Amnesty International is a global organization with an international, grass-roots membership devoted to the protection and promotion of human rights around the world. It was founded in 1961 in London on the inspiration of Peter Benenson (1921–2005), a lawyer with a long-standing interest in civil liberties. Amnesty International started as a short-term publicity campaign, launched in a newspaper article and coordinated through Benenson's office. Within two years Benenson and his colleague Eric Baker, a Quaker activist, had established a permanent but small and frugally run organization whose central purpose was to coordinate local groups of ordinary citizens who would "adopt" individuals imprisoned in other countries for their nonviolent beliefs.

Amnesty International referred to the adopted prisoners as prisoners of conscience, a term coined by Baker. Prisoners were assigned to the earliest groups in politically balanced sets of three. One prisoner would be assigned from a Western country, one...