shared with each other and with those who joined the organisation. As a number of scholars point out, there have been a great variety of human rights vernaculars developed by actors who have come together at different movements under the banner of human rights.[8] Recovering the multiple interactions between multiple actors that led to the creation of these vernaculars allows us to understand how the concept rose to prominence amongst such a wide range of actors, and how these actors transformed the concept in the process.[9] This emphasis on interactions has been a feature of recent scholarship on internationalism, which highlights how liberal, illiberal and radical internationalisms ‘cooperated, co-mingled and co-produced each other on an international plane.’[10] Amnesty was formed in London in 1961, meaning that its founders and members interacted with a political world largely concerned, among other things, with redefining Britain’s international role in the wake of decolonisation.[11] The role of the Third World in the imagined geographies of western humanitarianism has been the object of much innovative scholarship in the last years.[12] The role of the Third World in imagined geographies of human rights internationalism, however, is less understood. This article seeks to address this gap.

This means reconstructing the broader political world that Amnesty belonged to. This was the world of what Chris Moores has called the ‘progressive professionals’, a group he defines as occupying the space ‘between the formal left, represented by the Labour government, and developing manifestations of a new left associated with extra-parliamentary movements and the emerging counter-culture.’[13] Ennals’ own family offers a portrait of this world: of the three Ennals brothers David was a Labour Party politician on the left of the party who succeeded the progressive Barbara Castle as Secretary of State, while both Martin and John held a range of roles in organisations like the World Federation of United Nations Associations (WFUNA), the Anti-apartheid Movement, and of course Amnesty International (both were considered for the role of Secretary General).[14] In order to conduct this recovery I employ a biography of Martin Ennals, using his life as what Jake Hodder has called ‘a qualitative “sampling” device’ that can ‘cast light on the wider social and cultural worlds that a life inhabits’.[15] Thus, the aim is not to hold him up as a ‘great man’ of history but to use his life to trace a path through the interconnected political spaces that were sites for the evolution of the human rights internationalism he brought to Amnesty. It also helps us decentre the history of international organisations, showing how they were not hermetically sealed entities but were staging grounds for ideas and plans often hatched elsewhere. This allows us to understand how human rights internationalism emerged out of (and exists within) the broader panoply of liberal and other internationalisms of the twentieth century.[16] As such, I follow historians’ calls for an actor-centred approach to the study of international organisations, yet I see those actors as inextricably part and product of assemblages of other actors and objects.[17]

The formation of the progressive professionals

In 1959 Martin Ennals returned to London from an extended period abroad. The political scene he returned to was vastly transformed from that of a decade earlier, when he graduated from the London School of Economics (LSE) and departed for a job in Paris with UNESCO. In 1949, while India had achieved independence the year before, there were no rumblings of widespread decolonisation. By 1959 this rumbling had become a deafening roar, reshaping the broader world of progressive professionals that Ennals belonged to. Turning variously towards the Commonwealth, Europe, the United Nations, and humanitarian internationalism (among others) as a way to understand this new world and their place in it, new internationalist vernaculars were formed that propelled older political traditions into the post-colonial future.

            For the broad group that would come to make up the progressive professionals in the 1960s the postwar period also saw the sharpening of an older division that had lay largely inert: anti-communism. Many were young adults when WWII came to an end, their political socialisation taking place in the world of student politics where both communist and liberal students saw themselves engaged in the common task of resisting fascism and oppression.[18] Ennals was firmly a part of this world of anti-fascist internationalism: during his studies he had been elected Vice-President of the LSE student union (which had been dominated by communists since the 1930s) and then Assistant Secretary of the National Union of Students (NUS), remaining involved in student unionism after his graduation in 1948 as NUS Social and Cultural Organiser.[19] In 1947 he had coordinated the British delegation to the World Festival of Youth and Students in Prague, a space where young internationalists of varying progressive and radical stripes freely mingled.[20]

            But the space for this kind of non-partisan internationalism was rapidly shrinking. The increasingly Soviet-obsessed British Security Service viewed the actions of people like Ennals (who had a penchant for his ‘speaking warmly of communist Russia’ after a few drinks, was close friends with many of the young British communists in the student movement, and who together with his partner Jacqueline Morris made frequent visits to Prague) with the upmost suspicion.[21] For the MI5 Ennals and Morris were the ‘most dangerous kind of fellow traveller’, and actively intervened to limit their ability to shape the postwar world.[22] Immediately after graduating Ennals had been poised to take up a position at the WFUNA in New York but the British authorities successfully requested that their US counterparts refuse him a visa in order to limit potential communist influence in this new international body.[23] Beyond student circles, while the theme of civil liberties had long been a vehicle for common action among liberal and left-wing actors, it was becoming increasingly difficult to escape the shadow of increasing partisanism. Groups like the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), which had successfully united people on both sides of the ideological divide before the War, were dogged by accusations of communist influence, losing members and influence as a result.[24] Thus while for many, particularly younger activists, the line between liberal and radical was often opaque, ‘a matter of degree or nuance rather than sentiment’ as Chris Moores puts it, the world in which they operated made it increasingly difficult to maintain this approach.[25]

            There were pockets of resistance to this encroaching Cold War logic. Barrister Peter Benenson, slightly older than Ennals, became a key figure in the long and lonely struggle to articulate a politics of universalism that spanned political divisions. In 1954 Benenson, who had previously been active with a mix of political activities, from advocacy for Spanish political prisoners to standing multiple times for election as a Labour candidate, attempted to form a cross-party, non-sectarian organisation dedicated to upholding the contents of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[26] Yet even this action was tinged with sectarianism: Benenson saw the need for a new organisation because of the NCCL’s association with communism.[27] It was not, however, until later in the decade with the 1957 formation of Justice, a multi-Party lawyers organisation affiliated to the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), that he found any success in mobilising people around this theme.

