Human Rights NGOs Increasingly Beholding to their Masters

Is Amnesty International abandoning human rights?
2 September, 2012 – By Bev Cotton – Uprooted Palestinians

The internationally renowned journalist, Greg Palast offers the following advice in his 1999 book “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” – “if you are a member of Amnesty International, quit”. Mr. Palast’s brush with Amnesty was in a court case in which he was sued after quoting Amnesty research containing allegations against the multinational mining company, Barrick. Amnesty refused to verify their own research in court. As Palast says, “Amnesty wants journalists to report their material. I would say to any journalist that they would be completely, utterly and absolutely insane to ever cite Amnesty again.”

Failure to prioritise human rights

Why do increasing numbers of people believe that Amnesty has abandoned the cause of human rights? As Francis Boyle, ex board member of Amnesty International USA – and renowned expert in international law puts it:

“Amnesty International is primarily motivated not by human rights but by publicity. Second comes money… To be sure, if you are dealing with a human rights situation in a country that is at odds with the United States or Britain, it gets an awful lot of attention… But if it’s dealing with violations of human rights by the United States, Britain, Israel, then it’s like pulling teeth to get them to really do something on the situation”.

Moral flatulence

That was in 2001. A neater solution to this problem has been found by Amnesty since – to issue very little meaningful data at all. Issues from the entire region of the Middle East and North Africa are now channeled through a single Amnesty office, MENA. As its UK director describes it “I should say a little about the campaign I manage here – Crisis & Transition in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA). It’s fair to say it is an ambitious, labyrinthine and long term campaign but when I am asked what it is really about I say “Solidarity with people peacefully demanding change”.

All of which means, well, nothing really. When asked recently why Amnesty International Ireland (AII) had failed to issue any briefings over the past year about a supposedly priority campaign for Zimbabwe, the answer was that the whole organisation was ‘still in transition’. In transition to what, exactly? And from what? Meanwhile MENA, originally a military campaign term, serves to bury the vast scale of human rights abuses in Palestine by losing them in a stream of information about a region that includes 523 million people and 6% of the world’s population.

As ex Amnesty supporter Paul De Rooij writes in CounterPunch:

“Reading AI’s reports doesn’t reveal why there is a conflict in the area in the first place…. The portrayal of violence is stripped of its context, and historical references are minimal…. The fact that Palestinians have endured occupation, expulsion, and dispossession for many decades, the explanation of why the conflict persists, is nowhere highlighted in its reports”.

He concludes, “today, most AI pronouncements range between moral flatulence and moral fraudulence”.

Lack of transparency

You would think that transparency would be a cornerstone of a human rights campaign group. However, Amnesty International Ireland has still failed, even after a resolution calling for openness at its 2011 AGM, to publish its staff salaries. The approximately 20 local groups are sending no more than a few thousand euro each to AII annually, and membership subscription internationally is falling after the scandal over the expensive and unexplained sacking of two of Amnesty’s senior staff in 2009. When asked by members of the Clonakilty group recently a representative of AII was unable to explain what its sources of funding are, how much they receive and on what it is spent.

Meanwhile AII is running a Mental Health Campaign part funded by Atlantic Philanthropies that bears an uncanny resemblance to the government’s rationale for its attempts to reduce services and cut funding. AII threw itself behind government closures of allegedly failing residential centres in the claimed expectation that “care in the community” was a more humane policy. Investing in improving the much needed centres was off the agenda. As was expected by many who depend on them, closures of residential services have gone ahead speedily and efficiently while the corresponding funds for care in the community have not only failed to materialise but existing funding has now been drastically cut. …more