Amnesty founder dies

Peter Benenson, who founded Amnesty International more than 40 years ago, has died, the human rights organisation said. He was 83.

Benenson had been ill for several years, and he died yesterday in Oxford from pneumonia, Amnesty said.

Benenson began his own human rights campaigns as a boy in support of Spanish civil war orphans and Jews fleeing Hitler's Germany.

In 1961, at the age of 40, he set up Amnesty after reading an article about the arrest and imprisonment of two students in a cafe in Lisbon, Portugal, who had drunk a toast to liberty.

He initially envisioned Amnesty as a one-year campaign, but it went on to become the world's largest independent human rights organisations with more than 1.8 million members and supporters worldwide.