Parallel to Benenson’s efforts to establish a universalist human rights internationalism, events across the continent of Africa were attracting increasing interest from liberals, the left, religious groups, politicians, business figures – in short, the breadth of the world of the progressive professionals. This gave rise to an internationalism driven by a moral response to colonialism.[28] Emblematic was the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), was founded in 1954 and which drew in leftist Labour party and trade union members as well as religious actors and operated both to pressure Labour’s colonial policy and to support other campaigns and organisations.[29]  Other organisations like the Council for Education in World Citizenship (CEWC), which Ennals had been secretary of before his departure for UNESCO and which appealed to a different subset of internationalists more focused on the UN, also found that there was a great interest across society in racial issues in the continent.[30] The success of these organisations stood in contrast to Benenson’s struggle to find a significant constituency for an organisation mobilised around universalism. His difficult slog throughout the decade indicated that it was easier to awaken an internationalism whose imagined geography followed the map of the British Empire than it was to mobilise around universality. Indeed, even Justice’s scope of action was limited to the British Empire and Commonwealth.[31]

While many members of the progressive professional milieu were initiating and driving these internationalist voluntary organisations, others took up roles in the international civil service. For some perhaps less progressive individuals like former colonial officials, this was tied to a desire to pre-empt any loss of British political influence.[32] But the UN and its agencies, especially UNESCO where Ennals spent the decade of the 1950s, attracted a range of internationalists with varying visions of the postwar world. Given its thematic concern with racial discrimination, the agency functioned as an extension of the emerging focus on ‘Africa’ back home. But it also drew in a wider range of people with a different take on this concern, bringing Ennals into contact with a different range of political worldviews than if he had stayed in London. UNESCO’s emphasis on science and education as tools to combat racial discrimination saw it draw in people like African American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, who saw his work at the agency as in the service of promoting political models of citizenship over ethno-nationalist ones.[33] Its ‘cosmopolitan spirit’ also made it the UN forum most attentive to the goals and ideals of the decolonising world, with its global history project endeavouring to escape methodological eurocentrism by positing decolonisation, rather than the Cold War, as the key lens for understanding the second half of the twentieth century.[34] And the agency’s location in Paris was also significant: it had been chosen to ensure autonomy from the rest of the United Nations, a spatial arrangement that facilitated the agency’s function as a melting pot of liberal, radical and black internationalisms.[35]

The social world that Ennals came to inhabit in Paris reflected UNESCO’s position at the intersection of these multiple internationalisms. His and Morris’ friendship circle centred on a multicultural group of American citizens who were, in turn, part of a broader world inhabited by internationalists such as anti-colonial, communist, student and women’s activists and organisations and who saw in the United Nations the ideal vehicle for fostering world citizenship.[36] In 1954 Ennals was elected Secretary of the UNESCO Staff Association where he became active supporting the agency’s US staff who were under threat of losing their jobs as part of the McCarthyist purge of the international civil service.[37] This positioning allowed him to see up close the racial dimension of American anti-communism.[38] Upon his return to London a few years later, this experience of mobility and the wide range of internationalisms that it allowed him to come into contact with, would position him in a different corner of the broader world of the progressive professionals to people like Benenson.

The emergence of a human rights internationalism in the shadow of post-imperial humanitarianism

Ennals’ 1959 return to London coincided with an accelerated period of decolonisation across the British Empire. As Anna Bocking-Welch has shown, the world violently contracted for the British public in the subsequent decade, both in terms of losing an Empire but also in terms of increased mobility and communications that brought far off places and events into people’s daily lives. This was accompanied by a surge in both anti-imperial sentiment and feelings of post-imperial responsibility that activated large numbers of the progressive professionals.[39] This activation drove a moment of increased momentum in the longer history of NGOs, as organisations which mobilised specialised knowledge via professional advocates to ‘tackle the issues at the frontier of social and political reform’ proliferated.[40] Ennals’ career throughout the decade is instructive of these processes. He worked in a number of environments, some explicitly internationally focused while others formally national bodies, all of which oriented themselves towards  the theme of postcolonial order and its international and domestic manifestations. This was also the period in which Peter Benenson found success in mobilising around universalism with his new organisation, Amnesty International. The ‘NGO moment’ consisted of a diverse range of nationally and internationally-oriented organisations all with considerable interaction and overlap.[41]

            Ennals’ first port of call upon his return to London was one of these such organisations, the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), where he took up the role of Field Officer. His experience there is illustrative of the delicate dance that continued to take place between different political orientations. Before long, he was promoted to the role of General Secretary. While he is broadly credited with severing the connection between the NCCL and the Communist Party while in this role, for Ennals this was more of a strategic move in order to strengthen the organisation by bringing the ‘left lawyers’ back into the fold, rather than an ideological decision.[42] He maintained regular contact with Joe Eber, Communist Party member and General Secretary of the MCF.[43] He also had a close personal and professional relationship with Alan Paterson, his ‘right hand man’ within the organisation, who much like Benenson vehemently rejected the Cold War logic of anti-Soviet sentiment and sought to understand the society on its own terms.[44] As such, while Ennals did preside over a period of transformation of the NCCL, a disavowal of people of a more radical bent was not its chief characteristic. Instead, he undertook a more conscious manoeuvring around the imposing logic of the Cold War, an approach that differentiated him from people like Benenson and that would be seen again later in his actions at Amnesty to accommodate internal differences.  

Instead, Ennals’ key contribution was repositioning the organisation to engage with the issue of postcolonial order and domestic manifestations of the broader process of the end of the British Empire. Ennals understood racial conflict and police violence towards people of colour as one of the key issues at the time, issues intimately connected to the legacy of Empire and the movement of people within it.[45] One of his first actions as Secretary General was to organise a conference on the colour bar in British society.[46] This reflected the strong moral anti-imperialism and humanitarian internationalism that was on the rise within the world he inhabited. Paterson, for example, would later go on to play a central role in War on Want.[47]  But Ennals also invoked an internationalism based on solidarity in his actions at the NCCL. Early in the 1960s the organisation ran an intensive campaign against the conservative government’s Commonwealth Immigrants Bill, which introduced the first restrictions on commonwealth freedom of movement. Ennals encouraged people to reject the emerging narrative of problematic and illegal immigration and view the Bill as a form of racial discrimination.[48] He called on the trade union movement to recognise shared experience of socioeconomic exclusion and deprivation across racial and ethnic groups, rather than descend into racial prejudice.[49]  He also placed British events in their international context and drew parallels between racial politics in Britain and similar events in the US, commenting that with ‘the march from Selma, the Los Angeles riots, the aftermath of Smethwick and the discussion aroused by the Governments’ [immigration measures]’ had made race a key ‘subject on which Americans and British can talk to each other with fellow feeling and animation.’[50] Ennals’ experience at UNESCO saw him combine an internationalist vision based on solidarity and black internationalism with the moral humanitarian internationalism that was ascendant across his peer group, incorporating both of these into his mobilisation of rights and civil liberties. As we shall see with the formation of Amnesty, he was not alone in being attracted to a rights framework yet imagining those rights in a concrete international context.

