LiberPress Association Award 2014

Amnesty International was founded in London on 1 October 1962 to denounce the arrest and imprisonment of two Portuguese students who had drunk a toast to freedom under the dictatorship of General Salazar. The founders decided to form an organisation that would seek to secure the release of the imprisoned students and create an effective international mechanism to achieve freedom of opinion and expression. What started as a specific campaign became an ongoing international movement for the defence of human rights. After a year, the new organisation had already sent delegations to four countries to protest on behalf of various prisoners of conscience and was working on 210 cases of people who had been unjustly imprisoned.

As Amnesty International grew, the scope of its activities extended to victims of other human rights abuses, such as torture, forced disappearances and the death penalty.

Amnesty was one of the first international human rights organisations. In 1977 Amnesty International received the Nobel Peace Prize and in 1978 it was awarded the United Nations Human Rights Prize. Today, this global movement operates in more than 150 countries, working to ensure that the rights recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and in other international treaties are respected. It has more than 3 million members and sympathisers around the world, its objective being to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated.