Amnesty International is an independent human-rights organization which issues regular reports on violations of human rights throughout the world and works for the release of what it calls Prisoners of Conscience (political prisoners who have neither used nor advocated violence). The organization, which boasts an overall membership of 168,000, is based in London but has national sections in 33 countries and individual members in 107. In this country, Amnesty International USA has chapters in 32 states and last year had a budget of $750,000.
According to AI, in the sixteen years of its existence it has helped secure the release of more than 13,000 prisoners. But it is only in the last few years that the organization has itself attained international prominence, culminating in the award to it of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1977. As the Nobel Committee said in its citation: “In a world of increasing brutality, internationalization of violence, terrorism, and torture, Amnesty International used its forces for the protection of human values.” No doubt the luster of a Nobel Prize will enable AI to increase its membership and to increase as well the amount of money it raises.
A widely respected organization, AI has emerged in recent years as the most powerful lobbying group in the world for human rights, and has earned the support (at least in the United States) of persons of all political persuasions. Though some of its findings have been disputed, its reports are generally regarded as impartial and reasonably accurate. But now that it has come of age and promises to become even more influential in the future, AI would seem to deserve a closer look—a task that is aided by the recent publication of a 352-page annual report that is the most extensive in the organization’s history.1 For there may be serious problems, both with the theory by which AI operates—particularly on the issue of what it includes under the rubric of human rights—and with its practice.
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At first glance it might seem impossible to arrive at any universal agreement about what constitutes a violation of human rights. Many people believe, for instance, that because Western legal and cultural traditions differ fundamentally from non-Western traditions, no consensus can be reached on the definition of human rights. In China, John K. Fairbank points out, the notion of civil liberties does not exist. “Habeas corpus, presumptive innocence, right of counsel, no self-incrimination, jury trial, and other civil liberties depend on the supremacy of law,” he writes, “but Chinese tradition and practice do not accept the supremacy of law. . . .” And what about the Islamic law that condemns persons to death by stoning for committing adultery, fornication, or sodomy? (According to AI, three men were executed in this manner in Saudi Arabia last year.)
Against such views, Peter L. Berger has argued that some actions are indeed universally considered as violations of human rights (“Are Human Rights Universal?” COMMENTARY, September 1977). Among those he lists are genocide, torture, forced labor, the forced separation of families, and religious persecution. According to Berger, in condemning these as violations of human rights “we can call upon a consensus far wider than that of Western civilization. That consensus emerges from all the major world cultures, especially in their religious foundations. . . .”
Berger’s list is one that most people in the world would accept—one, moreover, that AI has generally followed in husbanding its limited resources. Thus, a good deal of its time and money is devoted exclusively to the question of torture. Last year, AI’s Campaign for the Abolition of Torture, which is a major part of its overall program, published pamphlets on Evidence of Torture: Studies by the Amnesty International Danish Medical Group and on Professional Codes of Ethics, the latter dealing in part with the responsibilities of the medical profession in connection with torture. Moreover, AI often issues reports on torture in particular countries. It is hard to say whether the campaign has been effective in reducing torture throughout the world; but it is clear that the fact that torture has come to be recognized as an international problem is in large part due, as AI justifiably says, to “Amnesty International’s years of campaigning on the issue.”
In addition to its preoccupation with torture, however, AI is also on record as opposing “by all appropriate means the imposition and infliction of death penalties. . . .” In this, AI follows the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948. But AI does not merely pay lip service to the UN Declaration; it is quite insistent about its opposition to the death penalty. Martin Ennals, AI’s Secretary General, says that “Amnesty International’s opposition to torture and the death penalty is absolute and embraces all cases regardless of the nature of the offenses involved” (emphasis added). And, as if to stress the seriousness of its commitment, AI has planned a year-long educational and publicity campaign on the death penalty—an effort that began last December with an international conference in Stockholm.
