PETER BENENSON was the founder of Amnesty International, the largest and most influential independent human-rights organisation, and a nagging thorn of conscience in the side of dictators — and dictatorial governments — all over the world.

Since 1961 the organisation has grown from an office staffed by a handful of volunteers to become a hugely influential network with 1.8 million members and subscribers in more than 160 countries. It has campaigned to publicise the plights of more than 45,000 victims of torture and prisoners of conscience. In 1977 Amnesty was awarded the Nobel prize for peace.

Benenson’s legacy is no less than a worldwide movement of citizen activism against the misuse of power. Amnesty’s logo of a candle surrounded by barbed wire has become a beacon of hope for the oppressed and downtrodden of the world.

As Benenson said when he lit the first Amnesty candle in St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, on Human Rights Day, December 10, 1961: “I am reminded of the words of a 16th-century man sentenced to death by burning: ‘We have today lit such a candle as shall never be put out’.”

The story of the organisation’s beginnings is one of conviction and timing, a simple but powerful idea falling upon the ears of a receptive world. In 1960 Benenson, a lawyer in London, read a newspaper report of two students in Portugal, then under the harsh military dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. Each had been jailed for seven years — their crime was to have raised their glasses in a Lisbon restaurant in a toast to liberty.

Benenson was outraged. He sat in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields for nearly an hour and thought hard how to mobilise public opinion. “It was necessary,” he later wrote, “to think of a larger group which would harness the enthusiasm of people all over the world who were anxious to see a wider respect for human rights.”

In practical terms, this meant encouraging individuals to bombard governments with letters on behalf of individual victims of torture or prisoners of conscience.

Within months Benenson had put his ideas into as an article, an “Appeal for Amnesty”, which appeared in The Observer’s Weekend Review in May 1961, under the headline “The Forgotten Prisoners”.

The article began: “Open your newspaper — any day of the week — and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or his religion are unacceptable to his government. There are several million such people in prison . . . The newspaper reader feels a sickening sense of impotence. Yet if these feelings of disgust all over the world could be united into common action, something effective could be done.”

The epoch-making article concluded: “Governments are prepared to follow only where public opinion leads. Pressure of opinion 100 years ago brought about the emancipation of the slaves. It is now for man to insist upon the same freedom for his mind as he has won for his body.”

The response was astonishing and instantaneous. Other newspapers around the world picked up the story, letters flooded in, and Amnesty International was born.

Benenson’s great initiative was not a sudden Damascene conversion to the cause of human rights. Born in 1921, Peter Benenson was the grandson of a Jewish Russian banker, Grigori Benenson. His mother Flora brought him up alone after the early death of his father, Colonel John Solomon.

After a period of private tutoring by the poet W. H. Auden, Benenson went to Eton and then on to study history at Oxford. At Eton his complaints about the poor food prompted the headmaster to write to his mother warning of his “revolutionary tendencies”. Alas for authority, Benenson soon converted his tendencies into practical action. It was at Eton that he, aged 16, launched his first campaign, in aid of the Spanish Relief Committee, which was working to look after the orphan children of Republicans killed in the Spanish Civil War. He then turned his attention to raising money from his fellow pupils to help Jews who had fled to Britain from Nazi Germany. He joined the Labour Party in 1939.