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So my name is Dr. Sarah Dunstan. And I work at the University of Glasgow. I'm a lecturer in the History of Human Rights. I primarily work on French empire, the United Nations,

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and questions around race and gender. So the interesting thing about non-governmental organisations is that the term itself was first coined in the post-war period.

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So it was used to describe voluntary organisations who were consulting on the United Nations Charter in 1945. So Amnesty International is one of those, it was established in 1961.

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And part of the challenge that it faced was really in thinking about what human rights were. So in this post-war period there was a general consensus that the world was ripe for reshaping.

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That a terrible event, World War II, had occurred, and that there was opportunity now to try and create a better world, a world that was better designed for peace.

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And Amnesty International's-- one of Amnesty International's founders, Peter Benenson, in fact, described his enthusiasm and excitement for this moment. Talking about this period as one in which

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the world could be reshaped. Now organisations like the United Nations had the sense that the war had occurred because there wasn't enough commitment to moral principles, to good conscience

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in the international order. And this is one of the things that, in fact, the first chairman of Amnesty International, Lionel Elvin, described when he talked about the purpose or the raison

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d'etre of Amnesty International. He described it as the ombudsman for the conscience of the world. And I think that this is a really important way

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of approaching Amnesty International and the challenges it faced in the 20th century because it was about thinking about not just how to achieve human rights, but actually

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what human rights were. And the United Nations, in this moment, quite famously in 1948, announces the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That declaration is actually primarily

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concerned with what we might call now political and civic Rights. And it's those kind of rights that Amnesty International primarily dedicated itself to in the latter part

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of the 20th century. But there are other kinds of rights too. And so these are the kinds of conversations that were going on about what constituted a human right.

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And so you see in this period in the 1960s-- the early 1960s, where Amnesty International is finding its feet and really trying to work out what kind of organisation it's going to be. Obviously, initially, it's dedicated

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to Prisoners of Conscience and to the conditions that political prisoners find themselves. In the same period, you see the development of the conventions on political and civic human rights,

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but also economic and social rights. So these are very different kinds of definitions and very different kinds of visions that are being established in this period about what sort

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of category rights fall into. And this really defined how organisations, like Amnesty International, then went on to approach their activism and the issues that they were engaging with.

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In this period, actors like President Woodrow Wilson, who's the President of the United States at the end of World War l talk about Minority Rights in the context of the redrawing of the map of Europe,

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in the context of thinking about the right to self-determination and self-governance. So here they're thinking about how minority groups within countries can be represented fairly

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in democratic systems. And it's a term that was very much latched onto by groups that had been persecuted for reasons of race or religion.

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It became a vehicle for articulating claims to rights within empire and beyond. And so by the time you get to World War ll, minority rights, vocabularies are attached to this League of Nations project

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and in many ways to the failure of the League of Nations project. So in the immediate post-war period, human rights become a vocabulary that doesn't supersede minority

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rights, but it ushers in an era in which individual rights are prioritised, not so much over collective rights, but are seen as the way to ensure collective rights. And you see this in regard, I think, to the broader landscape

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of human rights activism. I mentioned previously that Amnesty International and other NGOs like Amnesty International really focus on political and civil rights

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during this period. And really they're talking about individual rights, that map onto group rights. In fact, minority rights are not mentioned in the United Nations

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Declaration of Human Rights. And it's not until-- I believe it's in 1992 that the UN issues a particular declaration on minority rights.

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And in part, this is because different-- as I've mentioned, there are different vocabularies of talking about rights. People are using different vocabularies to articulate their claims to rights, to articulate

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ways of protecting groups. But what you see during this period is with the increased persecution of religious minorities or racial minorities,

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minority rights becomes a term that becomes more useful to these groups once more. And so I think you can see this play out in some of the Amnesty International records

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that are available in the database. For example, some of the material from the late 1970s, that Amnesty International has on political prisoners in El Salvador, really talks about minority rights in relation

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to religious persecution. And this is part of a broader pattern of the history of human rights in which there's this tension between how we think

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about rights, do they belong to the group, do they belong to the individual, what do you do in the context of a state which has-- how do you deal with difference within state populations.