            For his part, Benenson’s interests had outgrown the limited geographic and procedural scope of Justice. In 1961, in collaboration with his Quaker friend Eric Baker, he launched a new initiative, the Appeal for Amnesty, an internationalist venture launched via simultaneous publication in major newspapers across the world. At the heart of this appeal to diverse publics was what would soon become known as the ‘prisoner of conscience’, a universalised understanding of political prisoner, ‘men and women who are imprisoned because their ideas are unacceptable to their government’, regardless of what political stripe these ideas, or this government, bore.[51]  Both this internationalism and this universalism distinguished Benenson’s amnesty appeal from the many existing organisations and campaigns for political prisoners, and it appealed to a significant, if limited, number of people who had also found the existing organisations limiting.[52]

            The initial campaign became a permanent organisation in 1962, but while it garnered significant support and enthusiasm its internationalism and its universalism presented challenges. Insufficient consideration had been given to the meaning of the word ‘amnesty’ outside the British context. In the formerly occupied parts of western Europe – France, Belgium and the Netherlands – the word was associated with campaigns in support of those tried and convicted as collaborators with the Nazis during the Second World War. This association was the direct cause of the would-be international organisation’s failure to take off in the first two countries, and an indirect cause of its falling apart in the third.[53] This problem related to the second: how to define the limits of the concept of ‘prisoner of conscience’. In Britain itself lengthy debates ensued around the definition of this key category. Were, for example, conscientious objectors to be included under the definition?[54] And what about those imprisoned or otherwise persecuted because of their race? And, if this group did come under the definition, what of those who advocated violence and who took up arms in their pursuit of racial freedom? Benenson and Baker had specifically excluded individuals who used or promoted violence from the prisoner of conscience classification, but for the many supporters drawn to the fledgling organisation who came to it from ‘Africa’ focused activism, this question and any answer to it was inextricably bound up with the complexities of the historical and political situation across the continent.

The issue was a key debate from the organisation’s very beginnings, and came up repeatedly at its annual international meetings.[55] The December 1966 resignation of British member Suzanne Mollo illustrated the tensions involved. In a letter to the organisation’s headquarters Mollo lamented that Amnesty had ‘deviated considerably from its initial aims and principles’ and had become ‘a platform for African nationalism’. Her own group in Southampton had many members with ‘strong anti-Apartheid sentiments’ which was causing the group to ‘lose sight of its main objectives.’ This tension over defining the core mission of the organisation combined with a subtle current of anti-communism. She had lived in a communist country and wanted the group to focus on prisoners in those countries; their refusal led her to conclude that they were ultra-leftists imposing their views on the rest of the group.[56] This was certainly not the attitude of the organisation’s leadership, which implored her to stay precisely to provide political balance, encouraging her to see the benefit of an organisation that was politically heterogenous.[57] But these general appeals to plurality avoided rather than resolved these tensions. The Chair of the fledgling New Zealand section resigned over the same issue shortly after.[58]

            Mollo’s complaints also indicate that despite Benenson’s desire to provide an alternative to other forms of internationalism, for many who joined it was not a matter of one or the other but of overlapping approaches to the issues they cared about. These other internationalisms also found a home in the fledgling human rights organisation, leading people like Mollo to lament that it had ‘become a platform for African nationalism’ and that there was even an anti-Vietnam march on human rights day.[59] While Amnesty proudly proclaimed its impartiality, assured by the fact that activists worked equally for one prisoner in each of the three ‘ideological blocs’, East, West and Afro-Asian/non-aligned, on the ground the huge interest in the third category across society in general was also reflected in the organisation’s membership. These were people who shared Ennals’ worldview, and for whom his appointment as Secretary general would come to signify a loosening up of the organisation that would allow them to pursue the kind of activism they felt was needed in the world.

Appointing a new Secretary General: an internal realignment

With four of the international organisation’s national sections falling apart and internal conflict over its praxis, the critical organisational mass that might have sustained Amnesty when it encountered leadership problems in 1966-67 was simply absent. These problems led to the departure of Benenson.[60] The small group that took charge of Amnesty following Benenson’s departure looked to their broader world of progressive professionals for a new Secretary General.[61] As such, it wasn’t long before Martin Ennals’ name ended up on their list. And one person was key to getting his name to the top of that list: Sean MacBride. In doing so, MacBride sought not simply to address an administrative gap. He sought to reorient Amnesty as an international force.

            Irish Republican and Chair of the ICJ, MacBride had been involved in Amnesty since its very early days, having reached out to Benenson following the initial publication of the Appeal in 1961. The latter had eagerly replied that ‘there was no one with whom we would more wish to be associated than yourself’, reflecting the internationalist prestige surrounding him.[62] Yet MacBride’s understanding of how to bring about change differed in key ways from that of Benenson. They both shared the view that there was a need for a non-political organisation that could, in MacBride’s words, ‘do for political prisoners what the Red Cross did for prisoners of war’, and they saw that Amnesty’s task was to work towards the release of these through a mixture of contacting governments directly and building public opinion.[63] But MacBride emphasised international treaties and agreements and engaged with international bodies in a way that Benenson rarely if ever did. His principal political interest in the late 1960s was the strengthening of both international humanitarian law and the laws of human rights, and bridging the gap that had emerged between them and mobilising them in support of those imprisoned during armed conflicts.

            In early 1968 MacBride, in his capacity as delegate for the ICJ, attended two related events where he was able to push this agenda forward: the first UN World Conference on Human Rights, held in the Iranian capital of Tehran in March, and the associated pre-meeting of NGOs held in Montreal, Canada, in February. Thanks in no small part to the ICJ interventions this NGO Assembly focused on plugging what they saw as a gap in international mechanisms for human rights protection: human rights in non-international armed conflict. MacBride volunteered to serve as envoy to bring these recommendations to the Tehran Conference, where he had many diplomatic contacts receptive to his message. The result was a series of resolutions on human rights in armed conflict and on the treatment of those targeted for opposing racial discrimination.[64] MacBride felt that while the Tehran Resolution had strengthened humanitarian laws, they were and should be connected to the laws of human rights and offered the chance to move forward with strengthening the latter.[65]

This groundbreaking measure was seen by many at the time (and subsequently) to be the only redeeming feature of the entire Conference amidst broader disillusion regarding the potential for states to agree on international human rights action. And, given this disillusion, there was a feeling that it was now up to the NGOs to take this agenda forward.[66]

