Founder of Amnesty International Dies

LONDON – Peter Benenson, who founded Amnesty International more than four decades ago, has died, the human rights organization said Saturday. He was 83.

Benenson had been ill for several years, and he died Friday night at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford from pneumonia, Amnesty spokesman Brendan Paddy said.

Benenson, who was educated in some of Britain’s top schools, 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 organizations. Currently, Amnesty, which is based in London, has more than 1.8 million members and supporters worldwide.