Misplaced Pages

Amnesty International: Difference between revisions

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
Browse history interactively← Previous editNext edit →Content deleted Content addedVisualWikitext
Revision as of 19:41, 20 February 2006 view sourceLightdarkness (talk | contribs)Extended confirmed users12,130 editsm Reverted edits by Sligahan (Talk) to last version by Sango123← Previous edit Revision as of 19:43, 20 February 2006 view source Sligahan (talk | contribs)13 edits Reverted taking out POV parts see discussionNext edit →
Line 73: Line 73:
* Total: £23,728,000 (including contingency) * Total: £23,728,000 (including contingency)


==Criticism and rebuttal==
Criticism of Amnesty International may be classified into two major categories, accusations of ] and ideological bias. In addition, many governments, including those of the ] , ] , the ] , ] , ] and the ] have attacked it for alleged bias, one-sided reporting, or failure to take security threats as a mitigating factor.


The majority of these criticisms are from governments (or supporters of a government) pleading mitigation for admitted infringements of human rights, either because of special circumstances (such as security threats) or because other countries' records are worse.

===Selection Bias===
It is widely accepted that there are a disproportionate number of AI reports on relatively more democratic and open countries. This is the major source of the charge of "selection bias", with critics pointing to a disproportionate focus on allegations of human rights violations in for example ], when compared with ] or ]. The term "selection bias" is potentially misleading, since it derives from statistics, and AI's intention is not to produce a range of reports which statistically represents the world's human rights abuses. Instead, its aim is (a) to document what it can, in order to (b) produce pressure for improvement. These two factors skew the number of reports towards more open and democratic countries, because information is more easily obtainable, and because their governments are more susceptible to public pressure.

A tendency to over-report allegations of human rights abuse in nations that are comparatively lesser violators of human rights has been called "]," after the late ] and former ] ], who is said to have stated that at the ], the number of complaints about a nation's violation of human rights is inversely proportional to their actual violation of human rights.

<!--Three factors should caution an overemphasis on this issue. First, as already noted, the number of reports is not the issue - as long as AI reports on countries with worst human rights abuses pull no punches and use all available information, one cannot ask for more. Second, the overwhelming majority of individual action cases (prisoners of conscience) are in more repressive states. This reflects the fact that such states can much more easily be pressured to release specific named individuals, as the result of a public campaign which risks international embarrassment, than to change longstanding repressive policies. Conversely, in democratic states it easier to change policy (through the political process) than affect individual cases (which are typically dealt with by independent judicial systems). Attempts to change policy tend to require greater amounts of information (in order to justify them) and publicity (to build public pressure) than individual cases. Third, part of the selection bias issue is down to media reporting of AI reports. The media will always give greater prominence to reports regarding their own country, regardless of intrinsic newsworthiness. In addition there is the man-bites-dog point that revelations of human rights abuses in countries such as Congo and Cambodia are hardly surprising, and therefore less newsworthy than abuses associated with more developed countries such as Israel and Russia.--><!--This paragraph appears to be pure ]. Please quote AI defenders who make these arguments.-->
====Examples====
One example is the allegation of ], a publication of the ], which noted that between September 2000 until the beginning of 2003, when AI became active in the crisis in ], AI issued 52 reports on the human rights abuses against Christians and animists in southern ], which has claimed tens of thousands of lives through starvation and ethnic violence, as well as creating 1.2 million refugees (according to the ]), while AI concurrently issued 192 reports on the ]. (These numbers refer in fact to the total number of documents including press releases, not to reports alone.) As the NGO Monitor report points out, after the start of the ], AI became much more involved in Sudan. The total number of documents from the beginning of 1996 to March 2005 is 315 for ] and 398 for ]. AI defenders respond by asserting that all nations should aspire to absolute respect for human rights, and that the difficulties associated with monitoring 'closed' countries should not mean that 'open' countries should receive less scrutiny.

===Ideological bias===
Amnesty International has been criticized for having an ideological bias both from the ] and from the ].

Criticism from some parts of the left includes the view that the very idea of Human Rights is based on ], ], ], and ] (as meant by ], ], et al.), and takes the view that ] means that the Human Rights are not in fact universal.

