Sir Roger Casement(1864–1916)

Roger David Casement was born at Doyle's Cottage in Sandycove on the southern coast of Dublin Bay on the first of September 1864, fourth child of Roger Casement Senior, a captain of the 3rd Light Dragoons and a Protestant Antrim Casement, and Anne Jephson of County Dublin. His mother died when he was nine and his father when he was thirteen; he was raised from then on by his father's brother John at Magherintemple, the family house at Ballycastle on the north Antrim coast, and schooled at Ballymena Academy. He left school at fifteen, took a clerk's post with the Elder Dempster shipping line at Liverpool in 1880, and through the 1880s sailed regularly on the West African coast as a purser, building the practical West African experience that became the foundation of his later consular career.

He took service with the African International Association of King Leopold the Second of the Belgians at the Congo Free State in 1884, worked across the Lower Congo through the late 1880s, and in 1892 joined the British Colonial Service in West Africa. He served as British consul at Old Calabar (the Niger Coast Protectorate) from 1895, at Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa from 1898, and from 1900 as British consul at Boma in the Congo Free State, the Belgian-run rubber-extraction concession that was, by the turn of the century, the central humanitarian scandal of imperial Africa.

In May 1903 the British Foreign Office, on the strength of E. D. Morel's Congo Reform Association campaign in Britain, sent Casement up the Congo for two months to investigate the rubber-atrocity reports coming out of the Equator and Lake Mantumba districts. He travelled by river-steamer and dugout up to Lulonga and Mantumba, interviewed survivors at the river-stations, photographed the mutilated children (the cut hands of the rubber-quota system), and returned with the documentation that became the Casement Report, presented to Parliament in February 1904 as Africa No. 1. The Report set out in austere consular prose the operating practice of the Congo rubber regime: the village quotas of rubber, the militia raids and the mutilations for failed quotas, the systematic destruction of village agriculture, the depopulation of whole districts. It forced King Leopold to convene the 1904 Commission of Inquiry, whose findings substantially confirmed Casement's, and led directly to the parliamentary annexation of the Congo by the Belgian state in 1908 and the dismantling of the Free State concession system. The Report was the central humanitarian document of pre-war imperial Africa.

In 1910 the Foreign Office sent him to the Putumayo district of the Upper Amazon to investigate parallel rubber-atrocity reports against the Peruvian Amazon Company, a British-registered concession. He travelled five months in the Putumayo, interviewed surviving Huitoto and Bora witnesses, and returned in 1911 with the Putumayo Report, the consular blue-book that documented the destruction of an indigenous population of about thirty thousand under the company's quota system. The Report led to the criminal prosecution of the company's directors in the British courts, the dissolution of the Peruvian Amazon Company, and the recall of the company's chief manager Julio Arana. He was knighted by Edward the Seventh in June 1911 for the two humanitarian investigations.

He retired from the Consular Service on his pension in 1913 in his forty-ninth year, returned to Ireland and engaged in the Irish Volunteer movement of 1913 to 1916, served as a Volunteer organiser through the Howth gun-running of July 1914, travelled to Berlin during the First World War on behalf of the Irish Republican Brotherhood to seek German support for an Irish rising, returned by U-boat in April 1916 and was arrested on landing at Banna Strand in County Kerry. He was tried at the Royal Courts of Justice in London on a charge of treason under the Treason Act of 1351, was convicted on the twenty-ninth of June 1916, was hanged at Pentonville Prison on the morning of the third of August 1916 in his fifty-second year, and was buried in the prison cemetery. His remains were returned to Ireland in 1965 under President de Valera and reinterred with state honours in the republican plot at Glasnevin Cemetery. The Casement Report on the Congo (1904) and the Putumayo Report (1911) remain the central pre-First-World-War English-language humanitarian-investigation documents, on the syllabus of every postgraduate course in human-rights law in the English-speaking world. The Casement name carries the weight of the Antrim Consular Service officer who put the Congo and the Putumayo rubber atrocities into the public record of the world.