Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 179
had come up. He spoke unhurriedly, without seeming to be pressed by the
time limit, and still managed to answer all my questions with succinct precision.
Most Americans knout you chiefly as one of the founders of Amnesty International Were
your own experiences of being imprisoned by both the British and the Free State an important
factor in motivating your involvement with political prisoners everywhere?
Yes, of course. But I was also one of the drafters of the European
Convention for the Protection of Human Rights in 1950, which I regard as a
very important step forward in developing an international rule of law, but
by 1961 some of us saw the need for a non-governmental agency that
would bring world attention to individual cases where human rights were
being violated. The Human Rights treaty was dependent upon the good
faith and good will of the governments that signed it. Amnesty International
was created in 1961 to take on cases irrespective of the wishes of governments—whether
the governments liked it or not.
Would you explain how Amnesty works and what it attempts to accomplish?
Amnesty is concerned only with political prisoners. We divide them into
two groups—"prisoners of conscience" and "other political prisoners." We
define "prisoners of conscience" as those who have been imprisoned only for
their political or religious views, who are not accused of violent acts or
advocacy of violence. We demand immediate release in such cases and bring
every possible pressure on the governments involved, to secure immediate
release. The "other political prisoners," those who have committed or
advocated violence, we treat differently. We do not demand release, of
course, but we monitor these cases to see that they are treated humanely
and decently, that they are not tortured, and that the prison conditions
conform with norms of human rights laid down by the United Nations.
What about the shady area—prisoners who have been convicted of violent acts but who are
widely alleged to have been framed for political reasons?
We have a "borderline bureau" that scrutinizes cases of that sort, and we
have developed a rather elaborate internal jurisprudence in evaluating the
evidence before we make a decision. Even so, some cases have to be
reclassified when new evidence is uncovered. We had one case I remember
in which the prisoner himself caused us to change his category. That was a
Black civil rights leader in South Africa, whom we had classed as a "prisoner
of conscience" while he was awaiting trial, but then, in his closing speech to
the Court, he stated that the only way of protecting the Black people in that
country was by armed force. We had to transfer him to our "other political
prisoners" category, since he was advocating violence, and we stopped
asking for his release, which was a very hard decision.