Roger Casement

Sir Roger David Casement (1864 – 1916) was an Irish nationalist, British consular official, and one of the founders of international investigative human rights. In 1903, the British Foreign Office sent Casement to investigate conditions in the Congo Free State. His landmark 1904 *Casement Report* provided verified consular proof of forced labor, floggings, and hand-severing, compelling European governments to intervene.

In 1910, he traveled to the Putumayo basin in Peru, exposing identical genocidal rubber slavery inflicted on indigenous Amazonian tribes by the British-registered Peruvian Amazon Company, for which he was knighted in 1911. Realizing that imperialism crushed peoples identically in Africa, South America, and his native Ireland, Casement resigned from the diplomatic service and joined the Irish Volunteers. In 1916, seeking German military support for Irish independence during World War I, he traveled to Berlin. Arrested landing on Banna Strand in Kerry days before the 1916 Easter Rising, Casement was convicted of treason and hanged at Pentonville Prison.