Amélie Verfaillie analyzes the relation between the United Nations (UN) and the human rights NGO Amnesty International from 1961 onwards, when the latter was founded, until the first half of the 1980s. Through an extensive use of empirical data and the methods of contextual legal history and process tracing, this comprehensive study sheds light on Amnesty as a diplomat in the realm of international human rights law, with the UN as forum for its advocacy. In determining how Amnesty tried to influence UN decision-making processes to strengthen, create, interpret, implement and enforce international human rights norms in the studied timeframe, it gives a more holistic, in-depth and empirical account of the Amnesty-UN relation and maps how Amnesty started lobbying governments and influencing international public opinion to try to realize change. The study showed how as of the 1970s, Amnesty became part of a more decentralized process of normative and operational authority in international law, using the UN as a platform to try to push through its internal human rights agenda, whether through formal or informal channels.