Now, the death penalty is clearly a very different matter from the practice of torture. Many countries have laws that authorize the death penalty for certain crimes, whereas there are no laws authorizing torture. Torture by its very nature is outside all legal systems, something that is practiced clandestinely and arbitrarily. As known law, the death penalty is subject to debate, adjudication, amendment, even abolition; torture is not. It is thus one thing for AI to protest against the widespread practice, in Ethiopia, of “extra-judicial execution,” another name for mass terror. It is another thing to intervene, as AI did in France, to try to commute the sentence of a man convicted of “attempted rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl,” or to mount an Urgent Action campaign—massive letter-writing and telegrams—to prevent the execution of Gary Gilmore, a convicted double murderer, in Utah last year. One need not be in favor of the death penalty to recognize the elementary distinction here between cases of criminal behavior which no society can leave unpunished and cases of government injustice that are acknowledged as such by most of the human community.
AI seems determined to move into other areas that, as with the death penalty, are only tangentially related to its original concerns. In the United States, where, as AI admits, there is no overt political imprisonment, it nevertheless suspects that “many people may be ‘framed’ on criminal charges because of their political activities or ethnic origin. . . .” By “political” AI seems to mean racial, for AI has intervened almost exclusively on behalf of blacks and American Indians. A recent article in the Washington Post took a close look at the case of these so-called political prisoners cited by AI, and it does seem that in several instances there were serious abuses in the handling of the trial. Yet here too questions may be raised. Some—perhaps many—criminal trials in the United States may not be “fair,” but any number of reasons may account for this, having nothing whatever to do with politics. Furthermore, the case of someone convicted of criminal charges in a country which knows the right of further legal appeal, and even of petition to political authorities, is miles apart from the case of someone convicted of clearly trumped-up criminal charges in a country where Western legal traditions are nonexistent or exist on paper only. As with its blanket opposition to the death penalty, AI’s argument ignores such important distinctions.
AI’s intervention in a number of criminal trials in the United States is in line with the very broad view it takes of Prisoners of Conscience, whom it defines as persons who “are imprisoned, detained, restricted, or otherwise subjected to physical coercion or restriction by reason of their political, religious, or other conscientiously held beliefs or by reason of their ethnic origin, color, or language, provided that they have not used or advocated violence.” That this definition applies to an Anatoly Shcharansky is obvious, but it has also led AI to spend time on behalf of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who in many countries go to jail not because they refuse induction into the military but because they refuse even to apply for conscientious-objector status. Aside from the fact that the Jehovah’s Witnesses themselves apparently resent AI’s intrusion into their affairs, it seems plain that in calling such people Prisoners of Conscience the organization is willfully overstepping the line between persecuted “beliefs” and those negative actions—a refusal to serve in the army or to pay an income tax—which the state surely has a right to punish.
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The increasingly indiscriminate attitude AI has been taking toward the question of what constitutes a violation of human rights has resulted, in turn, in the emergence in its literature of a strange picture of the landscape of injustice. A country that has a strong tradition of respect for human rights in general and civil liberties in particular may look bad in AI’s eyes if it executes a number of convicted criminals in any given year. Conversely, a country with an “enlightened” criminal code—i.e., no death penalty—may escape AI’s censure while quietly doing away with countless political undesirables. In AI’s annual report for 1977, Switzerland rates two paragraphs for violations of human rights whereas North Korea rates only one. In the United States, where even the existence of the category itself is open to question, AI has “adopted” 14 Prisoners of Conscience; in Cuba, where thousands rot in prison camps, AI has a mere 25.
If its indiscriminate application of central concepts has led to a distortion in AI’s work, the curious fact about that distortion is that, with an important exception, it obeys the logic of Left and Right. The world that confronts the reader of AI’s recent literature—its newsletters, pamphlets, news releases, and the latest annual report—is one in which the regimes that seem to be the most scandalously repressive are usually of the rightist variety, with Chile, the Philippines, Argentina, and Uruguay leading the pack, while those on the Left receive by comparison higher marks. The important exception is Communist Eastern Europe, and especially the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, countries to which AI pays very close attention indeed.
The fact that AI has received the support of Andrei Amalrik and Vladimir Bukovsky, and earned the public displeasure of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, certainly underlines its commitment in principle to exposing human-rights violations wherever they occur. Still, there are realities that AI must live with—realities subsumed under what might be called Moynihan’s Law, after Daniel P. Moynihan’s observation that the more voices we hear in a particular country protesting injustice, the less repressive that country is likely to be. AI is stuck with the news it can get, and it usually finds it easier to get news from countries that have rightist, authoritarian regimes—not to speak of countries that are democratic—than from countries whose governments are leftist and totalitarian. The consequence is that in AI’s latest annual report, the same number of pages (four and a half) is devoted to Singapore as is devoted to China. Four pages are devoted to human-rights violations in West Germany, only two and a half to East Germany; three and a half pages to Chile, only two and a half to Cuba; four and a half pages to South Korea, only two to Cambodia.
