Finally, in 1999, after years of campaigning by Amnesty, the British government set up a Human Rights Commission for Northern Ireland.
Former prisoner of conscience Julio de Pena Valdez, a trade union leader in the Dominican Republic, has spoken of the impact of an Amnesty letter-writing campaign on his own case.
"When the 200 letters came, the guards gave me back my clothes. Then the next 200 letters came and the prison director came to see me. When the next pile of letters arrived, the director got in touch with his superior.
"The letters kept coming and coming: 3,000 of them. The president was informed. The letters still kept arriving and the president called the prison and told them to let me go."
But Amnesty has had some high-profile failures of judgment too: it went to town with a story put out by a US PR firm claiming that Iraqi troops were destroying incubators in hospitals and thereby killing babies. It turned out that the PR firm was acting on behalf of the Kuwaiti government at the time of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and Amnesty was forced into a retraction when the story was found to be a fabrication.
In recent years, some have argued that Amnesty has become respectable, a part of the international establishment. Others claim it has lost its unique profile and has been submerged in a plethora of other human rights groups. Perhaps the unkindest cut of all has been the allegation that Amnesty's publicity campaigns have resulted in the development of even more insidious methods of torture and repression, designed to avoid the calumny of global exposure.
Unquestionably, there is still work to be done. Last year, 63 countries were known to be holding prisoners of conscience and extra- judicial executions were carried out in 61 countries. People were arbitarily arrested and detained, or in detention without charge or trial, in 78 countries. Armed opposition groups committed serious human rights abuses, such as deliberate and arbitrary killings of civilians, torture and hostage-taking, in 42 countries. As for the two Portuguese students, the archetypal prisoners of conscience who sparked the long-running campaign, they were subsequently freed and Amnesty has since lost track of them.
Peter Benenson, now in his 80s, lives in a cottage outside Oxford, England. He has long been reconciled with the organization he created. At celebrations to mark the 20th anniversary of Amnesty, he lit a candle at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in London. His words then are apposite today, on the eve of Amnesty's 40th anniversary: "I have lit this candle, in the words of Shakespeare, `against oblivion' -- so that the forgotten prisoners should always be remembered. We work in Amnesty against oblivion."
Jonathan Power's book, Like Water on Stone: The Story of Amnesty International, is published in the UK by Penguin.
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