Chris Bertram says
Amnesty International’s annual report for 2004 is now out. A sobering reminder of how bad things are out there. It is also a reminder of how bad things are in world of chatterers, op-ed columnists and bloggers that we can expect (a) a great deal of moaning about how Amnesty has failed to treat country X (of which the writer approves) with due understanding, context, perspective etc; and (b) much noise about how the activites of country Y (of which the writer disapproves) are demonstrably condemned by the same report. Human rights are indivisible, and in my view, the burden of proof is on those whom Amnesty condemns to show their innocence.
He makes clear in the comments section that he means this to refer to Amnesty’s reporting of facts, not to their judgments about which facts constitute rights-violations. That’s a crucial qualification.
I do trust Amnesty’s reporting to a very high level of confidence. I don’t trust either the organization’s priorities, its understanding of human rights, or its understanding of the relationship between human rights and other things very far at all. Amnesty says
AI is independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it support or oppose the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect. It is concerned solely with the impartial protection of human rights.
This impartiality is in part a necessary pose, in part justified, and in part moral obtuseness. It seems to me necessary to remember simultaneously that torture is torture, and is reprehensible under whatever regime it takes place and that some political regimes and systems are built on and centrally dedicated to the violation of human rights and some aren’t. Not to oppose “any government or political system”– not Nazi Germany, Stalin’s USSR, apartheid South Africa, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Pinochet’s Chile, or insert-your-least-favorite-example-here– isn’t being an honest impartial assessor of human rights violations. It’s radically misunderstanding where human rights violations come from, and how they’re stopped. AI does great work embarrassing governments into releasing what the organization terms “prisoners of conscience.” But some political systems rely on, and endorse as a matter of principle, punishing people for their religious and political views. Others don’t. The one-prisoner-at-a-time, don’t-judge-the-system approach maintains the organization’s credibility with some governments. But it damages the organization’s moral credibility.
I also think there’s some deliberate slippage between the image of Amnesty as centrally concerned with prisoners of conscience, torture, extrajudicial executions, and “disappearances,” and the organization’s “vision […] of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards.” Those of us who think that the UDHR does not represent the best or truest understanding of human rights therefore have to have an ambivalent relationship to AI. Its work on torture, extrajudicial executions, and disappearnces is irreplaceable. And yet we don’t want that fact to provide moral cover for much more controversial claims about, e.g., social and economic rights.
I think one of the real virtues of Michael Ignatieff’s writing over the past couple of years has been to disrupt the simple equation of a human rights agenda with Amnesty International’s way of viewing the world. , and to reinfuse at least some human rights theory with a sense of the relationship between human rights and political systems.
None of this is to say that AI shouldn’t draw attention to human rights abuses committed by democracies. It is to say that a human rights agenda that doesn’t notice the difference between liberal democracy as a system and theocracy, military dicattorship, or totalitarianism as systems is so incomplete as to be distorting.
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