You can imagine Andrew Puddephatt striding into the office each morning, sitting down at his desk and checking out the international political arena. Yep, there's one, over there.

He swings his sights, finds his focus, locks target and fires off a quick burst of press releases, pamphlets, policy recommendations. And another bully, another government that's keen to hide the truth, bites the dust - or at least is forced into an embarrassing interview on CNN.

Sitting in his office, Puddephatt admits that his first acts of citizenship were exactly on course for someone who now spends his time helping the world's weak and vulnerable. At primary school, he hunted for playground bullies. As a teenager, he fought against the school prefect system. As a student, he protested against US involvement in Vietnam.

Later, in his political career, as a councillor and then the leader at London's Hackney Council, he hit out against the politicos, class warriors and black rights opportunists that he believed were running riot in the council chamber. When he was in charge of the campaigning organisations Liberty and then Charter 88, he struggled to get civil rights and constitutional reform - the idea that power needed to be redistributed more fairly - onto the political agenda and then into the law books.

Fighting bullies comes from a lifelong belief in the importance of human dignity, says Puddephatt. That's what moves him to act. "I don't like people being treated differently because of what they look like, what their background is, because of their essential attributes. I don't like people in powerful positions abusing their power."

Firing letters across the world
It's been a busy day at Article 19. Executive Director since 1999, Puddephatt makes life awkward for bullies by "monitoring, researching, publishing, lobbying, campaigning and litigating on behalf of freedom of expression wherever it's threatened". There's plenty of work out there to keep him busy, he says.

The organisation gets its name from the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its 19th article states: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Puddephatt's just sent off a letter to Chief Godwin Agabi, Attorney General of Nigeria, to argue that the "disappearance" of journalists during military rule should be included in investigations into alleged human rights abuses. He's drafting a letter to Mangala Saramweera, Sri Lankan media minister, about the use of official media to plant "conspiracy" allegations against non-government editors.

How traditional values fuelled radical views
It's a long way from fifties Luton. Growing up in the "motor town" outside London, as a member of the "new" lower-middle classes - his father worked in one of its car factories - Puddephatt was "full on for traditional values".

He worked hard. He did what he was told. At the local tech, at the dinner dances organised by the Luton Young Conservatives, he nodded to God and Queen and Empire.

What made Puddephatt first rethink his world, as he sat and munched his tea and revised for his A levels, was the fallout from the infamous 1968 "rivers of blood" speech by Conservative shadow minister Enoch Powell - the implication that race riots would break out if Britain became a multicultural society.

While those around him talked about invasion, he couldn't help thinking that what Powell said smacked of racism. It was wrong. It wasn't fair. It was what bullies did.

Guerrilla thinking
At the University of Cambridge, surrounded by people from different backgrounds and different countries, the small-town boy's gut feeling for justice became the basis for the revolutionary student's attack on the contemporary world system.

It wasn't just about following doctrines, he says. It was about thinking. It was about the excitement of thinking. The Marx brothers, both Karl and Groucho, and the social and political theories filtering across from Paris and the student unrest of May 1968 - "Be reasonable: demand the impossible" - gave him the freedom to pursue a "guerrilla activity of the mind".

Finding out about real politics
Despite sounding nostalgic about the seventies counter-culture, Puddephatt is at pains to point out that political change needs more than opposition, anger and hatred to succeed.

He points to the "tactical genius" of the Birmingham Six campaigners. When they wanted to protest, they didn't stand outside the prison and shout abuse. They planted a tree. They created a garden outside the prison gates.

"It wasn't something that the prison institution could be negative about. And it created a good media opportunity. But it also created a climate in which people started thinking: there must be something in this."

It was Hackney that taught Puddephatt about what he calls "real" politics. Working as an electrician, he became politically active in his local Labour party. And discovered that revolutionary political theory didn't help in the hurley-burley of the council chamber.

The necessary compromises
Puddephatt has the trick of making what many people regard as the dirty business of politics - the lobbying, the setting of agendas in the corridors of power - sound good, even virtuous.

"If you're building coalitions, you have to remember that people have different values, people have different views," he says. "Politics is about meshing them in a way that's effective in the interests of the majority and in the interests of the vulnerable.

"Sometimes the ends justify the means; sometimes the ends don't justify the means. It's not always simple. The thing about politics: you're always making judgements."

Although successful at this kind of "real" politics, rising rapidly through the ranks from councillor in 1982 to council leader in 1986, Puddephatt felt constricted. Action to solve local problems needed to be taken on a national scale, he believed.

Attacking the big structures
He left Hackney in 1989 to become the head of Liberty – then known as the National Council for Civil Liberties - and campaigned to overhaul the "archaic structure of British government". In doing so, he began a move from the local to the international and a return to the theorising of his student days. It's a move he says he still hasn't finished making.

Although it's not a very British habit, Puddephatt's not embarrassed about thinking. He sees his task, and the task of anyone who wants to change the world, as understanding the ideas that may form tomorrow's world.

"If you want to have a quiet life, you don't have to think," he says. "If all you want to do is make a lot of money, you just need to find a growing sector. But to achieve political change, you have to understand the spirit of the times, the zeitgeist. There's no way around that."

Shaping the political future
When he arrived at Liberty it was fighting in a general way for rights to be guaranteed in English law. After consulting his new colleagues, he refocused its objectives and decided to concentrate on campaigning for a Bill of Rights. But after six years, he says he got bored. Liberty was aiming to change English law. He wanted a larger canvas.

Charter 88 gave him bigger, more theoretical ideas. But it was in trouble as an organisation. It had problems in its direction, management, financing. The academics that set it up didn't know how to run organisations, says Puddephatt. He set to work. If there's one thing he knows about, he says, it's how to run a campaigning organisation.

He's proud of what he achieved at Charter 88. Certainly, Tony Blair's government sometimes seems to be following its agenda. The Human Rights Act secured civil liberties. Devolution gave power to Britain's nations and regions. Hereditary peers have lost their voting rights. All were key Charter 88 aims.

But Charter 88 wasn't enough. Britain wasn't enough. The national scale, like the local, wasn't where the truly significant changes could happen.

"I wanted to be excited about the kind of changes that were possible," he says. "I thought the real challenges were the ones happening at a kind of intergovernmental and global governance level."

A citizen of the world
Puddephatt says we're at the beginning of a new political era – an era of global politics. In this brave new world, NGOs, states and companies need to work together to create a system of global governance.

With its international remit, Article 19 lets Puddephatt exercise his imagination on a global level. After all, there's the whole world to sort out.

And then what? Nobody knows. "There isn't a coherent theory of the world any longer, not even a coherent critique," he says.

"Nothing satisfactorily describes how the world is shaping up right now. I couldn't think of a more fantastically exciting time to be a campaigner."

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