One Sunday in May 1961, readers of a British newspaper opened it to find an appeal on behalf of people they had never met: prisoners locked away for what they believed. The idea that ordinary readers could help them grew into a movement of more than ten million people.
A toast to liberty
As Peter Benenson later told the story, it began with a short news report. In 1960 he read that two Portuguese students had been sent to prison for raising a toast to liberty. Portugal was then ruled by the authoritarian government of António de Oliveira Salazar, and criticising the state could cost a person years of freedom. Researchers have never traced the exact article Benenson described, but the anger it stirred in him was real, and what he did with it changed the world.
Benenson was a London barrister. He did not want to hold a protest or write a single angry letter. He wanted to find a way for people everywhere to act together on behalf of those who had been silenced, whatever their country and whatever their cause.
The young man behind the appeal
Benenson was born Peter Solomon in London on 31 July 1921 into a large Jewish family. His father, an army officer, died when Peter was nine. His mother, Flora, founded the welfare department at Marks and Spencer. He later took her maiden name, Benenson, in line with the wishes of his grandfather, the Russian Jewish banker Grigori Benenson.
His instinct to help started early. At 16, while a pupil at Eton, he helped set up a relief fund for children orphaned by the Spanish Civil War. He also organised schoolmates and their families to raise £4,000 to bring two young Jews from Nazi Germany to safety in Britain. After war service, which included work at the codebreaking centre Bletchley Park, he became a barrister, and in 1957 he was one of a group of British lawyers who founded the law reform and human rights organisation JUSTICE.
Six names in The Observer
Working with his friend Eric Baker, a Quaker, Benenson took his idea to David Astor, editor of The Observer. On 28 May 1961 the paper published Benenson's article "The Forgotten Prisoners", which launched what he called the Appeal for Amnesty, 1961. It told the stories of six people imprisoned in different parts of the world because of their political or religious views, and it asked readers to write letters on their behalf. Benenson called such people prisoners of conscience, a phrase that is now used around the world.
He believed that private sympathy was not enough, but that shared action could be. As he wrote in the article, if feelings of outrage "could be united into common action, something effective could be done." Newspapers in other countries reprinted the appeal, and responses flooded in. In July 1961 a meeting in London decided to turn the one-year appeal into a permanent movement. Benenson made sure that members of parliament from the Labour, Conservative and Liberal parties were all involved, a sign that the cause belonged to no single party. Within a year, groups of letter-writers had formed in more than a dozen countries, and in 1962 the movement took the name Amnesty International.
“If these feelings of disgust could be united into common action, something effective could be done.”Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International, "The Forgotten Prisoners", The Observer, 1961
A candle in barbed wire
On 10 December 1961, Human Rights Day, the first Amnesty candle was lit in the London church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. A candle wrapped in barbed wire became the movement's emblem. According to the Nobel Prize organisation, Benenson drew the idea from the old saying that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
Benenson served as Amnesty's first general secretary, stood down from that role in 1964 because of ill health and left the organisation in 1967. He kept helping people for the rest of his life. In the 1990s he organised aid for orphans in Romania, and he founded a group to support people with coeliac disease, a condition he lived with himself. He refused honours for most of his life, but in 2001, largely to please his family, he accepted a Pride of Britain lifetime achievement award. He died in Oxford on 25 February 2005, aged 83.
A movement of millions
The movement he started kept growing. Its membership rose from about 15,000 in 1969 to some 200,000 by 1979. In 1977 Amnesty International was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work for worldwide respect for human rights. Over the decades its work widened from prisoners of conscience to torture and unfair trials. It launched its first campaign against torture in 1972, and in 1984 the United Nations adopted the Convention against Torture.
Today Amnesty describes itself as a global movement of more than ten million people. The simple act at the heart of Benenson's appeal, a letter from a stranger, is still one of its most powerful tools. Every year its Write for Rights campaign invites people to send letters, cards and messages for individuals at risk. The 25th edition, in 2025, saw at least 3,962,563 actions taken in at least 200 countries and territories, according to Amnesty's own report.
Those letters can make a difference. Amnesty Australia reports that Rita Karasartova, a human rights defender in Kyrgyzstan featured in Write for Rights 2023, was acquitted in June 2024, and that the death sentence of Rocky Myers in the United States was commuted in February 2025 after a petition drive that included more than 30,000 signatures from Australia alone.
Why it still matters
Benenson's great insight was that no one is too far away to help. A schoolteacher in one country, a retired engineer in another and a student in a third could each write a letter, and together their voices could reach a prison cell on the other side of the world. For a prisoner, a pile of letters can be a sign that they have not been forgotten. For a government, it can be a sign that the world is watching.
More than six decades after a lawyer's appeal in a Sunday newspaper, people of every faith and none still pick up a pen for someone they have never met. The candle he lit in 1961 is still burning, and every new letter keeps it alight.
People in this story
Sources & further reading
- Peter Benenson, Wikipedia
- Amnesty International, Wikipedia
- Peter Benenson: defender of the forgotten prisoners, British Library
- Amnesty International founder Peter Benenson has died, World Jewish Congress
- Amnesty International: Facts, Nobel Peace Prize 1977, NobelPrize.org
- Our history, Amnesty International Australia
- Write for Rights 2025 Global Campaign Report, Amnesty International
- Write for Rights, Amnesty International Australia
Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
Tikkun olam in action. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.
