Between Brussels, Strasbourg, and London: The European Strategy of Amnesty International’s Dutch Section, 1976-1983

Abstract

This article examines the ties between Amnesty International’s Dutch section, the European Parliament, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe between 1976 and 1983. It elaborates on the threefold manner in which analysing the Dutch section’s European strategy adds to the existing historiography on Euro­pean integration. First, this article illustrates that the European strategy of Amnesty was diffuse among its national and international sections, therefore problematising the approach to such transnational actors as monolithic organisations. Instead, sec­ondly, this article demonstrates that it was the Dutch section specifically that func­tioned as interlocutor between the European organisations through its attempt to closely intertwine the two on the field of human rights. Finally, this deepens our understanding of how the European organisations operated in the “human rights revolution” that took place in the 1970s and 1980s.