Conservative commentators have alleged that AI's reporting reflects ideological bias toward a ] political viewpoint in opposition to the foreign policy of the ]. To support this they point to AI's treatment of the human rights implications of the U.S.-led war in ]. Critics of AI have suggested that AI's concern for the human rights implications of this war disproportionately criticize the effects of U.S. military action while in comparison they were less vociferous about the abuses of the ] regime and the human rights implications of the continued rule of this government. Examples of this criticism can be found in the links below. Supporters of AI have pointed out that AI was critical of Hussein's regime while ] was shaking the dictator by the hand, and that when the ] later released reports on the human rights record of Hussein, they depended almost entirely on AI documents that the US had ignored when Iraq was a US ally in the 1980s.

===2005: Guantánamo Bay "the gulag of our times."===
In a to AI's , the Secretary General, ], made a passing reference to the ] prison as "the ] of our times," breaking an internal AI policy on not comparing different human rights abuses. The comment implied a comparison of the United States' treatment of "unlawful enemy combatants" held in the camp with the massive ] covertly run by the ] under ] to "re-educate" over 20 million "political ]" through torture, forced labour, and other tactics. Even taking into account Khan's mention of other related aspects of the ], such as ], this is not a comparison which the AI report itself supports.{{NamedRef|NewStatesman|1}}

U.S. Secretary of Defense ] called the report "reprehensible", Vice President ] said he was "offended" by the report, and ] called the report "absurd" in a ], ] press conference. In an editorial, the '']'' lamented that "lately the organization has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world's dictators but for the United States":<blockquote>"The Soviet gulag, by contrast, was a massive forced labor complex consisting of thousands of concentration camps and hundreds of exile villages through which more than 20 million people passed during Stalin's lifetime and whose existence was not acknowledged until after his death. Its modern equivalent is not Guantanamo Bay, but the prisons of Cuba, where Amnesty itself says a new generation of prisoners of conscience reside; or the labor camps of North Korea, which were set up on Stalinist lines; or China's ], the true size of which isn't even known; or, until recently, the prisons of Saddam Hussein's Iraq." </blockquote>

], Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, defended the statement, saying, "What is 'absurd' is President Bush's attempt to deny the deliberate policies of his administration." and "What is 'absurd' and indeed outrageous is the Bush administration's failure to undertake a full independent investigation". Secretary General ] also responded saying, "The administration's response has been that our report is absurd, that our allegations have no basis, and our answer is very simple: if that is so, open up these detention centres, allow us and others to visit them."

===Manipulation of AI===
Critics have also claimed that AI had a role propagating "]" in a press release before the ], in which it charged that ]i soldiers were responsible for the deaths of "scores of civilians, including newborn babies, who died as a direct result of their forced removal from life-support machines." It later transpired that this claim was a propaganda hoax, and AI's press release was used in the opening salvo of this propaganda campaign &ndash; ] ] showed AI's press release on a prime time interview. Prof. Francis Boyle, an AI director at the time, gives a detailed insider account of the way the AI press release was handled. The normal process of double-checking and consultation was short-circuited in a rush to issue the press release. In an April 1991 statement, AI said that although its team was shown alleged mass graves of babies, it was not established how they had died and the team found no reliable evidence that Iraqi forces had caused the deaths of babies by removing them or ordering their removal from incubators. Supporters of AI point out that such mistakes by AI are rare; and that in any case such propaganda claims are common in war, and AI was merely an unfortunate conduit for them in this instance.

===Leading critics===
Perhaps the main critic of AI is ], a professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign, and a former member of Amnesty International USA's board of directors &ndash; he left AI because of his disagreements about the coverage of human rights in certain countries, especially in the ]. In fact, he threatened to sue AI over its biased coverage, but at the last minute the lawsuit was settled out of court.

Forthcoming is a book by Professor ] entitled "''Keepers of the Flame''" a discourse into the turbulent politics of the International Secretariat, Amnesty's headquarters in London.

], in her book ''Fool's Crusade'', alleged that AI played an uncritical role during the various Balkan wars, and discusses the case of a woman who was taken on a 25 US-city tour with a film about her ordeal as an alleged rape camp victim. According to Johnstone, the alleged rape camp victim, ], was actually a senior propagandist in the Croatian government, and a close confidante of President ].

*Prof. ], a professor of international law at York Univ., Toronto, Canada. Mandel criticizes AI's stance pertaining the wars in the Balkans and Iraq.
*Prof. ], professor anthropology at Henry Ford Univ., Michigan, USA. He has written a comparative study of ten human rights organizations.
*Prof. ], professor of Comparative English Literature at Dogus Univ., Turkey.
*Prof. ], UNED, Dept. Comparative Educational Systems, Madrid, Spain.
*] (three articles discussing various aspects of AI's alleged bias).


