Forty years ago, a British lawyer named Peter Benenson read in his morning paper about two Portuguese students who had been arrested in a Lisbon cafe and sentenced to seven years in prison for having drunk a toast "to freedom," a code phrase for opposition to the government of then dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.

Evidently, the story was the last straw for Mr. Benenson. Unlike most of us, who might have sighed and moved on to the sports page, he decided to try and do something in response. He came up with the idea of bombarding the Portuguese and similarly repressive governments with letters of protest, and a yearlong "Appeal for Amnesty" campaign to that end was launched on May 27, 1961. In an article published in The Observer, Mr. Benenson called on the public to write letters protesting the detention of men and women for their political or religious beliefs -- disregarding both the content of those beliefs and the ideology of the jailers. He called the victims "prisoners of conscience" -- a phrase that has entered the language.

One passage in that 1961 article stood out -- and still does, four decades later, when the movement it started has grown into the human-rights behemoth now known as Amnesty International. How, Mr. Benenson asked, can we discover the state of freedom in the world today? He answered his own question by quoting the American philosopher John Dewey: "If you want to establish some conception of a society, go find out who is in jail." Looking back over nearly a half-century's sometimes controversial activity on behalf of the unjustly detained, it is worth remembering the idealism, the singular purity of motive, embodied in that choice of quotation.