TheHuman Rights League (French:Ligue des droits de l'homme,LDH), officially theFrench League for the Defense of Human Rights and Citizen (French:Ligue française pour la défense des droits de l'homme et du citoyen), is ahuman rightsNGO association whose mission includes to observe,defend and promulgate human rights within the French Republic in all spheres of public life. The LDH is a member of theInternational Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH).[1][2]
The League was founded in 1898 by therepublicanLudovic Trarieux to defend captainAlfred Dreyfus, aJew wrongly convicted fortreason – this would be known as theDreyfus Affair.[3]
Dissolved by theanticommunist regime ofVichy duringWorld War II, it was clandestinely reconstituted in 1943 by a central committee includingPierre Cot,René Cassin andFélix Gouin.[4] The LDH was refounded after the Liberation.Paul Langevin, who had recently joined theFrench Communist Party (PCF), became its president.[5] Opposed to theAlgerian War and the massive use of torture by the French Army, the LDH called for demonstrations against the 1961Algiers putsch.
In February 2005, the LDH accused the government of historic revisionism for implementing alaw requiring high schools to teach about the positive effects of colonialism.[citation needed] The law was repealed at the start of the following year.
The LDH has provided support to the Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons (GIP), a prisoners' rights group co-founded byMichel Foucault in 1971, and worked with prominent activists likeCesare Battisti andIra Einhorn. The LDH has also opposed itself toNicolas Sarkozy's policies, which it deems "repressive". In its 2003 report, it declared that "since theAlgerian War we had never seen such a strong rollback of human rights in France".[citation needed]
I trampled the organisation of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen that never spoke out and said, "stop killing people as surely as if they were guillotined: abolish the mass sadism among the employees of the prison service." I trampled the fact that not a single organisation or association ever questioned the top men of this system to find out how and why eighty per cent of the people who were sent away every two years vanished.
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