"" This concept was viewed by some as a formulation of the underlying principle on which all ideas, political and religious liberty of citizens; but it was vigorously rejected by some other philosophers as baseless. The term "natural rights- eventually fell into disfavor. However, the concept of universal rights took root with the expansion of this idea by philosophers such as Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau, and John Stuart Mill. ("A Short, 2) In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, activism of human rights remained in great part tied to religious and political groups. Many revolutionaries made note of the atrocities of governments as evidence that their ideology was necessary to bring an end to the government's abuses. Examples of later social changes of civil rights include labor unions that introduced laws granting workers the right to strike, forbidding or regulating child labor, gaining the right to vote for many women, and national liberation movements that drove out colonial powers. .
The Amnesty International Organization developed from one of these civil rights movements when in 1961 a group of lawyers, writers, journalists, and others formed the Appeal for Amnesty, 1961 when two Portuguese college students were sentenced to seven years in prison for raising their glasses in a toast to "freedom- in a bar. British lawyer Peter Benenson wrote to the London Observer's Sunday Supplement to call on an international campaign to bombard governments around the world to protest to free the "forgotten prisoners-. On May 28, 1961 his year long campaign launched calling on people everywhere to protest against the imprisonment of men and women for their political or religious beliefs ""prisoners of conscience-. ("How Did, 3) The response to this appeal was much larger than expected, extending the campaign for more than one year, creating the Amnesty International Organization and the modern human rights movement.