The number of pages on each country obviously only tells part of the story; more important is the nature of the news being recounted. Here too the reports often “favor” leftist regimes, since the information available on their practices is usually very vague, whereas the information on rightist regimes is often detailed. About Cambodia, for example, AI says that reports of widespread killings, amounting really to genocide, have been denied by the foreign minister and “remain unverifiable because foreign journalists are not allowed to visit and information leaving the country is severely restricted.” Needless to say, the reports on torture in the Philippines, Chile, and Uruguay—where the absolute numbers of victims are by comparison minuscule—are graphic and full.
The effect of AI’s reports is thus to make rightist, authoritarian regimes look worse than leftist, totalitarian ones. Whether intentional or not, this is certainly in conformity with the view of things that prevails in the court of international public opinion, where rightist regimes suffer a kind of obloquy that leftist regimes rarely have to endure. Yet it should not need to be stressed that by a truly impartial yardstick, it is the regimes of the Left whose records are by far the more heinous. The Washington Post recently reported, for example, that for several days prior to President Pinochet’s plebiscite in Chile, “Several thousand young people wound through downtown streets shouting ‘no’ and chanting slogans last heard more than four years ago during the government of leftist President Salvador Allende.” And the New York Times recently reported that in South Korea, “more than 500 people packed a Christian center in downtown Seoul for 90 minutes of prayers mixed with denunciations of the suppression of human rights by the government of President Park Chung Hee.” Can anyone imagine such demonstrations being allowed to take place in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Rumania, Vietnam, or North Korea? Or even, for that matter, in Hungary—the “model” leftist state? Yet it is Chile that remains the bête noire of “enlightened” opinion, and this is faithfully reflected in the literature of AI.
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Has AI, then, become politically biased? There is some evidence that this may be so. AI’s literature tends to exhibit an automatic distrust of all rightist governments, and an equally automatic desire to give leftist governments—with the exception of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia—the benefit of the doubt. Thus, in its latest annual report, AI provides a rather low figure for the number of political prisoners in Vietnam—200,000—and then quotes without comment from a broadcast by Hanoi Radio which, in effect, justifies the current regime’s program of “reeducation.” According to Hanoi Radio, those who undergo prolonged “reeducation” in the new Vietnam include “members of the Green Berets, the rangers, the paratroops, marines, policemen, prison guards, district officials, village chiefs, and secret agents who were trained by the United States.” In other words, they are only getting what they deserve. It is unclear why AI chose to let the government of Vietnam give its own explanation of the reasons for there being so many political prisoners in that country, but one thing is clear: AI never fails to question any statement by government officials of rightist regimes.
In its rundown of the situation in Cuba, to take another example, the way AI speculates about the number of political prisoners borders upon the evasive. “The figure of 4,000-5,000,” it says, “put forward in Amnesty International Report 1975-1976, applies only to those prisoners whom the Cuban authorities . . . recognize as being detained on political charges. This category of prisoner appears to have become smaller in the last year; the total now lies between 2,000 and 3,000.” This figure, according to AI, was “confirmed by Fidel Castro in a televised interview with the American journalist Barbara Walters in June 1977.” Why, one wonders again, should Fidel Castro be allowed to confirm anything, when AI would never let the likes of a Pinochet or a Marcos or a Park Chung Hee do the same? But it is the misleading statistics that are more troubling here. In a recent article in Christian Century—one. that is in the main favorable to Castro—Dean Peerman has quite a different story to tell. “Exile groups in Florida,” he writes, “claim that there are more than 100,000 [political prisoners], but this is probably a highly inflated figure just as the figure cited by Castro—2,000 to 3,000 (in his interview with Barbara Walters)—is no doubt deflated. Latin Americanist Roger Fontaine of Georgetown University insists that Cuba’s political prisoners number between 40,000 and 60,000, but most of the responsible estimates seem to range from 10,000 to 20,000.”2
The language in which AI describes the situation in Cuba is remarkably restrained and diplomatic—as if AI wanted to reassure the Cubans that basically it thinks well of them. We learn that AI has “continued discussions” with Cuban officials, mainly through the UN, the purpose of which is “to explain the organization’s concern—especially its concern over the situation of human rights in Cuba.” AI also speaks of “lengthy discussions with officials” whom it met at a UN-sponsored conference in Cuba in 1976. In the analysis of Chile, on the other hand, the language is very different; instead of lengthy discussions, there is a worldwide publicity campaign, whose aims are “to arouse international opinion, to get from the Chilean authorities precise details about what had happened to these people and to demand an end to the ‘disappearances’. . . .”
