Chapter 1 examines the beginnings of human rights activism in the 1930s and 1940s. It starts with a discussion of the National Council of Civil Liberties, which engaged with the question of human rights but was too close to the Communist Party to embrace them wholeheartedly. The chapter then looks at wartime initiatives, notably the debate over a ‘New Declaration of the Rights of Man‘ launched by H. G. Wells in 1940 and the Atlantic Charter of 1941, before discussing the impact of the formation of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Although there was no effective ‘human rights movement‘ in this period, some groups did explore the potential of human rights in their campaigning in the later 1940s. The chapter concludes with the Rev. Michael Scott, who shot to prominence by defending the rights of the Hereros of South West Africa (modern Namibia) at the UN. Scott, it is argued, represented a new kind of political activist: alive to the potential of human rights as a weapon for fighting racial oppression in the postwar world, and able to take advantage of the new international institutions of that world.

Chapter 2 examines how far ideas of human rights were taken up by activists and protest organisations during their campaigns over the end of the British empire in Africa and the creation of the apartheid regime in South Africa. The chapter begins by assessing the impact of African questions on Britain, emphasising the significance of moral – as opposed to political - concerns. The two main sections of the chapter are, first, a detailed discussion of the handful of individuals (in particular Eileen Fletcher) who criticised Britain’s brutal handling of the ‘Mau Mau‘ rebellion in Kenya and, secondly, an analysis of the first phase of the anti-apartheid movement, a campaign which more fully embraced human rights. The chapter concludes by looking at how the emergence of independent African states in the 1950s created new human rights concerns for activists, in particular over the oppression of ethnic minorities.