==See also== ==See also==
Line 146: Line 104:
* (UK Charity Commission) * (UK Charity Commission)


===Articles critical of AI===
*Jonathan V. Last, , ], ], ]. Alleges AI has anti-American/Israel bias.
*Christopher Archangelli, , ], ], ]. Alleges AI has anti-American bias regarding Iraq.
*] &ndash; Points to a running list of criticism of various NGOs, AI in particular.
*Nabeel Abraham, et al.; , Middle East Report (MERIP), Vol. 18, No. 1, Jan.-Feb. 1988, pp. 12 &ndash; 20. Argues that several organizations, including AI, are biased against Palestinians.
*Nabeel Abraham, , ''Lies of Our Times'', May 1992, pp. 2 &ndash; 4. Claims AI and other groups are reticent in describing alleged torture on the part of Israel.
*Dennis Bernstein's with Prof. Francis Boyle, ''CAQ'', Summer 2002. Boyle, a former AI-USA board member, threatened to sue AI-USA over its alleged biased coverage.
*Alexander Cockburn, , CounterPunch newsletter, April 1-15, 1999. Alleges several human rights organizations "fell into line" regarding the bombing of Serbia.
*Michael Mandel, ''How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against Humanity'', Pluto Press 2004. Alleges AI is selective in defending "human rights", in particular, regarding the US-Iraq war 2003, and the War in the Balkans.
*Paul de Rooij, , CounterPunch, ], ]. *Paul de Rooij, , CounterPunch, ], ].
*Paul de Rooij, , CounterPunch, ] ]. Contains a reading list. Alleges AI has anti-Palestinian bias.
*American Gulag at ].


<!-- Category boxes and interwiki links --> <!-- Category boxes and interwiki links -->

Revision as of 19:43, 20 February 2006

File:Amnesty Logo.gif

Amnesty International (commonly known as Amnesty or AI) is an international, non-governmental organization with the stated purpose of promoting all the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international standards. In particular, Amnesty International campaigns to free all prisoners of conscience; to ensure fair and prompt trials for political prisoners; to abolish the death penalty, torture, and other treatment of prisoners it regards as cruel; to end political killings and forced disappearances; and to oppose all human rights abuses, whether by governments or by other groups.

History

Amnesty International was founded in 1961 by a British lawyer named Peter Benenson and a Quaker named Eric Baker. Benenson was reading his newspaper and was shocked and angered to come across the story of two Portuguese students sentenced to seven years in prison – for the crime of raising their glasses in a toast to freedom. Benenson wrote to David Astor, editor of The Observer newspaper, who, on May 28, published Benenson's article entitled The Forgotten Prisoners that asked readers to write letters showing support for the students. The response was so overwhelming that within a year groups of letter writers had formed in more than a dozen countries, writing to defend victims of injustice wherever they might be.

By mid-1962, Amnesty had groups working or forming in West Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Canada, Ceylon, Greece, Australia, the United States, New Zealand (Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand), Ghana, Israel, Mexico, Argentina, Jamaica, Malaya, Congo (Brazzaville), Ethiopia, Nigeria, Burma, and India. Later in that year, a member of one of these groups, Diana Redhouse, designed Amnesty's Candle and Barbed-Wire logo.

In its early years, Amnesty focused only on articles 18 and 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights – those dealing with political prisoners, or more precisely, prisoners of conscience who espoused non-violence.

Amnesty and its writers campaigned for the release of prisoners in many oppressive regimes around the world; all such regimes were pressured equally, no matter which side (if either) of the Cold War they might align with. For example, the Spring 1986 newsletter campaigns for the release of specific prisoners from Guatemala, South Korea, South Africa, Syria, the U.S.S.R., and Vietnam.

Amnesty International was in particular a thorn in the side of the Soviet Union; they published detailed reports both of conditions in Soviet prisons and of how the Soviet political system as a whole was structured to prevent dissent and political freedom. Soviet internal security documents later found in archives indicated concern about Amnesty's anti-Soviet activities. Natan Sharansky is one of the more famous Soviet prisoners whose eventual release was secured with the help of Amnesty.

Amnesty was also very active in condemning oppressive regimes which commited murders, disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and outright massacres against their own citizens. For example, the September/October 1988 newsletter's lead article was an appeal to the United Nations Security Council to "act immediately to stop the massacre of Kurdish civilians by Iraqi forces" under Saddam Hussein.

In 1977 Amnesty won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work defending human rights around the world.

During the 1980s, Amnesty increased its visibility via popular culture events, including The Secret Policeman's Balls series, the 1986 U.S.-based A Conspiracy of Hope Tour, and the 1988 worldwide Human Rights Now! Tour.