The attitude AI takes toward Chile is very much the attitude it takes toward other rightist governments. In a lead article on Argentina in the Winter 1977 issue of Matchbox, the newsletter of AI’s American section, the 1,300 persons said to have been killed by government security forces there are categorized as those who “opposed the totalitarian regimes now in power in Uruguay and Argentina. . . .” Even aside from the fact that the current Argentine government is not totalitarian, it is amazing that an article on terror in Argentina should gloss over in one sentence, as this one does, the widespread incidence of left-wing terrorism there.
But such “exposés” of rightist regimes are not uncommon in AI’s newsletters, despite the organization’s proud insistence on its political neutrality. In the Fall 1977 issue of Matchbox, an article entitled “Manila Folder” attacks the government of the Philippines for holding an international conference on human rights when, in fact, the government systematically practices torture and detains people without trial. The author makes much of the contrast between the elegant hotel where the conferees were staying and the awful slum of Tondo, only a thirty-minute drive away. Where, one wonders, is a similar article on the international Conference in Support of the Peoples of Zimbabwe and Namibia held in Maputo, Mozambique, and attended by AI? According to AI’s own statistics, approximately 100,000 persons are languishing in “reeducation” camps in that country. And where is the article on another UN-sponsored international conference (on apartheid) that AI attended in Havana, Cuba, in May 1976?
It is true that in its literature AI does not begin to approach the notorious bias of the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations, which has claimed that the only nations consistently employing torture, suppressing dissidents, and imprisoning political foes are Israel, South Africa, and Chile. But neither does AI stray far from that body’s view of the world. “AI concerned at Arab prisoners’ hunger-strike in Israel,” went one news release last year. “AI concerned at Democratic Kampuchean [Cambodian] government’s lack of response to appeals” went another—the sole release on Cambodia last year (as opposed to five on Chile). According to Jean Lacouture, the Cambodian government is carrying out “the bloodiest revolution in history,” yet AI shows no more concern about it than about a prison hunger-strike in democratic Israel. It is hard to resist the conclusion that some policy, or at least some conscious set of attitudes, is at work behind AI’s increasingly frequent practice of whispering softly when it comes to Vietnam, Cuba, China, and Cambodia but shouting vehemently when it comes to Argentina, Chile, the Philippines, and South Korea.
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The specter of the possible politicization of AI is brought home dramatically in a letter that recently appeared in the New York Review of Books. Signed by two members of the governing board of the American section of AI as well as by many others, the letter brands President Carter’s human-rights policy as hypocritical, condemns repression in Eastern Europe, and also castigates the regimes of Iran, Chile, Brazil, South Korea, Argentina, South Africa, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Nothing is said about repression in Cambodia, Cuba, Vietnam, and China. But this is not all. The letter goes on to dwell on all manner of human “rights” that are, it says, violated by the American government: the “right” to abortion, the “right” to child-care facilities, the “right” to affirmative action in employment, education, and housing. This blatant enlistment of the language of human rights in the service of a partisan political position is a truly ominous sign. If it were an aberration from AI’s habitual practice, there would be little cause to remark upon it. It seems more likely, however, that the organization as a whole is moving away from its original purpose, a concern with violations of human rights all over the world, to a selective and predictable partisanship. If this is really so, it will mark the ruination of an enterprise that has brought hope to many.
1 Amnesty International Report 1977, Amnesty International Publications, $3.95.
2 In the February Encounter, Hugh Thomas, the noted authority on Cuba, reminds us that Castro himself fairly recently admitted the existence of some 23,000 political prisoners in Cuba. Thomas comments: “Rarely publicized by the world's philanthropic agencies, these half-forgotten prisoners continue their terrible travail, many of them in unspeakable conditions and without hope of release.”
