Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards

I am not a professional obituary writer, but I surely wished I were, as writing about my dear friend Leah Levin deserves the best possible skills. Fortunately, I received some excellent input from her caring family of which I am making good use. A celebration of Leah’s life will be held by the family on 13 June, 4 pm BST which can also be followed online.

And you can leave messages at: : https://www.mykeeper.com/profile/LeahLevin/ 

Leah Levin, was a well-known figure in the international human rights movement of the 1970’s and onwards. She died of cardiac arrest on 25 May, 2024, at the formidable age of 98. For over half a century, she served and led a range of human rights organisations and collaborated globally with some of the world’s leading activists. For which she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex in 1992 and an OBE in 2001.

She was the author of UNESCO’s “Human Rights: Questions and Answers”, one of the world’s most widely disseminated books on human rights, (translated into more than 30 languages).

From 1982-1992, she was director of JUSTICE, a pioneering organisation that sought to right miscarriages of justice and which was a national section of the International Commission of Jurists . She served as a board member or trustee of the United Nations Association, the Anti-Slavery Society, International Alert, Redress, Readers International and The International Journal of Human Rights. But most of all, I remember her from the work she did to make sure that we would not forget one of our most impressive friends: Martin Ennals, who had led Amnesty from 1968 to 1980 and had been one of her closest friends until his death in 1981. [see his biography in the Encyclopedia of Human Rights, OUP, 2009, Vol 2, pp 135-138].

Leah’s contribution to the creation and development of the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders was enormous. She stepped down from the board after two decades in 2013.[see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2013/10/07/leah-levin-a-human-rights-defender-of-the-first-rank/].

Frances D’Souza, said about Leah: “without any pretension she was nearly always right. She hit the nail on the head whether dealing with world affairs or people. She made a significant difference by her wise counsel and fact that she could really see what the issues were, read the situation and do something about it.”

Leah Levin had the special talent to draw other like-minded people to her and help coalesce a community of activists with whom she would collaborate throughout her entire life.

Her own life story is one of human rights struggle: Leah was born Sarah Leah Kacev on 1 April 1926 in Lithuania. She grew up as Leah Katzeff in Piketberg, South Africa, a small, rural town in Western Cape to where the family had to flee to escape poverty and anti-Semitism in the difficult years after the First World War and Russian revolution. Leah was the first of four children and the first person in her family to go to university. She graduated in 1945, when at the end of the second world war, the Katzeffs found out that their family along with their entire Jewish community in Mazeikiai, had been murdered by local Lithuanians organized by the Germans in the very first days of the Nazi advance in 1941.

In 1947 she married Archie Levin, fifteen years her senior. Like Leah, Archie was the child of European Jewish immigrants. Together they set up a new business, writing travel guides to Central and Southern Africa. In 1960, disgusted by the repression of anti-apartheid protest, the couple moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) with their two children Michal and Jeremy. A third son, David, was born in Salisbury (now Harare).  

In Rhodesia, Leah completed a second degree in international relations at the University of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, while her husband became politically active. His activities angered those in power; shortly before Rhodesia unilaterally declared independence. Archie was tipped off that he was likely to be arrested. He rapidly left for the UK with his daughter Michal and later was joined by his son Jeremy; a few months later, Leah and her infant son David joined the rest of the family in the UK. 

In London, Leah found a volunteer post as Secretary of the newly founded United Nations Association. The UNA human rights committee brought together people who became lifelong friends as well as colleagues: Martin Ennals, Sir Nigel Rodney, Amnesty’s first legal officer and later UN rapporteur on torture, and Kevin Boyle, who ran the Human Rights Centre of the University of Essex.  After the death in 1977 of her husband Archie, Leah threw herself still more wholeheartedly into human rights work.  In 1978, she took a job as Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, which connected her to the United Nations in Geneva. And in 1982 she moved to run JUSTICE for a decade. In 1992, she co-founded Redress, representing victims of torture to obtain justice and reparation for them. 

Even when fully retired Leah continued to keep an active interest in children and grandchildren as well as her human rights “children”. I will bitterly miss her almost yearly phone calls to check on me to make sure I am doing the right thing.

See also: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/ac7b872e-5b7d-409f-975b-265a59f5f160

On 21 June 2024 the Times published https://www.thetimes.com/article/4a2d6b5a-a2a0-477d-8701-29a8358a6dee?shareToken=0dd6ee7a6cedbc723f18cce633713205 with emphasis on her ‘national’ role but disappointingly leaving out much of her international contribution.

and later:https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/06/26/leah-levin-human-rights-dies/