1.

Amnesty International Many rights, some wrong, Mar 22nd 2007, Economist
The world's biggest human-rights organisation stretches its brand

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL is the biggest human-rights organisation in the world, with 70 national
chapters and 1.8m-plus members. Its battle honours glitter. It has defended moral giants among prisoners of
conscience such as Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov. Amnesty still champions such causes, rattling
dictatorial governments (and governments with dictatorial tendencies). But its mission has also become
broader and more ambitious, calling for political and economic improvement as well as freedom from
judicial persecution. “Working on individuals is important, but if we don't work on systemic change we just
exchange one group of sufferers for another,” says Irene Khan, its secretary-general.
Many of the movement's most vocal supporters strongly support this stance, increasingly entrenched in
Amnesty's thinking; it also chimes well with the visceral opposition to American foreign policy, and to
globalisation, that exists in many parts of the world. All that has made Amnesty more popular in some
quarters—but also, perhaps, less effective overall. Amnesty's website (http://www.amnesty.org/) —
admittedly not the same as the organisation, but still a shop window for its main concerns—can certainly be
disconcerting for those who have not followed the changes of past years. Instead of named individuals
locked up by their governments, it highlights a dozen campaigns. Top comes “stop violence against women”,
including discrimination by the “state, the community and the family”. The second asserts: “The arms trade
is out of control. Worldwide arms are fuelling conflict, poverty, and human rights abuses.” The third—closer
to a traditional Amnesty campaign—is “stop torture”; this focuses mainly on abuses in the “war on terror”,
and links to a campaign to close the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay. Ms Khan infuriated both the American
government and some Amnesty supporters in 2005 when she described Guantánamo as the “gulag of our
times”. She stands by her statement: like the gulag, Guantánamo “puts people outside the rule of law”, she
says. Yet the comparison seems odd in scale and in principle: the gulag embodied the Soviet system;
Guantánamo is a blot on the American one. Not that old-style Amnesty was soft on the West. Using the
moral authority it had won by confronting both apartheid and communism, it challenged Western
governments whenever they seemed to be cutting legal corners; in that spirit, it opposed Britain's policy of
internment in Northern Ireland.
But these days America does seem to have a strangely high priority, given the enormity of humanrights
scandals elsewhere. One of the four “worldwide appeals” launched in March urges the public to press the
American government to grant visas to the wives of two Cubans jailed for acting as “unregistered agents of a
foreign power” (in effect, spying). Zimbabwe, scene of bloody repression in past weeks, comes fourth—but
the appeal deals not with current events but with the persecution of a movement called “Women of
Zimbabwe Arise”, an admirable but narrower cause. Another of Amnesty's 12 campaigns is on “Poverty and
Human Rights” which asserts: “Everyone, everywhere has the right to live with dignity. That means that no
one should be denied their rights to adequate housing, food, water and sanitation, and to education and health
care.” A similar theme is struck by the “Economic Globalisation and Human Rights” campaign—reflecting
Amnesty's enthusiastic support for the World Social Forum, a movement which holds annual anti-capitalism
shindigs. Sometimes there seems to be a desire to be even-handed between pariahs and paragons: Amnesty
recently surprised observers of the ex-communist world by producing a critique of the language law in
Estonia—a country usually seen as the best example of good government in the region.
The big question in all this is priorities. Cases do exist where violations of political rights and of economic
ones are hard to separate; one such case is Zimbabwe, whose government has engaged in politicised food
distribution and slum clearance at the same time as judicial repression. But the new Amnesty is surely open
to the charges both that it is campaigning on too many fronts, and that the latest focus comes at the cost of
the old one. Amnesty's website is, insiders acknowledge, a campaigning tool; it does not fully reflect the
depth of the organisation's expertise, or its internal priorities. Ms Khan admits a tension in the organisation's
“business mix” between high profile and less immediately rewarding work. But she insists that there is no
drift towards America-bashing for the sake of popularity, and that the emphasis on economic, social and
cultural rights does not reflect a preference for any particular system of government. Perhaps unavoidably,
the stance taken by Amnesty's increasingly autonomous national chapters in the domestic affairs of their
countries is decidedly political. In Colombia, for example, the movement opposes a law that offers reduced
sentences to right-wing paramilitaries but made no objections to past proposals for amnesties for left-wing
guerrillas.
Amnesty may to some extent be the captive of its need to keep a mass membership enthused with new and
compelling causes, even at the cost of narrowing its appeal to those with unfashionably positive views about
America or global capitalism. Its expert researchers and analysts still continue in their work, but sometimes
feel let down by what the leadership chooses to showcase. Amnesty has to compete for attention and funds
with other human-rights organisations: its “unique selling proposition”, says Ms Khan, is that it gives
ordinary people a chance to participate. Yet the best means of ensuring that—writing letters to, and about,
prisoners of conscience—has shrunk. The collapse of the Soviet empire and of apartheid rule in South Africa
cut the number of visible prisoners of conscience. Countless tens of thousands may languish in China's
laogai forced labour camps (a system that truly deserves to be called a gulag), and many are incarcerated in
places such as North Korea and Myanmar (Burma). But even getting the names of the inmates is hard, let
alone embarrassing the governments. Writing letters on behalf of a Havel or Sakharov sparks members'
enthusiasm far more than a few blurred pictures of a remote camp with anonymous inmates.
Amnesty's American-based counterpart, Human Rights Watch, has also changed its emphasis, but less
controversially. It keeps classic human-rights questions at the centre of its activities and gives only modest
attention to other concerns. On weapons, for example, it campaigns to limit the use of cluster bombs, but not
against the arms trade in general. It sticks to situations where its fastidious, legalistic approach will work,
“namely, the ability to identify a rights violation, a violator, and a remedy to address the violation.” That
covers arbitrary government conduct that leads to a violation of economic rights (such as the right to
emigrate), but steers clear of general hand-wringing about poverty or poor public services.
Current and former Amnesty insiders worry that an increasingly grandstanding and unfocused approach
makes it ineffective. Sigrid Rausing, a top British donor to human-rights causes, says she regrets the
“blurring” of the original mission: “There are so few organisations that focus on individual prisoners of
conscience.” Her husband, Eric Abraham, was supported by Amnesty while under a five-year sentence of
house arrest in South Africa in 1976.
Some wonder if Ms Khan has been too keen to impress constituencies in what NGO-niks call the “global
south”: code for developing countries, where opinion—at least among the elite—supposedly favours
economic development over a “northern” concern for individual rights. She vigorously contests that. But an
organisation which devotes more pages in its annual report to human-rights abuses in Britain and America
than those in Belarus and Saudi Arabia cannot expect to escape doubters' scrutiny.

