My tangle with South Korea

One of the first campaigns I ran at Amnesty was on the death sentence

I took up the post of campaigns co-ordinator at Amnesty International British Section in 1980 and which included running campaigns aimed at ending the death penalty worldwide.

I have watched with alarm the events in South Korea because its democracy is fragile and relatively recent.

In September 1980 Kim Dae-Jung was sentenced to death in South Korea following the military coup d’etat of the previous year.

There was an international outcry including from the pope. My intervention was small but it did get a lot of attention. I organised a vigil outside the South Korean embassy in Kensington and a small group of us included the then very glamorous actor Tom Conti. We got a photograph and sympathetic article on the front page of the Times! The Times then carried kudos and it was seen as influential. This was one of the first campaign events I had ever organised.

Kim Dae-Jung’s death sentence was commuted and he went to the US to teach at Harvard. He was elected President of South Korea in 1998.

To my chagrin I have never visited South Korea but I hope that my small part helped the country’s democratic processes, you never know.