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Amnesty International (or AI) is an international non-governmental organization that works to promote all the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international standards. In particular, Amnesty International campaigns to free all prisoners of conscience; ensure fair and prompt trials for political prisoners; abolish the death penalty, torture, and other cruel treatment of prisoners; end political killings and forced disappearances; and oppose all human rights abuses, whether by governments or by opposition groups. Missing image
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HistoryAmnesty International was founded in 1961 by a British lawyer named Peter Benenson. Benenson was reading his newspaper and was shocked and angered to come across the story of two Portuguese students sentenced to seven years in prison – for the crime of raising their glasses in a toast to freedom. Benenson wrote to David Astor, editor of The Observer newspaper, who, on May 28, published Benenson's article entitled The Forgotten Prisoners that asked readers to write letters showing support for the students. The response was so overwhelming that within a year groups of letter writers had formed in more than a dozen countries, writing to defend victims of injustice wherever they might be. By mid-1962, Amnesty had groups working or forming in West Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Canada, Ceylon, Greece, Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Ghana, Israel, Mexico, Argentina, Jamaica, Malaya, Congo (Brazzaville), Ethiopia, Nigeria, Burma, and India. Later in that year, a member of one of these groups, Diana Redhouse, designed Amnesty's Candle and Barbed-Wire logo. In its early years, Amnesty focused only on articles 18 and 19 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights – those dealing with political prisoners. Over time, however, the organisation has expanded its mission to work for victims of some other categories of human rights violations, not just prisoners of conscience. In 2000 alone, AI worked on behalf of 3,685 named individuals – and in over a third of those cases, an improvement in the prisoner's condition occurred. Today, there are upwards of 7,500 AI groups with around a million members operating in 162 countries and territories. Since AI was founded, it has worked to defend more than 44,600 prisoners in hundreds of countries. In 1977 Amnesty won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work defending human rights around the world. Goals and strategyAI aims to maintain every human's basic rights as established under the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. In accordance with this belief, Amnesty works to:
To fulfil these goals, Amnesty operates as a vast lobby. When word is heard of a human rights abuse, Amnesty sends a team of researchers to thoroughly and impartially investigate the claim. If the claim is found to be legitimate, Amnesty publicizes its findings and mobilizes its members to act out against the abuse — by letter-writing (to various government officials), protesting, demonstrating, organizing fund-raisers, educating the public about the offense, or sometimes all of the above. Amnesty works to combat individual offenses (e.g. one man imprisoned for distributing banned literature in Saudi Arabia) as well as more general policies (e.g. the policy of executing juvenile offenders in certain U.S. states). Amnesty works primarily on the local level, but after more than forty years and a Nobel Peace Prize, the respect it has earned is enough to give it a powerful voice on the larger scale. Most AI members utilize letter-writing to get their message across. When the central Amnesty organization finds and validates instances of human rights abuse, they notify each of the local groups (more than 7,000, all told) as well as all independent members (300,000 in the US alone; over a million worldwide). Groups and members then respond by writing letters of protest and concern to a government official closely involved in the case, generally without mentioning Amnesty directly. Amnesty follows a policy that, to maintain neutrality, members should not be active in issues in their own nation. This also helps to protect them from being mistreated by their own government, if it is itself abusive. This principle, called the own country rule, is also applied to researchers and campaigners working for the International Secretariat, to prevent coverage of a country being distorted by the author's domestic political loyalties. FinancesAmnesty International is financed largely by subscriptions and donations from its worldwide membership, and except for a small core of paid directors, all of Amnesty's members, coordinators, organizers, and workers are volunteers. Amnesty is a non-partisan organization and does not accept money donations from governments or governmental organizations. All of Amnesty's capital comes from the pockets of its members and donations from other non-partisan organizations. Amnesty's budget for the 2000 fiscal year was as follows: Missing image Irene_Khan_2003.jpg Irene Khan, Secretary General since August 2001
OrganisationThe fact that Amnesty is composed of small autonomous groups loosely joined together by larger governing bodies makes explaining the structure of Amnesty's bureaucracy complex. On a national level, the membership directly elects (each group gets a vote; and each individual member gets a vote, regardless of age) prominent members to the 18-seat Board of Directors for a three-year term. The Board of Directors hires an Executive Director and a staff. On a world-wide level, Amnesty is governed by the International Executive Council (IEC) – a board of eight members elected for two-year terms by the International Council Meeting, which is composed of delegates from each country's Board of Directors. The IEC then hires a Secretary General and an International Secretariat. Amnesty members end each Annual General Meeting with a commemorative toast to freedom. CriticismCriticism of Amnesty International may be classified into two major categories, accusations of selection bias and ideological bias. Some critics have noted that in nations that have relatively open and free societies, in which political opposition and freedom of speech are comparatively protected, AI has greater opportunity to compile and report on allegations of human rights abuse. In nations where international human rights monitors are completely banned, for example, or in which the press and individual speech critical of the government are nonexistent or heavily censored, it is relatively difficult for AI to report on the same. This potential tendency to over-report allegations of human rights abuse in nations that are comparatively lessor violators of human rights has been called "Moynihan's Law," after the late American Senator and former Ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who is said to have stated that at the United Nations, the number of complaints about a nation's violation of human rights is inversely proportional to their actual violation of human rights. Critics who allege AI suffers from this problem point out what they describe as a disproportionate focus on allegations of human rights violations in for example Israel, when compared with North Korea or Cambodia. One such example is the allegation of NGO Monitor, a publication of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which noted that between 2001 and 2004 AI issued 52 reports on the human rights abuses in the Sudan, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives through starvation and ethnic violence, as well as creating 1.2 million refugees (according to the World Health Organization), while AI concurrently issued 192 reports on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[1] (http://www.ngo-monitor.org/editions/v2n10/v2n10-4.htm) Conservative commentators in various publications have alleged that AI's reporting reflects ideological bias toward a liberal political viewpoint in opposition to the foreign policy of the United States. To support this they point to AI's treatment of the human rights implications of the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Critics of AI have suggested that AI's concern for the human rights implications of this war disproportionately criticize the effects of U.S. military action while in comparison they were less vociferous about the abuses of the Hussein regime and the human rights implications of the continued rule of this government. Examples of this criticism can be found in the links below. Critics have also claimed that Amnesty International has failed to give proper weight to, or take a strong enough stance against:
Diana Johnstone, in her book Fool's Crusade, alleged that AI played an uncritical roled during the various Balkan wars, and discusses the case of a woman who was taken on a 25 US-city tour with a film about her ordeal as an alleged rape camp victim. According to Johnstone, the alleged rape camp victim, Jadranka Cigelj, was actually a senior propagandist in the Croatian government, and a confidante of President Franjo Tudjman. Critics have also claimed that AI had a role propagating "disinformation" in a press release before the 1991 Gulf War, in which it accused the Iraqi soldiers of "throwing babies out of incubators". It later transpired that this claim was a propaganda hoax, and AI's press release was used in the opening salvo of this propaganda campaign. AI never apologized for its role in this campaign. Critics have also claimed that AI censored a film about Venezuela due to appear in its film festival, and did so without explanation. Perhaps the main critic of AI is Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at Univ. Illinois, Champaign. Boyle was a board member of the International Board of Directors for several years, and threatened to take AI to court over its apparent bias in its coverage of human rights in several countries. Other critics:
See alsoExternal links
Articles Critical of AI
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