Amnesty International

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.

Responses to charges of "ideological bias"

Most defenders of Amnesty readily concede that a belief in an objective morality (ie. the rejection of relativism) is central to the organisation's work. Therefore, while they accept that AI's position on the universality of human rights standards is inconsistent with relativism, they would argue that this fact is irrelevant.

Related Topics:
Objective morality - Relativism - Human rights

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The charge that AI is biased in its application of human rights standards is, however, a more serious one - because, if true, AI will have failed in one of its central aims - that of "impartiality".

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Defenders of Amnesty believe that the accusation of a generalised ideological bias is inaccurate or exaggerated, and cite the Israel-Palestine controversy as an instructive example. Some critics of AI have argued, as NGO Monitor does, that AI has an anti-Israeli bias. Others, like the commentator Paul de Rooij (listed below), claim that Amnesty is biased in Israel's favour.

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Looking at the controversy as a whole, AI defenders argue that at least one set of critics must be wrong, because it's logically impossible for one organisation to have a generalised bias in two diametrically opposed directions. Either Amnesty is, on balance, pro-Israeli, or anti-Israeli, or neither.

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The fact that Amnesty has managed to arouse such strong passions on both sides of the Israel-Palestine debate suggests, claim Amnesty's defenders, that the organisation is managing to keep a reasonably balanced perspective.

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By trying to engage, in a neutral way, with issues as hotly contested as Israel-Palestine, it's inevitable that AI will find itself coming under attack from both sides, say AI's defenders.

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2005: Guantánamo Bay "the gulag of our times."

In a foreword to AI's International Report 2005, the Secretary General, Irene Khan, made a passing reference to the Guantánamo Bay prison as "the gulag 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 prison system covertly run by the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin to "re-educate" over 20 million "political dissidents" through torture, forced labour, and other tactics. Even taking into account Khan's mention of other related aspects of the war on terror, such as extraordinary rendition, this is not a comparison which the AI report itself supports.{{NamedRef|NewStatesman|1}}

Related Topics:
Irene Khan - Guantánamo Bay - Gulag - Prison system - Soviet Union - Josef Stalin - Dissidents - War on terror - Extraordinary rendition

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U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called the report "reprehensible", Vice President Dick Cheney said he was "offended" by the report, and President Bush called the report "absurd" in a May 31, 2005 press conference. In an editorial, the Washington Post lamented that "lately the organization has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world's dictators but for the United States":"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 laogai, the true size of which isn't even known; or, until recently, the prisons of Saddam Hussein's Iraq."http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/25/AR2005052501838.html?nav=mb

Related Topics:
Donald Rumsfeld - Dick Cheney - President Bush - May 31 - 2005 - Washington Post - Laogai

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William F. Schulz, 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 Irene Khan 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."

Related Topics:
William F. Schulz - Irene Khan

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Manipulation of AI

Critics have also claimed that AI had a role propagating "disinformation" in a press release before the 1991 Gulf War, in which it charged that Iraqi 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 – U.S. President George H. W. Bush 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 handledhttp://www.corkpsc.org/db.php?aid=4573. 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.http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/kuwait/document.do?id=D45F2AF72CFB7A7E802569A600600E2C 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.

Related Topics:
Disinformation - 1991 Gulf War - Iraq - U.S. President - George H. W. Bush

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Leading critics

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

Related Topics:
Francis Boyle - Arab-Israeli conflict

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

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Diana Johnstone, 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, Jadranka Cigelj, was actually a senior propagandist in the Croatian government, and a close confidante of President Franjo Tudjman.

Related Topics:
Diana Johnstone - Jadranka Cigelj - Franjo Tudjman

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