MARTIN ENNALS

 MARTIN ENNALS

Martin Ennals (27 July 1927 – 5 October 1991) was a British human rights activist. Ennals served as the Secretary-General of Amnesty International from 1968 to 1980. He went on to help found the British human rights organisation ARTICLE 19 in 1987 and International Alert in 1985.

During Ennals's tenure as Secretary General, Amnesty International was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Erasmus Prize, and the UN Human Rights Award.

Ennals was educated at Queen Mary's Grammar School and the London School of Economics, where he received a degree in international relations.

Ennals was present at the 1948 United Nations (UN) General Assembly when it adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Not long afterward he began working at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris (1951–1959), where he found himself prominently involved in a historic human rights issue. As secretary and then president of the UNESCO staff association, he defended U.S. citizens, members of the international civil service, who risked dismissal because they, in his words, "refused to break the UNESCO and UN staff rules by completing political questionnaires demanded of them by the U.S. State Department during the McCarthy period."

In 1959, Ennals became a founding member of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and also became Secretary General (1960–1966) of the prominent human rights activist group in the United Kingdom, the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL, now known as Liberty). Among the issues NCCL concentrated on during his tenure (with some success) was the need for legislation against racial discrimination and the incitement of racial hatred. Ennals continued working on race relations after departing from the NCCL.

Ennals became Secretary General of Amnesty International in 1968. Ennals represented an era where Amnesty became a human rights organization of global concern. Amnesty was awarded the Erasmus Prize in 1976, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977, and the UN Human Rights Award in 1978. Ennals had other people accept the prizes on behalf of Amnesty.

In 1982 Ennals led the founding assembly of HURIDOCS (International Human Rights Information and Documentation System) and was its founding President.

In 1986 Ennals became the first Secretary General of International Alert.

Ennals died of cancer on October 15, 1991, in Saskatoon, Canada, where he had recently begun a year's residency at the University of Saskatchewan as the Ariel Fellows Chair of Human Rights.

The Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, created in 1993, is granted annually to someone who has demonstrated an exceptional record of combating human rights violations by courageous means and is in need of protection. The award gives international "protective publicity" to human rights defenders around the world, mainly in their country of origin (a unique characteristic of this award, and very important from a protection point of view), through too much mass media (television, radio and internet). The winner is selected in Geneva, the world center for human rights, by a jury made up of 10 leading international human rights organisations, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Frontline, International Commission of Jurists, HURIDOCS, etc. The Martin Ennals Award is considered the award of the whole human rights movement. It is known as "the Nobel prize for human rights". The Annual Ceremony organised with the City of Geneva is an event with world Internet and TV coverage.