Peter Benenson

One morning in the early 1960s, a man named Peter Benenson was reading the newspaper in a London subway. He noticed an article that reported on two Portuguese students being sentenced to seven years in prison for praising liberty in a public place in Lisbon. Benenson immediately penned an open letter to the British newspaper The Observer, which was later published, asking people to support the two students. This event is what started the group now known as Amnesty International.