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In the late 1940s, the International League for the Rights of Man greeted the newborn human rights system at the United Nations as a beacon of hope. Founded in the midst of the Second World War, the League had all along advocated worldwide safeguards for the protection of individuals. Confident that international relations were on the verge of a new era, its activists invested all their energies into supporting the development of international law and the establishment of supervisory mechanisms at the world organization. Roughly fifteen years later, however, the initial enthusiasm had largely dissipated. In 1966, Roger Baldwin, the League's director, reached a bleak conclusion: "If we look back on the 24 years of the League, the record shows an influential role at the United Nations, greater than that of any NGO, but even so small; [and] many interventions with governments, some successful and many not."1
At around the same time, Amnesty International, founded in 1961, was struggling hard to survive. The organization's credibility was severely damaged by publicity surrounding its links to the British government and strife among the leadership.2 Several national sections were about to collapse, and the overall growth of the international movement was subsiding. After prolonged preparatory work, the U.S. section was finally established in 1967 but faced years of frustration, lacking money, members, and dynamism. The "American operation," concluded Ivan Morris, one of the section's founders, in 1970, was "an unmitigated failure."3 By the end of the following decade, Amnesty International presented a completely different picture. In 1977 the organization was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, rising to worldwide recognition and fame. It had successfully spread knowledge about the plight of what it called "prisoners of conscience" and by means of a widely noticed campaign sparked a "rediscovery" of torture. At the same time, Amnesty's U.S. section saw a vast influx of new activists. Numbering a few thousand at the beginning of the 1970s, its membership soared to almost 100,000 by the end of the decade.
These three moments in the life of two non-governmental organizations, while providing only small glimpses into the evolution of human rights activism, suggest two important observations. First, both indicate the changing fate of private initiatives in this realm, illustrating how much the...