Amnesty Int Founder Peter Benenson, 83, dies

"There are not many newspaper articles that can claim to have changed the world for the better. But on Sunday, 28 May 1961, The Observer published 'The Forgotten Prisoners' by Peter Benenson, a 33-year-old London lawyer. Benenson had been angered after learning about two Portuguese students who had been imprisoned for seven years after drinking a toast to liberty in a Lisbon cafe during the Salazar dictatorship. His solution seemed simple: to bombard the Portuguese regime with written protests. As Martin Ennals, a future Amnesty secretary-general observed later, it was 'an amazing contention that prisoners of conscience could be released by writing letters to governments'. More here.