Peter Benenson's Appeal and the Founding of Amnesty International

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Amnesty International traces its founding to a 1961 newspaper appeal by the London lawyer Peter Benenson on behalf of two Portuguese students imprisoned for a political toast, an appeal that grew rapidly into a private international human rights body headquartered in London rather than remaining a single publicized case. Sean MacBride served as its first chairman, from 1961 to 1975, guiding the organization through its first decade and a half, and it has since grown to more than ten million members and supporters worldwide, funded entirely without government money in order to preserve its independence from the states whose conduct it documents.

Its Amnesty International Report, an annual survey documenting human rights conditions country by country, has been published since the 1960s and remains among the most widely cited sourcing used by journalists, governments and other human rights bodies assessing conditions in a given state. The organization describes itself as nonpolitical and nonreligious, a stance meant to preserve credibility across ideological and religious lines, and that stance has not stopped freedom of religion or belief from being part of its mandate since its founding, applied evenhandedly regardless of which faith a documented prisoner of conscience holds.