            MacBride’s personal interventions into the search for Amnesty’s new Secretary General can be seen as part of his pursuit of this agenda. MacBride saw the appointment a new Secretary General, which coincided with the International Year for Human Rights, as offering a chance to give ‘a new impetus’ to the organisation’s work which was ‘first and foremost concerned with the protection of human rights’, a characterisation that significantly broadened the organisation’s scope while connecting it to the main themes of the Year.[67] While he had held a series of positions within the organisation’s evolving structures throughout the 1960s, he had never played a central part in its day-to-day operations. This changed when it came time to appoint a new figurehead. When the rest of the leadership was unable to decide between the two final candidates, Ennals and NCCL Executive member Cedric Thornberry, MacBride scheduled a meeting with Ennals to judge for himself and offered him the role informally on the spot.[68] What was discussed at that meeting remains unknown, leading some to conclude that he was offered the role due to his more extensive administrative experience.[69] Yet Ennals’ first actions as Secretary General show that his appointment was likely due to his amenability to pursuing what MacBride called ‘the exciting possibilities for expansion opened up by the work done during Human Rights Year’, particularly efforts ‘to secure protection at the international level for those imprisoned in violation of the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’.[70] This vision of Amnesty as part of an international machinery, which differed starkly from Benenson’s vison of change occurring through the construction of a global ‘community of conscience’,  came more and more to characterise the organisation following the changes inaugurated by Ennals. MacBride’s unilateral action had paved the way for the changes that would prove decisive both for Amnesty and for the trajectory of human rights more broadly.

Human rights internationalism turns to the Third World

In August 1968 Amnesty held its annual International Council Meeting (ICM), Ennals’ first as Secretary General. On the agenda was an item titled ‘areas of special concern’, to deal with cases of human rights violations of interest to the organisation but that sat on the edge of its long-contested official scope of action. At the same meeting the organisation also adopted its first Statue, codifying the initial aims and objectives that Mollo had feared were being forgotten. Yet rather than continuing the conflict been these two points, the period that followed saw the organisation overcome the disarray that had previously emerged from the tension between the traditional prisoner work and the ever-present question of attending to other violations of rights. Ennals assumed responsibility for the task of clarifying the latter and in doing so established a consensus and an organisational structure that saw Amnesty strengthened as an internationalist force.

The new Statute adopted at the 1968 meeting put on paper, for the first time, the objectives, the methods and the organisational structure of Amnesty International. The objectives were largely unchanged from how they had been worded in organisational documents like the Annual Report over the previous years: to secure freedom of opinion via the observance of articles 5 (the lone new addition), 9, 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and to work for the release of Prisoners of Conscience, defined as those imprisoned in violation of these UDHR articles providing they had not used or advocated violence.[71] In laying out the organisation’s methods, the Statute was more detailed than previous iterations yet still retained a focus on Prisoners of Conscience as the main area of activity. As such, despite the incorporation of torture within the organisation’s remit,  actions on this and the other human rights articles remained restricted to Prisoners of Conscience, traditionally defined.

More than the new Statute itself, the key to the development of new techniques lay in the process set in motion by the agenda item on ‘areas of special concern’ which focused on the space beyond the traditional definition of Prisoners of Conscience. The meeting delegates voted to establish a working party to continue the investigation into the topic, with Ennals as Chair. He took up the task enthusiastically, creating of a working paper titled ‘Areas of Conflict’ that lay out a proposal for balancing traditional identity with room for innovation. Ennals opened the paper with a reference to the Tehran resolution calling for those who struggled against ‘minority racist or colonial regimes’ be considered prisoners of war or political prisoners under international law. This definition, he noted, conflicted with Amnesty’s, whose exclusion of those who use or advocate violence precluded almost all prisoners in places like Southern Africa. But, he noted, it did fall under the objective of upholding of Articles 5, 9, 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. What was needed if the organisation was to be able to pursue the full range of its objectives, he argued, was a second category of objects of Amnesty’s advocacy.[72]

In order to illustrate the need for this expansion of action, Ennals pointed to the actual political context of the world of the late 1960s. Of course, there was Southern Africa, where in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Angola, Mozambique and Namibia there were people who would come under the definition of political prisoner as set out in Tehran, yet not under Amnesty’s. But beyond that, he noted, there were other places where Amnesty’s traditional scope and methods limited the possibility for action. Prisoner of Conscience cases, which were allocated to ‘adoption groups’ who would write letters on their behalf, involved thorough documentation of each case, yet in places such as Greece, Indonesia, and Iran prisoners were so numerous it was difficult to get accurate information on each of them. Despite this, the conditions they were held in undoubtedly fell within the spirit of Amnesty’s purview.[73] The organisation’s traditions were preventing it from effectively confronting the world of the day.

Ennals also pointed to the changed organisational context in which Amnesty operated. This second, more expansive category of individual that the organisation would work for, with different methods and techniques, would be in line with the one declared at Tehran and would therefore allow Amnesty to establish its place in the flourishing human rights ecosystem. This new category would not include people who lived in situations of actual war, where it would be ‘difficult for Amnesty International to be effective as war is the ultimate destroyer of human rights’ and where other agencies like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) were already positioned to act. Instead it would focus on ‘areas where conflict was less well-defined [where] Amnesty International could lead to improved treatment’: effectively, non-international armed conflicts. He even suggested that the organisation could take its cues from the UN in the form of resolutions declaring the existence of an ‘area of conflict’ or even from the ICRC on cases where they deemed a conflict was outside their own scope. [74] This was a clear echo of MacBride’s vision for an organisation that complemented the Red Cross. And it was a far cry from Benenson’s view that there could be no effective international law until a truly global consciousness had been built.[75]

This was a bold move for a Secretary General new to the organisation. It did not immediately quell all disquiet. At the following ICM in 1969 several national sections introduced resolutions seeking to clarify the boundaries of the prisoner of conscience concept, particularly those who had held strong views on the topic throughout the previous decade. The New Zealand section, for example, proposed a second concept, ‘Prisoner of Circumstance’, to cover all those referred to by Ennals in his ‘Areas of Conflict’ paper, to ensure that the term ‘Prisoner of Conscience’ remained unaltered.[76] But equally some, like the German section, enthusiastically embraced the notion of expanding prisoner of conscience to include those persecuted for belonging to a racial or other minority, as well as those imprisoned for conscientious objection to military service.[77] Ennals’ appointment and his proposal, then, was not a magic bullet that instantly resolved all differences of opinion within the organisation.

