Amnesty International founder Peter Benenson has died

Peter Benenson, the British lawyer who founded human rights group Amnesty International, has died aged 83. Benenson set the group up in 1961 after he read about the arrest and imprisonment of two students in a Lisbon café who drank a toast to liberty when Portugal was still run by a military dictatorship. He launched Amnesty with a newspaper article dedicated to the plight of six political prisoners in Africa, America and eastern Europe. "Once the concentration camps and the hell-holes of the world were in darkness," Benenson later wrote. "Now they are lit by the light of the Amnesty candle; the candle in barbed wire." Benenson was the grandson of a Russian-Jewish banker. At 16 he launched a campaign at his Eton school to get support for a group helping republican orphans from the Spanish civil war. He "adopted" one baby himself, helping to pay for its support. Later he organized school friends and their families in the raising of GBP 4,000 to help bring two young Jews to Britain from Nazi Germany.