| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Pierre Sané Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 3 of 6
When did you assume a leadership role in Amnesty International?
In October 1992. The position of Secretary General of Amnesty is not an elected position. The Secretary General is appointed by the international executive committee, and the executive committee is composed of members who are elected from the membership around the world. In 1991 they advertised the post and I applied. I felt I had the background for the qualification required to take charge of the organization at that period of the development of the organization, which was just after the end of the Cold War.
Tell us a little about Amnesty for those in our audience who might not be familiar with it. What are its goals as a human rights nongovernmental organization?
Amnesty wants to contribute to the realization of all the principles contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a landmark document in the history of humankind. In 1948, for the first time in the history of humankind, nations came together and said through this declaration, we are proclaiming that all human beings, irrespective of their race, gender, economic status, have rights that are inalienable and that are inherent and that nobody can take away. That was the first time. You had declarations before that, like the French declaration of human rights which did not include women, because women at that time were not considered to have reason. The American Bill of Rights did not include slaves because slaves were considered as non-persons. So the Universal Declaration of Human Rights really is the first one that declares that all human beings, irrespective of who they are or what they believe in, have equal rights. And for the first time it listed what all those rights were, and stated categorically that if we want to achieve a world of peace, a world of justice, a world of freedom, governments and individuals need to work toward the realization of the principles contained in the Declaration.
Amnesty was set up 13 years after [the Declaration], in 1961, to contribute to the realization of that ideal. And the organization started by focusing first on the prisoners of conscience, who are people detained solely because they have ideas or beliefs which are different from those professed by those in authority. And since then, steadily, it has expanded its work to cover working for the abolition of torture, for the abolition of the death penalty, working for the protection of refugees, working for the defense of human rights in situations of armed conflicts, working to defend and promote women's rights. Trying to hold all those in power, political power, economic power, accountable to the citizens of the world, using the Universal Declaration as the manifesto. And using the subsequent international treaties that the governments have developed.
Explain to us what sort of an organization Amnesty International is.
Amnesty, from the very beginning, was set up on the principle of international solidarity, meaning that since human rights are universal, human rights have no borders, and therefore to promote human rights we need to set up an organization that would be present everywhere. Today Amnesty has 100 national structures and more that one billion members. And it is the membership that take action on the human rights issues that we're concerned with. The membership take action in order to affect the life of individual victims. So we don't just promote human rights in education, in schools, in meetings. We do not just try to influence national legislation and policy. We actually work on individual cases. When there is a prisoner that we want to release from prison, we prepare a file of that prisoner and we entrust that file to an Amnesty group in another country. And the mission of that Amnesty group is to obtain the release of that prisoner. Sometimes that can take twenty years. That creates bonds between the Amnesty members and the prisoner and the family of the prisoner, and this human bond is really an expression of our belief in human rights. When we talk about human rights, before being a matter for law, before being an issue for experts, we're talking about ordinary people organizing to affect the lives of other ordinary people.
A colleague reminded me the other day that Arthur Koestler, in his critique of communism, said that communism was interested in the rights of mankind but not of man. It sounds to me like your organization has worked at that problem in the sense that you're for the rights of mankind and womankind, but also for a man or a woman who is actually in prison. So it must be a moving experience for the people who are working to save the life of someone in a particular country. Does it help motivate them that it's actually a concrete individual whom they're working to help?
It's the greatest motivator. We live in a world today where we are overwhelmed by human catastrophes, wars, genocide, the killing of street children, death as the result of man-made famine, etc. But when you have individual members who, from 5,000 miles, have been successful after a long period of time in obtaining the release of a prisoner, and they receive a letter from that prisoner saying thank you for what you've done, without your support I would have probably died in prison, I think it gives an enormous sense of pride to the membership and also the conviction that when people are organized and determined, they can bring changes even if it is 5,000 miles away.
And it must cut the other way too. It must be quite affecting to the person who is in prison to learn that people in a far away country are actually working for their release.
I've received so many direct testimonies of former prisoners or people who have been detained and tortured, people who have been sentenced to death, that we have been able to free or stop from torture or to save from the gallows and who continue to say that without the action of Amnesty their fate today would certainly be different. Even the conditions in the prison change when they start receiving these letters and the letters are written to the prison officials. Prison officials in a far away country wonder how this prisoner has so much support internationally and that can lead to the prison guards being more careful. So it is not just scrutiny over the fate of that prisoner in the prison but it becomes then the scrutiny of the whole prison. And it is an international scrutiny, so it helps.
This work on the part of your organization, in a way, goes in tandem with the revolution in communications, so that now what you're doing is not only known on the ground there, in august forums like the UN, but it's also on CNN.
It is on CNN, it is on the internet. It is a double edge sword. To a certain extent speed in communication allows us to mobilize faster international public opinion, but at the same time we have to be very careful that we check the information and that the information is accurate. So you have the pressure to use the technology because it allows you to respond much faster, and it could lead sometimes to mistakes. So we try to use that, still being careful, but making sure that we use the technology at our disposal for the benefit of those victims.
Now tell me a little bit about your job, in addition to being in charge of the central office. I'd be interested in how you work with governments, how you try to influence governments, because that must also be an important part of your agenda.
Yes. Ultimately it is governments who keep the keys of the prisons and who decide to close them or who decide to bring to justice those officers who are responsible for the human rights violations. So it is those governments that we need to convince. And we try to reason with them. In our interaction with governments, we remind them that they have international obligations because they are part of a wider community in the United Nations where they have, by consensus, developed a set of rules, and unless, in the world in which we live, governments abide by those rules, it could be chaos.
But we don't just try to use reason because governments have different priorities that sometimes clash with one another and they have to make choices. So in addition to reasoning and having this dialog and trying to convince them that it is in their best interests to respect and promote human rights, we use also the force of moral pressure, the pressure from public opinion, the pressure from public opinion both at home and internationally. That we do by exposing the violations that are taking place. No governments want to be portrayed internationally as a government that is breaking international rules, as a government that is torturing its own people. So what we do all the time is to make sure that the information is out there. They would rather have the information suppressed. We make sure the information is out there in the general public, and we ask our members then to take action, so that governments being bombarded by letters coming from all over the world see that their action actually is out there, that it is known to everybody. And that it is a shame. It is through this pressure, coming from ordinary people who at the same time will be lobbying their own government to exercise pressure as well on the government that we are targeting. So it is this whole campaign that leads to the results which are sometimes positive.
Next page: The Human Rights Agenda after the Cold War
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