But as the membership grew so did the absolute, if not necessarily the relative, number of people who chafed at the restrictive nature of Amnesty’s traditional methods and scope and with whom the spirit of Ennals’ paper resonated. Between 1969 and 1970 the number of groups, the Amnesty term for clusters of anywhere between three and nine people engaged in advocacy for political prisoners, rose from 640 to 850 worldwide, and again to almost 1000 in 1971.[78] Many of these new members were keen to explore new themes and deploy new methods on the ground. The Dutch section, for example, which had re-formed in 1968, invented a new type of group, the action group, which engaged in activities such as awareness raising in public in contrast to the more private, letter-writing activities of the traditional adoption groups.[79] Many of those joining the new Dutch section came from the country’s Third World Movement, from which they brought the action group technique, and Amnesty presented them with a space in which to continue pursuing this interest within the new framework of human rights.[80] The massively growing membership outstripped the London-based International Secretariat(IS)’s ability to closely monitor all national sections, giving the latter space to improvise as their members saw fit. This space was even greater for those sections like the Dutch whose internal correspondence was conducted in a language other than English, shielding them from oversight.[81] Once the organisation started to become genuinely international, it was harder for the London-based IS to control what happened on the ground. The US section, which also baulked at traditional prisoner adoption techniques, had previously clashed with the IS over its desire to pursue its own approaches, but this tension dissipated under Ennals who supported the Americans’ ideas.[82] Ennals’ redefinition of ‘balance’, which he argued should not ‘reflect the cold war of the fifties but rather the world of the 70s where communism no longer has a sharp geographical definition and the world can no longer be divided into “East”, “West” and “Third World”’, facilitated this atmosphere of innovation and creation.[83]

Although many in and around the IS talked about this phenomenon as a crisis, Ennals capitalised on the situation to develop new methods.[84] He used his address in the 1970 Annual Report to talk about the problems this growth in membership had caused. In his telling, and that of Treasurer Anthony Marreco, there simply weren’t enough funds to properly support all these groups in their work for political prisoners.[85] It was true that there was not enough money to support the large amount of research work that went into preparing briefing papers for traditional prisoner advocacy. But this situation proved fortuitous for Ennals, Marreco and others, allowing them to advance arguments for new, less resource-intensive techniques that could be applied to individuals who fell outside of Amnesty’s traditional definition of political prisoner. At the same time, the distribution of these scarce resources came to reflect an interest in the Third World. When Head of Research Zbynek Zeman, who had been appointed by Ennals, restructured the research department into regional subdivisions, Eastern Europe was only allocated one researcher.[86]

The expansion of the labour force under Ennals’ command contributed significantly to the creation of new techniques that could be applied in the ‘areas of conflict’ outlined in his 1969 paper. Although there were financial constraints, the body of research and support staff at the IS was growing to meet the demand posed by the rapid increase in groups.[87] Some of these people came from other social movements and campaigns. For example, Pat Arrowsmith from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, worked as a publications officer at the IS from 1970 onwards, while Sherman Carroll, who would go on to be instrumental in running the organisation’s Campaign for the Abolition of Torture, had a background in the US civil rights movement.[88] Others, particularly the researchers, acquired their orientation towards the world via area studies and other graduate qualifications. For example, Tracey Ulltveit-Moe, an American citizen with degrees in Latin American Studies, responded to an advertisement for a researcher on Latin America, Portugal and Portuguese Africa.[89] The IS was increasingly a space where internationalists of the kind Mollo had feared were hijacking the organisation came together, and this shaped the work they did. Ennals worked closely with this staff: a collection of Arrowsmith’s sketches made during staff meetings includes one titled ‘God alias Martin Ennals’.[90] Whether this was a facetious comment or an affectionate one, we cannot know, but either way he was a significant presence in their working lives and he likely encouraged them in the proposal of new ideas.

The flagship of these was the Urgent Action technique, which emerged out of a weekend long strategy meeting on Brazil in 1973 between Ulltveit-Moe, Ennals, Brazilian lawyer Anina de Carballo and IS staffer Maggie Bierne.[91] This technique involved seeing mass numbers of letters and faxes to authorities when a prisoner was suspected of being in imminent danger of torture. Given this imminent danger, Urgent Action cases did not require extensive research and documentation that adopted prisoner cases did. It was first applied to a Brazilian prisoner about whom not enough was known to allow him to be adopted as a Prisoner of Conscience yet enough was known that he was in immediate danger. This focus on Brazil, accompanied by the organisation’s 1974 Report on Chile and its 1976 campaign on Uruguay, the first time it ran a campaign focused on one country, completed the expansion of Amnesty’s concern with the postcolonial world to encompass the Third World more broadly. As others have pointed out, events across Latin America in particular throughout the early 1970s became a laboratory for Amnesty’s development of new techniques.[92] Yet the reason that Amnesty engaged in this development, and not another organisation, lie in the longer interest in human rights cases at the edges of the Prisoner of Conscience category that was present in the organisation since its beginnings, an interest that Ennals found a way to embrace.

The development of new techniques did introduce its own tensions. The conflict between those who advocated for traditional Prisoner of Conscience work to be seen as Amnesty’s core mission (and for this work to be allocated an attendant budget) and those who pursued new approaches continued.[93] And the ‘violence question’ remained highly charged. Hardly a year went by without it provoking debate at the ICM or within other forums, and while the organisation never officially changed its stance the percentage of the membership that either opposed it outright or rejected it for its practical implications remained just under half throughout the decade.[94] This led to a series of measures designed to explore just how far the organisation could push its own Statute. In 1973, for example, a list was drawn up of opposition and liberation movements across the Third World to assist in deciding which ones Amnesty cold work with, and which ones it clearly could not.[95] And as the organisation began to work more in the Third World, it needed to expand its contacts in order to get more information on prisoner or torture cases, which meant downplaying the violence clause in order to be taken seriously. As one researcher reported after returning from Latin America in 1972, the non-violence clause was ‘for a great many Latin Americans difficult to understand and misunderstood causing even suspicion at times in a continent where CIA consciousness is present and real.’[96] The push against the violence clause, and for new techniques more broadly including for those that addressed social and economic rights, also increased as the organisation sought to establish national sections in the Third World itself, part of its ambition to become a ‘truly international organisation’.[97] Thus, growth created a positive feedback loop, provoking more innovation and experimentation, which attracted more growth. This growth, in turn, fuelled the human rights breakthrough of the late 1970s.

Conclusions: Towards an understanding of human rights internationalisms.