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So this is a really interesting question. And in part it comes down to definition. So as I mentioned previously, minority rights weren't necessarily part of the landscape of Human Rights

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Activism. For much of the latter part of the 20th century, they had a reemergence in late 80s and early 90s. In part, this is connected to the UN Declaration

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on Minority Rights that occurs in 1991. So the relationship between minority rights and international aid is very much bound up in questions of human rights as well as minority rights,

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so there's significant overlap between those two things. When we talk about minorities, these can be constituted by ethnic minorities, linguistic minorities, gender minorities, minorities defined

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by their sexuality and who-- or their religion and who are persecuted or deprived access to rights on that basis. So in part, this is a question of collective identity, which

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interacts in interesting ways with Human Rights Regime, which as we've previously discussed is primarily oriented around the question of individual rights. So when you talk about international aid,

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you have this tension between guaranteeing the human rights of individuals and guaranteeing the rights of a group, which can be a little bit messy to sort out. And this is one of the challenges that organisations

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like Amnesty International face, particularly because groups-- individuals who are part of one minority group might also simultaneously be part of a majority group or multiple other minority groups.

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And so it often comes back to a question of framing, what kind of aid is being pursued. If we're talking about amnesty and their focus on political prisoners, often a campaign will be oriented around what

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an organisation is going-- it thinks will be the most effective way to guarantee these individuals or these group rights. So in some cases minority identity

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might be key to freeing the prisoner or ensuring that their conditions are humane. In other contexts, it might be that it's better to pursue a individual approach, notwithstanding the fact

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that this individual is part of a minority group. So all of this to say that this question of minority identity is incredibly important and is a factor that plays into how NGOs make their decisions

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around international aid. But it's not the be all and end all. And there's an important example of this in the database records, where Amnesty International is receiving

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reports on Indigenous American groups. And some of their concerns about access to or claims to rights. And what's really clear in this report is that in some instances, indigenous groups

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are in fact considered to be a minority group whose circumstances need to be discussed in terms of minority rights. But in other circumstances they actually form the majority

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group, in a particular area. So this becomes very historically and geographically contingent. And I think it really speaks to the plurality of conversations

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around human rights and human rights activism. So I think minority rights need to be understood in the context of this longer history. 20th century and 21st century history

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of human rights and civil rights. So as I mentioned earlier, minority rights really became a significant feature in International Law in the aftermath of World War l, during the Treaty of Versailles

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and the Paris Peace Conference in which there were questions about the redrawing of political borders in Europe and beyond. And how that might affect self-determination and self-governance for the populations within it.

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In that particular moment, minority rights seemed an effective justification for some of that redrawing of maps. But by the time you got to World War ll, where

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the League of Nations and the associated Treaty of Versailles was seen as somewhat of a failure for the international landscape, there was a turn to two different kinds

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of vocabularies of rights. And the history of Amnesty International, from its founding in 1961 onwards, is very much a history of the resurgence or the emergence,

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if you like, of human rights as a vocabulary, as a framework for thinking about rights that encompassed, at times, this question of minority rights. And I think what's really important to understand at this

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moment is that the history of the defence of rights, the history of humanitarian aid in relation to rights has a much longer history than this late 20th century moment, but it was called something different.

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So I'm thinking of anti-slavery. Activists who in some ways their activism has a strong relationship to the Human Rights Activism of the late 20th century,

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but who are using a different vocabulary to talk about their work. And this is true in interwar period as well, where you see activists who are talking about the Defence

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of Civil Liberties. And the kind of Civil Liberties that they're talking about have a lot of overlap with, in particular, the work of Amnesty International in terms

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of the Defence of political prisoners and ensuring the conditions of political prisoners are humane. But as I said, they're not necessarily talking about these rights as human rights.

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And I think that this is true of minority rights as well. So when you talk about human rights in this late 20th century moment, for some people and some organisations, minority rights are considered to be bound up in this

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because when you're talking about Individual political and civil rights, you're talking about the right to be free from racial discrimination, gender discrimination, the right to practise the religion of your choice,

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and so on and so forth, all of which are also characteristics of minority rights, of minority group identity. So what you're seeing here is a push and pull between defining rights and thinking about aid and activism

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in terms of group identity or in terms of individual identity. And these things make a huge difference in terms of the mechanisms that you can pursue when you're campaigning for or making

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claims to rights. So Amnesty International, in particular, I think, had a focus from the very beginning about consciousness raising.

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I mentioned earlier the comment that the first chairman made about acting as the ombudsman for the conscience of political prisoners, the conditions of political prisoners, and I think

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that this is really key to understanding Amnesty's consciousness, awareness, raising agenda. And this is true of a lot of NGOs like Pen, for example, in the same period of the late 60s and 70s.

