This Sunday, 45 years since Amnesty was first launched with an article by Peter Benenson in The Observer, we join forces with the paper once again to launch Irrepressible, a new campaign tackling repression of internet users around the world, writes Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International.
Much has changed in those 45 years, but sadly people are still being imprisoned for the peaceful expression of their beliefs.
Peter Benenson started Amnesty after reading about two students who were arrested in a Portuguese cafe for raising a toast to freedom; 45 years on, we recently heard about three young Vietnamese people arrested after taking part in an online chat about democracy.
Governments still fear dissenting opinion and try to shut it down. It's a frightening trend. Governments block websites, filter searches to control what people can find, and lock people up just for peacefully expressing their opinions in emails or on websites.
What's more, some of the world's biggest IT companies are helping them do it. Firms that have based their principles (and their success) on freedom of information are now helping countries like China to control and monitor the internet. The whole ethos of the internet is in danger of being undermined.
Of course, restricting freedom of speech on the web is justified in very limited circumstances, just as it is elsewhere. Sites that encourage racial hatred, incite violence or carry child pornography should not be defended. But governments can only restrict free speech in very limited circumstances, laid down in law and within international rules. Locking someone up because their blog discussed democracy is simply unacceptable.
The web can be a fantastic force for human rights. Bloggers can tell us what life's like in Baghdad or Mogadishu; journalists and organisations like ours can better expose human rights abuses.
And people can use it to take action. Start by having your say below, then go to irrepressible.info to sign a pledge for internet freedom and email the Chinese authorities demanding the release of an imprisoned journalist.
And we're also giving people the opportunity to fight censorship by providing excerpts from politically-censored websites to put on their own sites or emails, defying the governments that try to deny access to them.
When Peter first wrote that article for The Observer, he probably never imagined that 45 years later it would have spawned a movement of 1.8 million people standing up for human rights. He certainly wouldn't have known we'd end up campaigning for so-called "cyber-dissidents". But he knew about governments trying to stop free speech; he knew it was wrong; and he knew that we had to do something about it. We still do.
