Word: benenson
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Most Sensitive Point. Amnesty's weapons are moral suasion strengthened with a potent brew of publicity. This is the kind of pressure, says President Peter Benenson, 45, that hits totalitarian regimes at their "most sensitive point, their public image, their trade image, their tourist image." By publicizing Belov in the British press, Amnesty forced the Russians to acknowledge his fate. Izvestia accused Amnesty of "presumption and arrogance in suggesting that a Western psychiatrist" be allowed to examine the prisoner...
Amnesty operates on a shoestring $50,000-a-year budget in a dingy fifth-floor office in London's Crane Court, where Sir Isaac Newton presided over the Royal Society. Benenson, assisted by a staff of eight full-time workers, farms out individual prisoners to Amnesty's 430 volunteer groups in 20 countries. Last week he was in the U.S. to drum up support for the 21st group, which has just been set up in Manhattan. Local chapters use every imaginable publicity weapon to dramatize the cases of their "adopted prisoners" -letters to newspapers, fund-raising campaign parties...
Last month Benenson was in Rhodesia bringing suit to reverse the summary deportation of the London Observer's correspondent. This week Amnesty is sending a 25-year-old Labor peer, Lord Gifford, to discuss with Hungary's Communist officials the recent arrest of 20 Roman Catholic priests and 50 workers on flimsy charges of agitation against the state...