Peter Benenson R.I.P.

Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International, has died. He was aged 83. A lawyer by trade, Benenson was, by all accounts, a deep believer in human rights. But belief without action is a recipe for impotence and Benenson’s place in history will forever be compromised by his organization’s refusal to uphold human rights when doing so meant calling terror by its name.

Founded with the noble aim of succoring “prisoners of conscience,” (Benenson’s words), it was nevertheless Amnesty International that, under the dubious justification of opposing torture, lobbied on behalf of the leftist German terrorist group, the Baader-Meinhof gang, in the 70s. While the group levied a vicious campaign of terror across Germany, kidnapping and murdering with impunity opponents who dared to stand in the way of its mission to topple the “bourgeois state,” Amnesty International cast its lot with the network of sympathizers—who included sympathetic lawyers, relatives and even fellow traveling prison guards—urging German authorities to relax their counterterrorism measures. Little did Amnesty International seem to object that its vigorous lobbying efforts allowed imprisoned gang members to plot their escape and organize attacks free from government interference.

More recently, Amnesty International’s views on terrorism took the form of demanding that the United States release all prisoners from Guantanomo Bay; or else they were advanced under the rubric of human rights research, a curious name indeed for what amounted to little more than footnoted polemics against U.S. efforts to replace the terror-sponsoring regime of Saddam Hussein with a government respecting fundamental human freedoms; and, still more recently, in reports seeking to disparage progress in postwar Iraq.

Peter Benenson may have cared strongly for the cause of human rights. So it is an unfortunate epitaph to his work in Amnesty International that it was limited by his, and his organization's, failure to grasp that the greatest threat to these rights came not from Western democracies but from terrorists and terrorist states. R.I.P.