Leah Levin, leading campaigner on human rights – obituary
Leah Levin, who has died aged 98, was a leading figure for many decades in the international human rights movement, serving and leading human rights organisations; she was director of Justice (1982-92), which seeks to right miscarriages of justice, and co-founder in 1992 of Redress, established to obtain justice and reparation for victims of torture around the world.
She was also the author of Unesco’s handy guide Human Rights: Questions and Answers, first published in 1981, which is now in its fifth edition, has been translated into more than 30 languages and is one of the world’s most widely disseminated books on human rights.
The eldest of four children, she was born Sarah Leah Kacev on April 1 1926 to Jewish parents in Lithuania, but grew up as Leah Katzeff in Piketberg, a small town in South Africa’s Western Cape, where her family fled soon after her birth to escape poverty and anti-Semitism, her father becoming a cattle and mule trader.
After the Second World War they discovered that family members who had remained in Lithuania had been murdered by local Lithuanians in cahoots with the Nazis in the first days of the German advance in 1941.
Leah was the first member of her family to go to university, graduating from Cape Town University in 1945. In 1947 she married Archie Levin, also from a Lithuanian-Jewish background, and they set up in business writing travel guides to Central and Southern Africa.
In 1960, however, disgusted by apartheid, they moved to the then British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where Leah took another degree, in international relations, at the University of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.
Her husband, meanwhile, became active in politics, but in 1965, shortly before Ian Smith issued Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence, he was tipped off that he was likely to be arrested and fled to Britain, where he was soon joined by the rest of the family.
In London, Leah worked as a volunteer as Secretary of the newly founded United Nations Association (UNA), through which she met leading figures in the human rights movement.
After her husband’s death in 1977 she took a job as secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, then in 1982 she moved to Justice, which she led for the next 10 years with charisma and determination, persuading lawyers from all parts of the political spectrum to work together.
She played a key role in persuading the Conservative Government to introduce reforms such as the Criminal Justice Act 1988 and statutory compensation for wrongful imprisonment. She also pushed for Britain to enshrine the European Convention on Human Rights in British law, though she had to wait for the Human Rights Act 1998.
By her own account the “watershed” year for Justice was 1991 when 20 people were freed from British jails after new evidence led to their convictions being quashed by the appeal court. These included, most famously, the “Birmingham Six”, who had been wrongly convicted and jailed for the murders of 21 people in two IRA bombings in 1974.
It was, however, Redress, an NGO that pursues legal claims on behalf of survivors of torture in the UK and around the world, which, as she put it, “captured” her heart. She co-founded the organisation in 1992 and remained a board member for the next 25 years as it grew from a fledgling idea sparked by one torture survivor’s search for justice to an organisation leading the global campaign for victims.
In 1993 she co-founded the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, named after her great friend who had led Amnesty from 1968 to 1980. She stepped down from the board of the Martin Ennals Foundation in 1993.
Leah Levin was appointed OBE in 2001 and is survived by three sons.
Leah Levin, born April 1 1926, died May 25 2024