I have written on occasion about the ideological and political corruption of those groups that claim the mantle of human rights advocacy. The American Friends Service Committee, for example, a 1947 Nobel peace prize laureate, has since conflated pacifism with politics and has subsequently shilled for such regimes at the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, North Korea’s murderous regime, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Human Rights Watch has become so obsessed with the Jewish state, that it has lost its moral bearings. Indeed, Robert L. Bernstein, the founding chairman of Human Rights Watch, took to the pages of the New York Times in 2009 to call his former organization out for its bias, polemics, and lack of professionalism. It gets worse: Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International partnered with an al-Qaeda financier cloaking himself as a human rights advocate. Even after his terrorist designation, however, neither group bothered to review the materials that he had supplied them and which they incorporated blindly into their own reporting.
Enter “Advancing Human Rights,” (AHR) founded by Bernstein in the wake of his public criticism of Human Rights Watch. What makes AHR different is rather than simply posture and pontificate — effectively what Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth does today — AHR seeks to actively help dissidents and potential dissidents through the power of crowdsourcing and other technologies. (I had written here, four years ago, with regard to some of the technologies that might be used to bypass censorship in autocratic states, and the bang for the buck that the United States would gain for supporting them).
In 2014, AHR launched Movements.org, which, according to its self-descriptions, “connects dissidents in closed societies with individuals around the world with skills to help.” The initial results are modest but show promise. The group reports that it has helped “Iranian activists connect with journalists, North Korean defectors get help from technology experts, [and] Syrian refugees receive legal advice from lawyers.”
There is a troubling tendency among diplomats to try to keep the plight of dissidents, prisoners, and hostages quiet. Often, diplomats argue that quiet diplomacy works better than the limelight, which might embarrass autocrats and their agents. Seldom, if ever, however, is such advice motivated by the desire to help dissidents; rather, keeping the limelight off human rights violations is motivated more by the desire to make diplomats’ lives easier by keeping their relations with their counterparts unburdened by reality. AHR has entered into a partnership with The Daily Beast to help family members and friends tell the stories of their jailed loved ones; perhaps one day, the New York Times and Washington Post will also dedicate space for such a focus on dissidents.
AHR has embarrassed dictatorships in other ways. It organized thousands of Facebook users to demand Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif release jailed student activist Majid Tavakoli; they were successful, at least temporarily. I’ve always been a big fan of using humor and satire to deflate the pretense of autocrats to moral legitimacy. AHR takes this philosophy to a new level. Executive Director David Keyes, for example, threw an ice cream party to commemorate 1,000 hangings in Iran, forcing discussion of the deteriorating human rights situation in Iran as the United States and Europe rush to engage its regime, and AHR also sponsored a gay rights party at a hotel where Saudi Arabia was holding a jobs fair.
AHR has also spearheaded a drive to rename streets in front of the embassies of autocrats in honor of the dissidents they suppress. For example, in 2014, AHR spearheaded the drive to rename the street in front of China’s embassy in Washington, DC, to “Liu Xiaobo Plaza,” after China’s jailed Nobel Prize winner. (Despite the initial flurry of positive press, the effort is still ongoing).
Start-ups are renowned for their energy, whereas big corporations stall and grow stale. The same holds true with human rights organizations. AHR may still be small and only five-years-old, but it exudes energy and moral clarity while the industry standards — Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — have lost their way. It should come as no surprise, for example, that Human Rights Watch sees Saudi Arabia as an opportunity to raise money, whereas AHR sees it for what it is: one of the world’s most repressive societies.
Why does this matter? Once upon a time, dissidents understood that the United States stood for freedom and liberty. Today, they must understand that, despite the posturing of self-described human rights advocates like Samantha Power, it will more likely be the policy of the United States to throw dissidents under the bus. Nor can traditional human rights groups be trusted: in the context of American politics, the American Friends Service Committee, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International are today much more partisan advocacy shops than objective monitors. Under such circumstances, it is both imperative and healthy to take human rights stewardship directly to the people. Let’s hope AHR continues with the same energy over the next five years. Freedom and liberty should never be a tangential let alone lost cause.
