Its symbol is a candle surrounded by barbed wire. Its premise is the conviction that “no man is an island entire of itself” and that we are all our brother’s keeper. Its creed is the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and its “bible,” to use the words of one of its spokesmen, is The Gulag Archipelago. Its goal is nothing less than freedom for every “prisoner of conscience” in the world.
Amnesty International, founded in 1961, is a private, voluntary, and increasingly prestigious “worldwide human rights movement” which seeks “the release of persons imprisoned, restricted, or detained because of their political, religious, or other conscientiously held beliefs, or by reason of their ethnic origin, color, or language, provided they have neither used nor advocated violence.” After a rather slow beginning in the 1960s, Amnesty is growing rapidly; it now has nearly 40,000 members in approximately sixty countries, primarily in Western Europe and the United States. On a global scale these figures may seem trivial, but, according to a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, Amnesty International is already “the largest international human rights organization both in terms of membership and staff.”
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