Chapter 4 shows how Peter Benenson’s initial idea for a one-year campaign on behalf of ‘prisoners of conscience‘ in May 1961 swiftly turned into a permanent organisation with the title Amnesty International. The chapter begins with a detailed account of how Benenson, in association with Eric Baker, launched the ‘Appeal for Amnesty‘, and explores the reasons for its remarkable success. There is then a discussion of the consolidation, in the period 1961-1964, of key elements of Amnesty’s practice – such as the archive of political prisoners, and the formation of local campaigning in ‘Groups of Three‘. A separate section analyses the role of religion in the early phase of Amnesty. The concluding part of the chapter shows how Amnesty also, from the very beginning, developed as an international campaigning organisation, even though the initial national sections were often extremely fragile.

Chapter 3 looks at how far questions of human rights contributed to the campaigns against political imprisonment during the 1950s. The Cold War forms the inescapable context: the left campaigned for left-wing prisoners, and the right for right-wing prisoners. Peter Benenson challenged this binary distinction when he set up the cross-party lawyers’ organisation Justice in 1956. The chapter discusses Benenson’s early career, as well as that of Eric Baker, who would work closely with him in Amnesty. The two men first worked together in Cyprus during the Emergency of 1955-1959. Baker’s Quaker heritage is explored, as well as his support for the influential Italian social activist Danilo Dolci. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the various campaigns that were launched in the late 1950s and early 1960s for an amnesty for political prisoners in Spain, Portugal and Greece. These were essentially left-wing campaigns, but it is argued that they had much in common with later ‘human rights‘ campaigns and are worthy of serious study.

This concluding chapter emphasises the book’s principal findings, in particular with regard to the different forms of leadership within human rights activism, and the various social groups involved. The chapter then looks briefly at how human rights activism evolved under the very different conditions – both nationally and internationally – of the 1980s.

Chapter 5 looks at Amnesty’s development in the mid-1960s, and in particular the major crisis that engulfed the organisation in 1966-1967 over its involvement in the crises in Aden and Rhodesia. The chapter opens with an overview of the crisis, which resulted in the departure of Peter Benenson. Two key aspects are then explored in detail; first, Amnesty’s relations with the British state, in particular the secretive Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, and, secondly, Peter Benenson’s long-standing engagement with the problems of southern Africa. It is argued that the crisis was due, in part, to Benenson’s attempt to devise new mechanisms for non-governmental intervention. The chapter concludes with an account of the drive to reform and professionalise Amnesty under the leadership of Martin Ennals.