Informant38

Peter Benenson, the founder of the worldwide human rights organisation Amnesty International, died 25 February. He was 83.
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From Benenson's article in the Observer(UK), 28 May 1961:

One story is of the revolting brutality with which Angola's leading poet, Agostino Neto, was treated before the present disturbances there broke out. Dr. Neto was one of the five African doctors in Angola. His efforts to improve the health services for his fellow Africans were unacceptable to the Portugese. In June last year the Political Police marches into his house, had him flogged in front of his family and then dragged away. He has since been in the Cape Verde Isles without charge or trial.

From Rumania, we shall print the story of Constatin Noica, the philosopher, who was sentenced to twenty-five years' imprisonment because, while "rusticated," his friends and pupils continued to visit him, to listen to his talk on philosophy and literature. The book will also tell of the Spanish lawer, Antonio Amat, who tried to build a coalition of democratic groups, and has been in trial since November, 1958; and of two white men persecuted by their own race for preaching that colored races should have equal rights- Ashton Jones, the sixty-five-year-old minister, who last year was repeatedly beaten-up and three times imprisoned in Lousiana and Texas for doing what the Freedom Riders are now doing in Alabama; and Patrick Duncan, the son of a former South African Governer-General, who, after three stays in prison, has just been served with an order forbidding him from attending or addressing any meeting for five years.

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"In 1961 his vision gave birth to human rights activism. In 2005 his legacy is a world wide movement for human rights which will never die."