PETER BENENSON, the British lawyer who founded Amnesty International, the human rights campaign group, has died aged 83.

The son of an army colonel, Benenson set the group up in 1961 after he read about the arrest and imprisonment of two students in a Lisbon cafe who drank a toast to liberty when Portugal was still run by a military dictatorship.

He was so enraged that he walked out of a Tube station and into the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square to light a candle and see what could be done to mobilise world opinion.

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, distinguished by his red hair, was the grandson of a Russian-Jewish banker. He was tutored privately by the poet WH Auden and then went to Eton, where his flair for taking a stand against unfair conditions first manifested itself.

He complained to the head master about the poor food. This provoked a letter to his mother, warning her of his “revolutionary tendencies”.

At 16 he launched a campaign at Eton 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 organised school friends and their families in the raising of £4,000 to help bring two young Jews to Britain from Nazi Germany.

He studied history at Oxford and worked in the Ministry of Information during the second world war.

Later he became a lawyer.The Trades Union Congress sent him to Spain in the early 1950s, where he confronted judges in his role as its observer at the trials of trade unionists.

Throughout the 1950s Benenson stood as a Labour candidate in Streatham and Hitchin, but was always beaten. With Amnesty International, however, he found his vehicle to try to right the world’s wrongs.

Irene Khan, Amnesty’s secretary-general, said yesterday his vision had given birth to human rights activism. Today Amnesty has 1.8m members and supporters. Benenson died on Friday at the John Radcliffe hospital, Oxford. He is survived by his wife Susan and three daughters, one by a previous marriage.

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