Over time, the organization has expanded its mission to work to prevent and end grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity, freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the context of its work to promote all human rights. Amnesty is currently running global campaigns to "Control Arms", "Stop Violence Against Women" and to end the "Death Penalty", amongst others. Amnesty also works directly on behalf of individuals suffering human rights abuses. In 2000 alone, AI worked on the cases of 3,685 named individuals – and in over a third of those cases, an improvement in the prisoner's condition occurred. Today, there are upwards of 7,500 AI groups with almost two million members operating in 162 countries and territories. Since AI was founded, it has worked to defend more than 44,600 prisoners in hundreds of countries.

Goals and strategy

AI aims to maintain every human's basic rights as established under the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. In accordance with this belief, Amnesty works to:

  • Free all Prisoners of Conscience (a "POC" is a person imprisoned for the peaceful exercise of their beliefs, which differs somewhat from the typical use of the term political prisoner).
  • Ensure fair and prompt trials.
  • Abolish all forms of torture and ill-treatment of prisoners, including the use of the death penalty.
  • End state-sanctioned terrorism, killings, and disappearances.
  • Assist political asylum-seekers.
  • Co-operate with organizations that seek to put an end to human rights abuses.
  • Raise awareness about human rights abuses around the world.

To fulfill these goals, Amnesty sends teams of researchers to investigate claims of human rights abuses. It publicizes its findings and mobilizes its members to lobby against the abuse — by letter-writing (to various government officials), protesting, demonstrating, organizing fund-raisers, educating the public about the offence, or sometimes all of the above.

Amnesty International works to combat individual offences (e.g. one man imprisoned for distributing banned literature in Saudi Arabia) as well as more general policies (e.g. the recently overturned policy of executing juvenile offenders in certain U.S. states). Amnesty works primarily on the local level but its forty-year history of action and its Nobel Peace Prize give it international recognition.

Most AI members utilize letter-writing to get their message across. When the central Amnesty International organization finds and validates to its satisfaction instances of human rights abuse, they notify each of more than 7,000 local groups as well as over one million independent members, including 300,000 in the United States alone. Groups and members then respond by writing letters of protest and concern to a government official closely involved in the case, generally without mentioning Amnesty directly.

Amnesty International follows a neutrality policy called the "country rule" stating that members should not be active in issues in their own nation, which also protects them from potential mistreatment by their own government. This principle is also applied to researchers and campaigners working for the International Secretariat to prevent domestic political loyalties influencing coverage.

Recently, Amnesty has expanded the scope of its work to include economic, social and cultural rights, saying that these concerns had arisen out of its traditional work on political and civil rights. Its 2004 annual report said that "it is difficult to achieve sustainable progress towards implementation of any one human right in isolation. ... AI will strive to ... assert a holistic view of rights protection. It will be particularly important to do so in relation to extreme poverty, and the human rights issues underlying poverty." As an example it asserts that "The right to effective political participation depends on a free media, but also on an educated and literate population."

Organization

Irene Khan, Secretary General since August 2001

Amnesty International is governed by the International Executive Council (IEC) – a board of eight members elected for two-year terms by the International Council Meeting, which is itself composed of delegates from each country's Board of Directors. The IEC hires a Secretary General (since 2001, Irene Khan) and an International Secretariat, located in London.

National and local organizational structures vary. In the United States, individual members, regardless of age, and each individual organization votes to elect members to the 18-seat national Board of Directors for a three-year term. The Board of Directors hires an Executive Director and a staff.

Secretary Generals

Finances

Amnesty International is a non-partisan organization financed largely by subscriptions and donations from its worldwide membership, and except for a small core of paid directors, 200 or so full-time researchers in the International Secretariat in London, and various coordinators and organisers in national sections, most of Amnesty's members and coordinators of local groups, and many supporters contributing time and energy to the organisation, are volunteers. It does not accept donations from governments or governmental organizations. Amnesty's budget for the 2002 fiscal year included:

  • Membership Support: £2,816,800 (12%)
  • Campaigning Activities: £2,387,100 (10%)
  • Publications and Translation: £2,810,600 (12%)
  • Research and Action: £5,828,800 (26%)
  • Deconcentrated Offices: £1,720,400 (7%)
  • Research and Action Support: £3,481,100 (15%)
  • Administrative Costs: £3,918,400 (18%)
  • Relief Payments: £48,000
  • Total: £23,728,000 (including contingency)


See also

Notes

External links

link title

Categories: