Luis Kutner was a US human rights activist, FBI informant, and lawyer who was on the National Advisory Council of the US branch of Amnesty International during its early years and created the concept of a living will.
12 Facts About Luis Kutner
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Luis Kutner was notable for his advocacy of "world habeas corpus", the development of an international writ of habeas corpus to protect individual human rights.
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Luis Kutner was a founder of World Habeas Corpus, an organization created to fight for international policies which would protect individuals against unwarranted imprisonment.
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Luis Kutner gained national recognition in 1949, when he obtained freedom for a black mechanic from Waukegan, Illinois, James Montgomery, who had served 26 years of a life term sentence for raping an itinerant.
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Luis Kutner helped free Hungarian Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, American fascist poet Ezra Pound, former Congo President Moise Tshombe and represented the Dalai Lama and Tibet.
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Luis Kutner is widely known as one of the most prominent human-rights attorneys of the twentieth century.
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Luis Kutner is accredited for the first acknowledged federal lawsuit against a prison warden by inmates in 1949.
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In 1952, Kutner filed a lawsuit on behalf of a Black passenger against Illinois Greyhound Lines, four years prior to the federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v Gayle.
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In 1966, Luis Kutner participated in a lawsuit against George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party.
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Luis Kutner was the first to publish the concept of the living will in 1969.
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Luis Kutner had first addressed the Euthanasia Society in August 1967 in connection with his plans to prepare an international symposium on Euthanasia which however was never materialized.
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Subsequently, Luis Kutner published four more articles about the topic, in which he followed the same line of argumentation.