In an early pamphlet introducing the organisation it states that ‘the word ‘amnesty’ connotes an overlooking’, a direct reference to Benenson’s vision that people might look beyond their political differences in order to build a better world.[98] Yet it also recalls his belief that people could overlook the context in which imprisonment and other violations occurred. For many within the broader world of progressive professionals, especially those whose international horizons were shaped by the legacies of British colonialism in Africa, this was too tall an order. Benenson’s universalism, embodied in the ‘prisoner of conscience’, had such a narrow definition in practice that it inspired more discord than concord. As a result, building an ‘awakened and vigilant world conscience’ proved difficult during the organisation’s early years.[99]

            A little less than a decade later, Amnesty’s new Secretary General declared that the organisation’s work ‘must not reflect the Cold War of the fifties but rather the world of the 70s’.[100] This shift from a disembedded universalism to a human rights politics consciously connected to the world of the day underlie the transformation that allowed Amnesty International to hit its stride, in turn driving the rise of human rights as a way of understanding and acting in the world. This interest in ‘the world’, as opposed to ‘the principle’, had been present within Amnesty from its beginnings. Martin Ennals’ appointment to the position of Secretary General was the result of this interest, not its spark. He belonged to the broader world of activists whose internationalism was less predicated on universalism and more embedded in time and place: the world of the 1960s and the interconnected political challenges that echoed across it. Human rights was a framework that interested these activists, but they did not conceive it or mobilise it in exactly the same way as Benenson. When Ennals came to the role he worked to articulate and facilitate a way for these activists to channel their work through Amnesty.

            The aim of using Ennals’ biography as a method, allowing him to ‘move in and out of view’, has been to shift the focus onto the broader, diverse world of the progressive professionals of which he was a part.[101] This is essential for showing how the actions and ideas of key individuals derive their historical and political force from the extent to which they are shared by others. Benenson developed a novel way to concretise universal human rights through the figure of the Prisoner of Conscience and was able to mobilise large numbers of people behind it, but his narrow definition also left many people who were otherwise attracted to his new organisation dissatisfied, leading to conflicts that could not be sufficiently managed by the nascent organisation. The confluence of Benenson’s unceremonious with the departure from the organisation with the possibilities for expanded action on political imprisonment that emerged out of the 1968 Tehran Conference, led formerly background figures like MacBride to take action and select a new figurehead who could lead the organisation into the future. While Ennals’ appointment enhanced the administrative capacity of the organisation, his real impact went much further beyond that. By issuing statements and introducing discussion that opened up the space beyond the Prisoner of Conscience category, Ennals made space for a human rights internationalism that was driven by concerns other than pure universalism, incorporating those whose internationalism was driven by a response, moral or otherwise, to events in Africa, Asia or Latin America. Jan Eckel remarks that Amnesty’s ‘transformation was not the result of any initial decision or master plan’; the choice to use biography as method reflects an agreement that there was no one person issuing a directive that took charge of the organisation and restructured it for its subsequent success.[102] At the same time, however, in this article I have shown that it is not entirely correct to say that the organisation ‘entered abruptly into a new phase [in the early 1970s].’[103] Instead, the tendencies behind Amnesty’s transformation were present in the organisation from its very early days, and when MacBride offered Ennals the job as Secretary General he set in motion a process whereby those tendencies could flourish.  

            In conducting this examination, the aim has been to clarify key elements in the existing literature on human rights and Amnesty International. Specifically, by explaining the origins of the changes instituted in Amnesty after 1968 the aim has been to explain why these changes took the form that they did, and why they occurred in Amnesty rather than in some other organisation or in an entirely new organisation. This helps us understand why it was Amnesty that played such a central role in the human rights breakthrough of the 1970s, and why that breakthrough took the shape that it did. Given the later evolution of human rights into a framework for intervention in the same of global order, the crucial importance of the events within Amnesty that led to the evolution and popularisation of a human rights internationalism focused on the challenges of this order in the Third World become clearer.[104] If we ask the question, why human rights, the answer is because it was focused on the challenges of (postcolonial) order. At the same time, the aim of this article has been to expand out beyond the narrow confines of human rights and its historiography, showing how the evolutions that took place within Amnesty find their origins in the broader interactions between internationalisms that occurred across the political world of the progressive professionals to which it belonged. In undertaking this expansion, this article has sought to go beyond the ‘quest for a breakthough’ or the debate about whether particular invocations of human rights are true examples of human rights, and show how it is a form of internationalism that emerges from and has continued to interact with and be shaped by other forms of worldmaking at both the international and domestic scale.

[1] Samuel Moyn, ‘The Return of the Prodigal: The 1970s as a Turning Point in Human Rights History’, in The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s, ed. Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 2; Jan Eckel, The Ambivalence of Good: Human Rights in International Politics since the 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 160.

[2] Dutch section Chair Cornelius van der Vlies, quoted in Tom Buchanan, Amnesty International and Human Rights Activism in Postwar Britain, 1945–1977 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 150; Award ceremony speech, 10 December 1977 <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1977/ceremony-speech/> (accessed 20 January 2025).

[3] Eckel, The Ambivalence of Good, 160.

[4] Eckel, The Ambivalence of Good; Buchanan, Amnesty International and Human Rights Activism.

[5] Robert Robert Brier, “Beyond the Quest for a ‘Breakthrough’: Reflections on the Recent Historiography on Human Rights,” European History Yearbook, 2016, 155–73.

[6] Daniel Laqua, Activism across Borders since 1870: Causes, Campaigns, and Conflicts in and beyond Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2023); Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Human Rights and History,” Past & Present, no. 232 (2016): 287-88.

[7] Eleanor Davey, Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954-1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Salar Mohandesi, Red Internationalism: Anti-imperialism and Human Rights in the Global Sixties and Seventies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

[8] Brier, “Beyond the Quest for a ‘Breakthrough’”; Joseph R. Slaughter, “Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New Historiography, and the End of the Third World,” Human Rights Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2018): 735–75; Mark Philip Bradley, “American Vernaculars: The United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 1 (2014): 1–21.

[9] Slaughter, ‘Hijacking Human Rights’.

[10] Philippa Hetherington and Glenda Sluga, ‘Liberal and Illiberal Internationalisms’, Journal of World History 31, no. 1 (2020): 2.

