As a veteran activist, Leah Levin was still delivering rousing speeches into her 90s. Her childhood escape from eastern Europe and experience of South African apartheid fuelled a lifetime’s commitment to upholding human rights. Levin, who has died aged 98, was director of the legal reform organisation Justice for a decade – between 1982 and 1992 – when it was investigating large numbers of claims of miscarriage of justice that were emerging from Britain’s prisons and courts.
Under her lead, the charity called for “an independent review body … to examine allegations of miscarriage of justice” and warned that, without reform, “it may well be necessary to consider creating a new [criminal justice] system”.
Justice raised concerns about the Broadwater Farm convictions following the 1985 riots in north London and celebrated the freeing in 1991 of the Birmingham Six who had been wrongfully jailed for the 1974 IRA pub bombings.
Levin was also the author of a pioneering handbook for Unesco, Human Rights: Questions and Answers (1981), that has since been translated into 36 languages and gone through several editions. Its success was partially due to its engaging illustrations by the French cartoonist Jean Plantureux, known as Plantu.
Although she was not a lawyer, Levin’s personal skills in bringing people together often enabled the campaigns she coordinated to achieve success. She was influential in persuading the Conservative government to introduce reforms such as the Criminal Justice Act 1988 and compensation for wrongful imprisonment. Incorporating the European convention on human rights into UK law had to wait until the arrival of a Labour government.
The eldest of the four children of Sonia (nee Pelcas) and Jacob Kacev, Leah was born in Mazeikiai, Lithuania. When she was a toddler, her parents emigrated to rural South Africa to escape antisemitism; her father worked as a mule trader. Her Lithuanian relatives were murdered in 1941 following the Nazi invasion. Levin remembered being read her grandmother’s last letter describing the approaching danger. She did not discover until the end of the war that they had been killed in a massacre of the town’s Jewish residents.
Leah graduated in social studies at Cape Town University in 1946, and initially she worked as a social worker. In 1948, she married Archie Levin, a former journalist and army intelligence officer. Together the couple began a business writing travel guides to Africa. On a research expedition in Kenya, Leah was chased by a rhino but emerged unharmed. In 1960, following the Sharpeville massacre, the Levins left South Africa – determined to distance themselves from the apartheid regime.
They settled in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where Leah took a second degree at the University College of Rhodesia & Nyasaland in international relations. Her husband had become increasingly politically active, starting the Sunday Mirror newspaper for Africans and a publication called the Confidential News Letter. Robert Mugabe, then active in the African nationalist movement, sent her a note thanking her for dinner: “This is the first time I have had dinner in a white person’s home as a guest.”
Archie’s work brought him into conflict with Ian Smith’s regime. Shortly before Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence in 1965, he moved to London. His wife and children followed. Leah joined the Department of Transport but became interested in political activism. She taught international relations and became secretary of the United Nations Association’s human rights committee.
The UNA brought together leading figures in the field including Martin Ennals, the first secretary-general of Amnesty International, Sir Nigel Rodley, Amnesty’s first legal officer and later UN rapporteur on torture, and Kevin Boyle, who ran the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex.
Archie died in mysterious circumstances in Zambia in 1977, where he had been advising the then president, Kenneth Kaunda. The family suspected he was poisoned by Rhodesian agents. Following his death, Leah took on more human rights roles.
In 1978, she became secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society and in 1982 was appointed director of Justice. In 1992, she was one of the co-founders of Redress, a charity that campaigned for justice for victims of torture, along with Keith Carmichael. She also co-founded the Martin Ennals award for human rights defenders.
Public recognition included an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex in 1992 and she was made OBE for services to international human rights in 2002.
Levin is survived by her children, Michal, Jeremy and David, as well as by seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
• Leah Levin, human rights activist, born 1 April 1926; died 25 May 2024
