RIP

In late 1960, a man reading his newspaper while riding the London underground came across a story about two students in Portugal who had been arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison for the crime - and a crime it was - of sitting in a cafe in Lisbon and drinking a toast "to freedom."

The man was Peter Benenson, a lawyer who had a history of activism on the cause of human rights. He decided to undertake the task of organizing a campaign seeking amnesty for those students and four other people wrongly imprisoned for their beliefs. He envisioned it as a one-year effort.

It didn't work out that way. The idea of dignified protest through supporting letters to prisoners and publicity to bring "light into the darkness of prisons, the horror of torture chambers and tragedy of death camps around the world" caught fire both politically and symbolically in the candle wrapped in barbed wire.

Peter Benenson didn't know it that day on the underground, but he had just founded Amnesty International.

The man who lit the fuse of the human rights revolution died this week, having refused all honours and leaving behind him a world changed by the countless protests and petitions he championed.

He was 83.

Of course, no one person is responsible for the changes that take place over the course of their lifetime. There are many other people, there are events that drive other events, there are social changes that drive other social changes. Change, including the change in attitude toward human rights (when Benenson was born, there were no international human rights treaties and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was 26 years in the future), is a process, not something commanded or generated by any single source, much less any single person.

But to the extent that any one person could symbolize that change, that person could well be Peter Benenson. May he be remembered with honor.