Luis Kutner

Who was Luis Kutner?

Luis Kutner, was a US human rights activist and lawyer who co-founded Amnesty International with Peter Benenson in 1961, and created the concept of a living will. He was also notable for his advocacy of "world habeas corpus", the development of an international writ of habeas corpus to protect individual human rights. He was a founder of World Habeas Corpus, an organization created to fight for international policies which would protect individuals against unwarranted imprisonment. Kutner's papers are at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University.

Kutner gained national recognition in 1949, when he obtained freedom for a black mechanic from Waukegan, Illinois, who had served 26 years of a life term sentence for raping an itinerant. A Federal judge described as "a sham" the defendant's 1924 trial in which a vengeful prosecutor withheld vital evidence. He also helped free Hungarian Cardinal József Mindszenty, American expatriate poet Ezra Pound, former Congo President Moise Tshombe and represented the Dalai Lama and Tibet. Kutner is widely known as one of the most prominent human-rights attorneys of the twentieth century.