On this day, May 28, 1961, Amnesty International was officially founded in London. The organization was launched by British lawyer Peter Benenson, inspired by the imprisonment of two Portuguese students. Benenson's article "The Forgotten Prisoners" published in The Observer newspaper that day, called for a global appeal for the release of prisoners of conscience.
In the fall of 1960, Peter Benenson read a news item while on a London-bound train. There was nothing unusual about the item; in fact, it was a “routine” report of a human rights violation. Two Portuguese students had been sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment by the military dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar for raising their glasses in a toast “to freedom” at a restaurant.
Salazar had exercised power since 1932 in Portugal in a manner typical of dictatorships—repressing democracy and human rights. What was unusual was that Benenson, a wealthy and successful English lawyer, decided at that moment that ordinary citizens must find some effective way to raise their collective voices on behalf of these students and the thousands of others like them who were imprisoned for the peaceful exercise of their human rights.
Benenson, who had already founded Justice, an organization of British lawyers working on behalf of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, immediately began discussing his idea with Eric Baker, a prominent British Quaker, and Louis Blom-Cooper, an internationally prominent lawyer.
Through Benenson’s friendship with David Astor, editor of the liberal London Sunday newspaper The Observer, they were given free editorial space on May 28, 1961, to launch a campaign called Appeal for Amnesty, 1961.
The date, Trinity Sunday, was deliberately chosen by Benenson, a Roman Catholic (of Jewish ancestry). To open a newspaper any day of the week, Benenson wrote in the article “The Forgotten Prisoners,” is to read of someone imprisoned, tortured, or executed because “his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government.”
The article, immediately reprinted in major newspapers around the world, identified eight “forgotten prisoners.”