[11] Jodi Burkett, ‘Re-Defining British Morality: “Britishness” and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 1958–68’, Twentieth Century British History 21, no. 2 (2010): 184–205; Anna Bocking-Welch, ‘Imperial Legacies and Internationalist Discourses: British Involvement in the United Nations Freedom from Hunger Campaign, 1960–70’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 5 (2012): 879–96; Gorman, Uniting Nations: Britons and Internationalism, 1945–1970; Ian Hall, ‘The Revolt against the West: Decolonisation and Its Repercussions in British International Thought, 1945–75’, The International History Review 33, no. 1 (2011): 43–64.

[12] Agnieszka Sobocinska, Saving the World?: Western Volunteers and the Rise of the Humanitarian-Development Complex (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Heike Wieters, The NGO CARE and food aid from America, 1945-80: 'Showered with Kindness?' (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020); Anna Bocking-Welch, British civic society at the end of Empire: Decolonisation, Globalisation, and International Responsibility (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). Kevin O’Sullivan provides a broader examination of this orientation towards the Third World, including human rights work. The NGO Moment: The Globalisation of Compassion from Biafra to Live Aid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

[13] Chris Moores, Civil Liberties and Human Rights in Twentieth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 105–6.

[14] For the politics and internationalism of the Wilson Labour government, see Charlotte Lydia Riley, ‘“This Party Is a Moral Crusade, or It Is Nothing”: Foreign Aid and Labour’s Ethical Identity’, in Rethinking Labour’s Past, ed. Nathan Yeowell (London: I.B. Taurus, 2022), 195-211. For the selection of Amnesty’s secretary general, see meeting Minutes, 5 December 1967, and Memo: ‘Appointment of Secretary General’, 27 March 1968. Amnesty International, International Secretariat archives, International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, inventory n. 1177 (hereafter AI IS).

[15] Jake Hodder, ‘On Absence and Abundance: Biography as Method in Archival Research’, Area 49, no. 4 (2017): 453; David Lamber, ‘Reflections on the Concept of Imperial Biographies: The British Case’, Geschichte Und Gesellschaft 40, no. 1 (2014): 22–41.

[16] For an alternative approach to human rights internationalism, that uses comparison to draw out differences, see Roland Burke, “The Internationalism of Human Rights,” in Internationalisms: A Twentieth Century History, ed. Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 287–314.

[17] Abigail Green, ‘Liberals, Socialists, Internationalists, Jews’, Journal of World History 31, n. 1 (2020): 11-41; Sandrine Kott, ‘Towards a Social History of International Organisations: The ILO and the Internationalisation of Western Social Expertise (1919–1949)’, in Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World: The Pasts of the Present, ed. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro (Cham: Springer, 2018), 33–57; Martin Müller, ‘Assemblages and Actor-Networks: Rethinking Socio-Material Power, Politics and Space’, Geography Compass 9, no. 1 (2015): 27–41.

[18] Jodi Burkett, ‘The National Union of Students and Transnational Solidarity, 1958–1968’, European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire 21, no. 4 (2014): 540; International Union of Students, ‘The Task of Student Youth in the Past-War World’, no date. Folder 1, International Preparatory Committee, 1st IUS Congress. Archive of the International Union of Students, International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam.

[19] Joël Kotec, Students and the Cold War (London: Palgrave, 1991): 91; Report Form, session 1947-48, Martin Ennals Student Records, London School of Economics.

[20] Kotec, Students and the Cold War, 117.

[21] Ibid., 91-2; Entry dated 13/07/1946, file KV 2/4043 Martin Francis Anthony Ennals, Records of the Security Service, National Archives, Kew (hereafter Ennals records).

[22] Entry dated 13/07/1946, file KV 2/4043, Ennals records.

[23] Undated note, File KV2/4043, Ennals records.

[24] Christopher Moores, ‘From Civil Liberties to Human Rights? British Civil Liberties Activism and Universal Human Rights’, Contemporary European History 21, no. 2 (2012): 178.

[25] Moores, Civil Liberties and Human Rights, 4.

[26] Buchanan, Amnesty International and Human Rights Activism, 88.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Steven Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918-1964 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

[29] Daniel Gorman, Uniting Nations: Britons and Internationalism, 1945–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 152-183.

[30] Buchanan, Amnesty International and Human Rights Activism, 56.

[31] Ibid., 89.

[32] Gorman, Uniting Nations, 76–87; Amy Limoncelli, 'Remaking the International Civil Service: The Legacies of British Internationalism in the United Nations Secretariat, 1945-7', Twentieth Century British History 34, n. 2 (2023): 169-91.

[33] Sarah C. Dunstan, Race, Rights and Reform: Black Activism in the French Empire and the United States from World War I to the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 201.

[34] Paul Betts, “Humanity’s New Heritage: Unesco and the Rewriting of World History,” Past & Present, no. 228 (2015): 271.

[35] James Patrick Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics : Engaging In International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 138–39.

[36] For Ennals’ friends and contacts, see the various entries, particularly travel logs, in file KV2/4044, Ennals records, NA. Many of those mentioned, such as Aubrey Pankey, Kathryn Weatherly and Ollie Harrington, were friends with the civil rights activists Paul and Eslanda Robeson. Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (Open Road Media, 1965), 518-9; Imaobong Umoren, “‘We Americans Are Not Just American Citizens Any Longer’: Eslanda Robeson, World Citizenship, and the New World Review in the 1950s,” Journal of Women’s History 30, no. 4 (2018): 134–58.

[37] K. G., “International Officials: A Question of Loyalties,” The World Today 10, no. 11 (1954): 490.

[39] Bocking-Welch, British Civil Society at the End of Empire.

[40] Chris Moores, Civil Liberties and Human Rights, 15.

[41] O’Sullivan, The NGO Moment.

[42] Transcript of Interview with Martin Ennals, Records of Liberty, Hull History Centre.

[43] See entry dated 18/11/59, KV2/4043, Ennals records.

[44] Benedict Birnberg, ‘Alan Paterson Obituary’, The Guardian (25 August 1999).

[45] See various editions of the ‘Civil Liberty’ column Ennals wrote weekly in The Tribune, especially 3 September 1965, 5 November 1965, 12 November 1965. Records of Liberty, Hull History Centre.

[46] Transcript of Interview with Martin Ennals.

[47] Birnberg, ‘Alan Paterson Obituary’.

[48] Christina Boswell, Sara Casella Colombeau, and Emile Chabal, ‘The Invention of Illegal Immigration: Constructing “Clandestine” Immigrants in France and the UK’, in States of Ignorance: Governing Irregular Migrants in Western Europe, ed. Christina Boswell and Emile Chabal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 91–116.

