from Frida Ghitis at TNR.
She draws attention to a set of problems that are related to but not quite the same as the ones I noted a couple of days ago. I emphasized the organization’s institutional stance that no system of government is preferable to any other, that human rights abuses just kind of happen rather than being matters of official policy in some cases and not in others. This requires a pose of believing in equivalence among liberal democracies, theocracies, military dictatorships, and so on. [see UPDATE below.]
Ghitis notes that the press release announcing publication of this year’s report and the introductory letter from Amnesty’s secretary general, Irene Khan, that pose turns into something even more perverse. On the narrow understanding of Amnesty’s mission that is the justification of taking no stands on political questions, Amnesty should also not have a view on pre-emptive war. If it’s not entitled to an official view about the political-systemic causes of human rights abuses, it’s also not entitled to an official view about the causes of diminished respect for the UN. If it’s not entitled to say that Saudi Arabia’s system of government is just worse from a human rights perspective than is Sweden’s, it’s certainly not entitled to the view that
The global security agenda promoted by the US Administration is bankrupt of vision and bereft of principle. Violating rights at home, turning a blind eye to abuses abroad and using pre-emptive military force where and when it chooses has damaged justice and freedom, and made the world a more dangerous place.
The press release and the letter purport to complain about the fact that the war on terror and the war in Iraq have distracted attention from ongoing human rights and humanitarian crises; but they themselves skip the opportunity to draw attention to, e.g., human rights abuses in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, Russia in favor of devoting lots of space to U.S. foreign policy.
Update:
No way is such “equivalence” entailed by the Amnesty statement of aims that Jacob quoted and it is lazy of him to suggest that it is.
Hmm. I’ll think about that. In the meantime, I do think Chris is right about the following:
it is absurd to suggest as Frida Ghitis does in the TNR piece that Jacob approvingly links to that Amnesty “has decided to stop doing its job” — since it demonstrably continues to produce the many detailed country-by-country resports that are its staple.
As I said in my original post, I trust the country reports a great deal. The headline-grabbing front material Ghitis criticizes distracts from the country reports and focuses on material that’s pretty different from the torture and extrajudicial killings that Chirs represents as Amnesty’s overlapping consensus. But distracting from them is not the same as replacing them. The country reports remain the really important heart of Amnesty’s work.
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