2. Nobel Peace Laureates to Human Rights Watch: Close Your Revolving Door to U.S. Government, May
12, 2014, AlterNet,
The leading human rights organization's close ties to the U.S. government call its independence into
question.

The following letter was sent today to Human Rights Watch's Kenneth Roth on behalf of Nobel Peace Prize
Laureates Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire; former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans von
Sponeck; current UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Richard Falk; and
over 100 scholars.
Dear Kenneth Roth,
Human Rights Watch characterizes itself as “one of the world’s leading independent organizations dedicated
to defending and protecting human rights.” However, HRW's close ties to the U.S. government call into
question its independence. For example, HRW's Washington advocacy director, Tom Malinowski,
previously served as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton and as a speechwriter to Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright. In 2013, he left HRW after being nominated as Assistant Secretary of State for
Democracy, Human Rights & Labor under John Kerry.
In her HRW.org biography, Board of Directors' Vice Chair Susan Manilow describes herself as "a longtime
friend to Bill Clinton" who is "highly involved" in his political party, and "has hosted dozens of events" for
the Democratic National Committee. Currently, HRW Americas' advisory committee includes Myles
Frechette, a former U.S. ambassador to Colombia, and Michael Shifter, one-time Latin America director for
the U.S. government-financed National Endowment for Democracy. Miguel Díaz, a Central Intelligence
Agency analyst in the 1990s, sat on HRW Americas' advisory committee from 2003-11. Now at the State
Department, Díaz serves as "an interlocutor between the intelligence community and non-government
experts." In his capacity as an HRW advocacy director, Malinowski contended in 2009 that "under limited
circumstances" there was "a legitimate place" for CIA renditions—the illegal practice of kidnapping and
transferring terrorism suspects around the planet. Malinowski was quoted paraphrasing the U.S.
government's argument that designing an alternative to sending suspects to "foreign dungeons to be tortured"
was "going to take some time."
HRW has not extended similar consideration to Venezuela. In a 2012 letter to President Chávez, HRW
criticized the country's candidacy for the UN Human Rights Council, alleging that Venezuela had fallen "far
short of acceptable standards" and questioning its "ability to serve as a credible voice on human rights." At
no point has U.S. membership in the same council merited censure from HRW, despite Washington's secret,
global assassination program, its preservation of renditions, and its illegal detention of individuals at
Guantánamo Bay. Likewise, in February 2013, HRW correctly described as "unlawful" Syria's use of
missiles in its civil war. However, HRW remained silent on the clear violation of international law
constituted by the U.S. threat of missile strikes on Syria in August.
The few examples above, limited to only recent history, might be forgiven as inconsistencies or oversights
that could naturally occur in any large, busy organization. But HRW’s close relationships with the U.S.
government suffuse such instances with the appearance of a conflict of interest. We therefore encourage you
to institute immediate, concrete measures to strongly assert HRW's independence. Closing what seems to be
a revolving door would be a reasonable first step: Bar those who have crafted or executed U.S. foreign policy
from serving as HRW staff, advisors or board members. At a bare minimum, mandate lengthy “cooling-off”
periods before and after any associate moves between HRW and that arm of the government. Your largest
donor, investor George Soros, argued in 2010 that "to be more effective, I think the organization has to be
seen as more international, less an American organization.” We concur. We urge you to implement the
aforementioned proposal to ensure a reputation for genuine independence.
Sincerely,
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