Peter Benenson

Peter Benenson , originally Peter James Henry Solomon (* 31 July 1921 in London , † 25. February 2005 in Oxford ) was a British lawyer , politician of the Labor Party and founder of the human rights organization Amnesty International .

Life

He was born in London to a Jewish family, the only child of Harold Solomon, an officer in the British Army, and Flora Benenson, a Russian-born active Zionist . His father died after a riding accident when Peter Benenson was nine years old, whereupon he received private tuition from WH Auden and subsequently completed an apprenticeship in Eton . At the age of 16, he and some schoolmates helped set up a fund to support children who had lost their parents in the Spanish civil war . After the death of his grandfather, the Russian gold magnate Grigori Benenson, he took his mother's maiden name .

He enrolled at Balliol College , Oxford , but had to postpone his curriculum because of World War II . From 1941 to 1945 Benenson worked in Bletchley Park in the Testery department under the direction of Major Ralph Tester , where he deciphered the German Lorenz key machine in collaboration with Peter Hilton and Roy Jenkins .

In 1958, Benenson converted to the Catholic Church and later became a member of the Pax Christi peace movement .

Benenson died of pneumonia in 2005 at John Radcliffe Hospital (Oxford).

effect

In 1960 Benenson read about two Portuguese students who had been arrested in Lisbon and sentenced to seven years in prison for toasting their freedom and criticizing the dictatorship. This happened during the reign of António de Oliveira Salazar .

On May 28, 1961, Benenson published an article about this and other cases in the British newspaper The Observer, entitled "The Forgotten Prisoners," in which he urged readers to write to each other To use governments for the release of these political prisoners. Benenson wrote: “You can open your newspaper any day of the week and you will find a report in it of someone captured, tortured or executed anywhere in the world because his government does not like his beliefs or religion . "

Benenson's article was reprinted by other newspapers, including Le Monde , the Italian Corriere della Sera, and the International Herald Tribune . This campaign, called “Appeal for Amnesty, 1961”, is considered to be the beginning of Amnesty International.

Web links

• Biography ( Memento from December 24, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biography (Engl.) ( Memento of 18 February 2006 at the Internet Archive )
2. ^ Professor IJ Good
3. ↑ Peter Benenson. Pax Christi , archived from the original on October 14, 2006 ; Retrieved March 10, 2008 . 
4. ↑ The Guardian : The Forgotten Prisoners