[49] Martin Ennals, ‘Education and Race Problems’, The Tribune (5 November 1965).

[50] Martin Ennals, ‘Race: Deeds not Words’, The Tribune (7 January 1966).

[51] ‘Objects of Amnesty International’, Amnesty International, Movement of Freedom of Opinion and Religion, Second Annual Report, 1962, p. 1.

[52] Sean MacBride, Amnesty International Oral History project interview, 8 June 1984. AI IS 987.

[53] Michelle Carmody, ‘Amnesty International: een blik uit Vlaanderen’, Brood en Rozen 1 (2024): 48-71.

[54] Letter from Eric Baker to Robert Swann, 12 May, 1966. AI IS 1166; Minutes of the 8th International Executive Committee meeting, 12-13 March 1966, AI IS 412.

[55] ‘Minutes International Planning Meeting’, 20-22 September 1963. AI IS 4; ‘Minutes International Assembly’, 26-27 September 1964. AI IS 5. See also ‘Violence and Racialism: A Report on the Eustomy Questionnaire’, 1964. AI IS 5.

[56] Letter from Suzanne Mollo, 12 December, 1966. AI IS 1166.

[57] Letter from Robert Swann to Suzanne Mollo, 15 December, 1966. AI IS 1166.

[58] Minutes of 6th International Assembly, 1967. AI IS 8.

[59] Letter from Suzanne Mollo, 12 December, 1966. AI IS 1166.

[60] Tom Buchanan, ‘Amnesty International in Crisis, 1966-7’, Twentieth Century British History 15, no. 3 (2004): 267–89.

[61] Meeting minutes, 5 December 1967 & ‘Appointment of Secretary General, 27 March 1968. AI IS 1177.

[62] Letter from Peter Benenson to Sean MacBride, 9 June 1961. AI IS 1163.

[63] Sean MacBride, Oral History Project interview.

[64] Steven L. B. Jensen, ed., The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values, Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 189–92; Amanda Alexander, “A Short History of International Humanitarian Law,” The European Journal of International Law 26, no. 1 (2015): 118–19.

[65] Sean MacBride, ‘Human Rights in Armed Conflicts: the inter-relationship between humanitarian laws and the laws of human rights’, N.D. (c. 1968), AI IS 1306.

[66] Letter from Sean MacBride to Eric Baker, 30 May, 1968. AI IS 996.

[67] Sean MacBride, ‘Introduction’, Amnesty International: Annual Report, 1 June 1967-31 May 1968 (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1968), 2.

[68] Draft letter to International Executive, from Eric Baker, undated; Letter from Martin Ennals to Sean MacBride, 5 May 1968. AI IS 1177.

[69] Buchanan, Amnesty International and Human Rights Activism, 150.

[70] MacBride, ‘Introduction’.

[71] Revised Draft Statute as finally approved  by the International Executive for Adoption by the International Assembly at Stockholm, 1968’. AI IS Microfilm 255. The one modification was the addition of UDHR article 5, which referred to torture. This modification had been introduced by MacBride, who was Chair of the International executive which drafted the statute. See Sean MacBride, ‘Torture and other Inhumane Treatment: the Legal Aspects’, 1968. AI IS Microfilm 255.

[72] ‘Working Paper on Areas of Conflict’, 1969. AI IS Microfilm 255.

[73] ‘Working Paper on Areas of Conflict’, 1969. AI IS Microfilm 255.

[74] ‘Working Paper on Areas of Conflict’, 1969. AI IS Microfilm 255.

[75] ‘A time to keep silence…and a time to speak’, N.D. (c. 1962), AI IS 995.

[76] Resolutions to the 2nd Annual International Council Meeting, Geneva, 13-14 September 1969. AI IS Microfilm 255.

[77] Resolutions to the 2nd Annual International Council Meeting, Geneva, 13-14 September 1969. AI IS Microfilm 255.

[78] Amnesty International, Annual Report 1969-70 & Annual Report 1970-71.

[79] Adri Kemps, interview with author, 30 July, 2019. Haarlem, NL.

[80] Adri Kemps, interview.

[81] Adri Kemps, interview.

[82] Sarah B. Snyder, “Exporting Amnesty International to the United States: Transatlantic Human Rights Activism in the 1960s,” Human Rights Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2012): 789–90.

[83] Martin Ennals, ‘Introduction to Annual Report’, Amnesty International Annual Report 1968-9, 3.

[84] Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).

[85] Martin Ennals, ‘Introduction’, in Amnesty International Annual Report 1969-70.

[86] ‘Report on Creation of Research Department’, June 1973. AI IS Microfilm 244.

[87] In 1970 there were 5 research staff; by 1973 there were 16, with additional people working in management and administrative support roles. Staff list as at 1 January 1973. AI IS Microfilm 243.

[88] Michelle Carmody, “Making Human Rights Effective? Amnesty International, ‘Aid and Trade,’ and the Shaping of Professional Human Rights Activism, 1961–1983,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 11, no. 3 (2020): 280–97.

[89] Tracey Ulltviet-Moe, Interview with author, 27 July 2019. London, UK.

[90] ‘Sketches done during Amnesty meetings’, undated. Folder 41, Pat Arrowsmith papers, LSE archives, London.

[91] Ulltviet-Moe interview.

[92] Patrick William Kelly, “The 1973 Chilean Coup and the Origins of Transnational Human Rights Activism,” Journal of Global History 8, no. 1 (March 2013): 172.

[93] Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame.

[94] See for example ‘Proposals to the 5th International Council Meeting’, 1971. AI IS 12; ‘Special Meeting on Violence Clause in the Statute, 6th International Council Meeting’, 1973. AI IS 13; ‘Report from the Committee on Violence Clause, 7th International Council Meeting’, 1974.

[95] ‘Opposition & Liberation Movements’, 1973. AI IS 65.

[96] ‘Report of Latin America Researcher’, 1972. AI IS 66.

[97] ‘Research Work and Traditional Amnesty Techniques in the Third World’, 1972. AI IS 12.

[98] ‘A Time to Keep Silent and a Time to Speak’, N.D. (c. 1962), AI IS 995.

[99] ‘Appeal for Amnesty: A Report on the First 6 Months’, N.D. (c. 1961), AI IS 1163.

[100] Amnesty International, Annual Report 1968-9.

[101] Hodder, “On Absence and Abundance,” 456.

[102] Eckel, The Ambivalence of Good, 162.

[103] Ibid.

[104] Hoffmann, “Human Rights and History”.