Roger Casement was once described as the “father of twentieth-century human rights investigations” after publishing his Casement Report on the Congo in 1905, and then for his important investigations of human rights abuses in Peru for which the British Government knighted him. Casement was a British diplomat of Irish extraction, humanitarian activist, Irish nationalist, and poet and when he retired from the Diplomatic service he made efforts during World War I to gain German military aid for the 1916 Easter Rising which sought to gain Irish independence.
When he returned to Ireland, he was arrested and charged with treason. To ensure his conviction (and his execution), the British government circulated excerpts said to be from his private journals, known as the Black Diaries, which detailed homosexual activities before the Trial started, which made the verdict a foregone conclusion. Despite pleas of clemency from the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, W B Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, Casement was stripped of his knighthood and hung in Pentonville Prison on 3 August 1916 , aged 51.
To mark the centenary of Casement’s death and of the Easter Uprising, Irish artist Fionnuala Doran has written and drawn a new book aptly called The Trial of Roger Casement as a poignant reminder of an extraordinary life that may have been saved but for his sexuality.
Labels: 2016, gay history, politics
