Delano: How was the Luxembourg section of Amnesty International formed and why?

Nathalie Bollen: Amnesty International Luxembourg was founded on 26 February 1970 by a group of 12 friends and acquaintances of different nationalities around Nic Klecker. This happened nearly nine years after Peter Benenson published his appeal for Amnesty, “The Forgotten Prisoners”, for two Portuguese students, that started the movement. Reprinted in newspapers across the world, his call to action sparked the idea that people everywhere can unite in solidarity for justice and freedom for those “imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government”. The idea stayed the same during the first decade of Amnesty International: groups of members worked for the liberation of one or several prisoners of conscience.

What was the original mission and the first initiative this group worked on?

NB: At the time when our section was founded, Amnesty’s work was still focused on freedom. As it happens, the international campaign “Prisoner of Conscience Year” in 1977 was actually managed by a member from Luxembourg. Even though, Amnesty started to expand its mission in this decade and the section joined the international campaign against torture in 1973.

The members in Luxembourg also supported the international movement from the very beginning with practical tasks that at the time were mostly done by volunteers, like the translation of the annual report into French and the organisation of the International Assembly in September 1971. They also helped with trial observation and sent letters to the press.

On a side note, Luxembourg played an essential role to Amnesty International even before the section here was founded: the first international meeting of people that had responded immediately to Peter Benenson’s article was held in Luxembourg in July 1961. It was here that they decided to establish “a permanent international movement in defence of freedom of opinion and religion.”

What was the initial response like in Luxembourg?

NB: The members in Luxembourg were very active from the beginning. Shortly after the official foundation of the section it counted already six groups and as said before, organised Amnesty’s most important international meeting. At this time all the work of our section was done by volunteers, having a team of employees is a recent development.

The work of the members was of course very different from today, more focused on the contact with prisoners of conscience and not so much on public campaigning. Obviously, the organisation of an international movement was much more time-consuming and slower without internet, let alone social media. That makes the immense effort of the volunteers even more impressive in my eyes.

What or who drives Amnesty International today, do you think?

NB: Our movement is driven by more than 8 million people that take injustice personally and support our mission for a world where human rights are enjoyed by all. In Luxembourg, almost 6,000 people support us with their time and money.

Amnesty has grown from seeking the release of political prisoners to upholding the whole spectrum of human rights. We work to protect and empower people--from abolishing the death penalty to protecting sexual and reproductive rights, and from combatting discrimination to defending refugees and migrants’ rights. In short, we are campaigning for a world where everyone can live in freedom and dignity. A driving force in this struggle are human rights defenders on the frontline, and we are trying to be a platform for their voices.

The offices of Amnesty International Luxembourg are pictured in rue des Etats Unis. Photo: Romain Gamba/Maison Moderne

At the moment, we are of course very occupied by the pandemic and its repercussions, particularly for the most vulnerable in our society. Nobody should be left behind. While governments need to ensure that all people can access the healthcare, housing and social security needed to survive the impact of covid-19, we need to make sure that the extraordinary restrictions on basic freedoms in many countries do not become the new normal.

How has human rights and Amnesty Luxembourg’s work changed in the past 50 years?

NB: We live in a completely different world today. Our topics, research and campaigning methods and the way we work all changed profoundly. For example, even though research has been an important part of Amnesty’s work from the beginning, it of course looked very different at the time.

In addition to interviews on the ground and other traditional research methods, we now also use videos and photo verification, weapon analysis and remote sensing analysis based on satellite imagery. With the rise of digital technologies, the ubiquity of smartphones and the expansion of social media, there are more information than ever before. Just as volunteers helped to find relevant information in newspapers in the first years of Amnesty’s existence, today tens of thousands of digital activists from all over the world help us to process these large volumes of data we now have access to. Simultaneously, there are of course also new ways of working in our other areas of operation, for example in campaigning, where digital tools are now indispensable.

One field that becomes more and more important is human rights education and training, which Amnesty started in the 1980s. We are very lucky to have today one member of the staff for this area. After Amnesty Luxembourg was founded, we didn’t have any employees for a very long time, even the international secretariat had less than twenty staff members in 1970.

What has been the most satisfying achievement of Amnesty Luxembourg in the last 50 years?

NB: As part of an international organisation, our section contributed to several successes of Amnesty’s key campaigns: the abolishment of the death penalty in 90 more countries than when Amnesty started its campaign in 1977, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in 1984, the Arms Trade Treaty in 2013 after 20 years of campaigning.

I don’t think it is possible just to name one single instant, after all Amnesty’s most important achievements can be measured in human lives; lives saved, prisoners freed, torture stopped. We have campaigned on behalf of thousands of individuals and communities at risk and we achieve positive change in approximately one third of those cases. Even where we are unable to effect direct change, we hear first-hand from those we help how much our messages of solidarity and support have lifted their spirits and offered them hope.