Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T18:54:10.284Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Political Imprisonment and Human Rights, 1945–1964

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2020

Tom Buchanan
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Get access

Summary

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×