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In fact, historians like Sam Moyn and Jan Eckel argued that really organisations like Amnesty International ushered in a new era of human rights because they were talking about, again, is this question of talking about political

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and civil rights as being human rights. Very particular way of approaching the question so their consciousness raising their grassroots, organisation, the petitions, all of these campaigns really changed

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the way that, I think, public opinion, particularly in, say for example, Britain and the US, and more broadly to, the way that people thought about human rights and what things they thought would come under

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the agenda of human-- sorry, of human or international aid. And so I think that that's a really important thing to think about because when we talk about human rights today,

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people immediately think of organisations like Amnesty International. And that is in fact because of the very public way in which they drew attention to the plight

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of political prisoners. And you can see this, I think, quite clearly in the documents in the database. The Urgent Action Documents, they

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make it very clear there are targeted issues that they bring to the attention of a broader public in an attempt to bring pressure to bear upon those situations and create change.

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And I think as a result they've had a hugely influential effect on the way that we as a contemporary society talk about well, aid, but also human rights, and also about the role of NGOs in society, the kind of expectations

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we have about what action is going to be taken and how it will be taken. I think another way of thinking about this, and I mentioned this in some of my earlier responses,

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is that what we've seen in the latter half of the 20th century is a move towards associating the guarantee of human rights with the International Criminal Justice System. And this is, as I said, it's not a foregone conclusion.

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I think it's in large part connected to the activities of organisations like Amnesty International, who increasingly focused on this question of making sure that there was no impunity for those who'd carried out--

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who had contravened human rights norms, for example. So I would first say that I think the phrase Human Rights is a very modern one. I think it comes-- it emerges in a post-world War Il context

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with-- most obviously with documents like the United Nations Charter and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. And in that moment, people start having conversations

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about what constitutes a human right, what should be included, what should be excluded. This goes on at the level of governments who are meeting to--

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and delegates of governments who are meeting to draft the Declaration. But it also goes on in the Court of Public Opinion because with the trauma of World War II,

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the second such war in a generation and all the associated conflicts that occurred in the interwar period and following World War ll, there was a real commitment to restructuring the world in such

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a way as would guarantee peace, but would also hopefully mean less suffering. And so there are lots of conversations going on about what it's possible to guarantee

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at the international level and at the national level. Don't forget this is also the period in which you have the emergence of the welfare state. So we're talking about not just what individuals

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might be entitled to, but what governments might owe their citizens. What citizens might ask of their governments. And this includes things like access

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to healthcare, access to education, and so the period in the 50s and 60s is really about an effort to work out what kind of rights these are.

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And so you see the emergence of a discourse of human rights, which tends to be associated with political and civil rights. Again, Amnesty International is very much an organisation that

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positions itself in terms of activism around political and civil rights. But at the same time in the 60s you see the drafting of a Convention of Economic and Social Rights,

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which includes questions around rights to housing, rights to education, and so you see the divergence of conversations around rights. Human rights taking a more--

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a definition that's more about political and civil rights, and social and economic rights going off in a different direction. But what's fascinating about this

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is that, that doesn't stay that way. So more recently when-- with conversations around environmental change and climate change, there have been moves in say, for example, Mexico,

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to start framing this question of climate change as a Human Right issue, right? And this is quite new and this is novel. And so I think that this is something that's

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really important to remember when you're talking about human rights, is that it's not a fixed idea. It's one that people mobilise in different periods to as a way

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or as a mechanism for achieving the rights that they want. I mean most-- a very famous example of this might be the African American Civil Rights Movement. So very quickly in the aftermath of the World War ll,

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a lot of African American Civil Rights Organisations, they talk about human rights, and they make an effort to think internationally. But a lot of the grassroots, activism

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is really focused on gaining a guarantee of rights from the federal government. And in fact, they achieve this with the Civil Rights Legislation that is passed in the early 60s,

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I think it's 1964. And the reason that they make a choice to frame these rights as civil rights, even though many of them would also describe them as human rights,

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is because they see the US government as being able to offer some kind of guarantee of these rights. And so this is something that's important as well. We've got to think about the value that

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comes with framing something as a civil right or a human right. As I've mentioned, there's a lot of overlap there. They can be one and the same. Something that you might consider a civil right,

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might also be considered a human right. But a lot of it has to do with an enforcement mechanism. Who are you looking at to make sure that these rights are guaranteed?

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Organisations like Amnesty International are very good at organising at the level of international law to create enforcement mechanisms. But a lot of the very successful grassroots activism

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that we see, such as that which occurred with the African-American civil rights movement, occurs at the level of the state instead. And that's about how you can achieve--

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because really at the end of the day, the goal is to achieve these rights or to prevent the contravention of these rights if you like.