- Person
- Peter Benenson
- Lived
- 1921–2005
- Field
- Human rights
- From
- British
The story
Peter Benenson was born in London in 1921 into a large Jewish family; his mother, Flora, was the daughter of the Russian-Jewish banker Grigori Benenson, whose name Peter later took. As a schoolboy at Eton he raised money for Spanish Civil War orphans and helped bring two young German Jews to safety in Britain. After wartime code-breaking work at Bletchley Park, he became a barrister who observed political trials in Franco’s Spain and helped found the legal rights group Justice.
In late 1960 he read a newspaper report about two Portuguese students who had been overheard drinking a toast to liberty in a Lisbon restaurant under the Salazar dictatorship and sentenced to prison. Angered, he decided to organise a protest by people who rarely expressed their indignation. On May 28, 1961, The Observer published his full-page article, The Forgotten Prisoners. Any day’s newspaper, he wrote, carried a report of someone imprisoned, tortured or executed because of opinions or religion unacceptable to a government. If the disgust that readers felt could be united into common action, something effective could be done.
The response was overwhelming. The article was reprinted around the world, and within a year letter-writing groups had formed in more than a dozen countries. What was planned as a one-year Appeal for Amnesty became Amnesty International. Benenson coined the term prisoner of conscience. Early local groups each adopted three prisoners, one from the West, one from the Communist bloc and one from the developing world, so that members worked for people whose views they might not share. The movement’s symbol, a candle in barbed wire, echoed the proverb that it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
The letters worked. A Dominican trade unionist, Julio de Peña Valdez, described how each new pile of letters improved his treatment until the country’s president ordered his release. Amnesty received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977 and today describes itself as a movement of more than 10 million people campaigning against torture, unfair trials and the death penalty.
Why it matters
Amnesty International, born from Benenson’s appeal, has helped free prisoners of conscience and expose torture and abuse in countries around the world.
About Peter Benenson
London lawyer from a Russian-Jewish family who founded Amnesty International in 1961, turning ordinary people’s letters into a worldwide movement for prisoners of conscience and against torture.
Sources
- Obituary: Peter Benenson The Guardian
- Bringing light into the darkness of prisons Salon (from The Observer)
- Who We Are Amnesty International
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.