Amnesty International (AI), established in 1961, espouses a vision of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards. Therefore, AI’s vision is very similar to the vision specified in the US Declaration of Independence – notwithstanding the fact that both are and have always been works in progress.
Amnesty International is a non-partisan and non-ideological organization. That does not mean that it doesn’t take strong stands. Rather, it means that, in targeting its criticisms and its actions against governments, organizations or other groups of individuals, it does not take into account whether those entities are labeled as communists, socialists, democracies, dictatorships, Republicans, Democrats, or even the United States of America. Instead, the only criterion it uses is the extent to which those entities repress the human rights of individuals.
Therefore, when the remarks of the Executive Director of AI-USA at its
Annual General Meeting deal largely with the barriers to human rights posed by our own nation, that should be a signal to American citizens and politicians alike that we ought to thoroughly reassess our role in the world.
Below, I have excerpted portions of a letter I recently received from the Executive Director of AI-USA, Larry Cox, detailing the remarks he made at the recent Annual General Meeting of AI-USA in Portland, Oregon. For emphasis I have denoted remarks aimed at the Bush administration (though not mentioned by name, in keeping with the non-partisan nature of AI) in red.
We were in the midst of what Martin Luther King, Jr. called the “human rights revolution.”…. This was a truly global revolution carried out not by professional armies or guerrillas, but by so-called ordinary people who were, in fact, the most extraordinary people on the planet. In many countries these people gave their freedom and even their lives. In others, they gave their time, creativity and resources. Together, they gave us all a new way of changing the world – a way that transcended partisan and tired political ideologies – a way that rejected violence and hatred and was empowered by universal standards of common decency. It was a way that judged its successes not by press clippings or awards, or by the size of its budget, but solely by the liberation of individual human beings around the world.
It was a way that has not always succeeded. There were many – far too many – painful defeats. Too many people died in prison or were massacred or suffered from the economic injustices that AI did not yet address. However, there were also many victories – unimaginable victories, life transforming victories. We saw that so-called ordinary people using non-violent means could open prison doors, shut down torture and execution chambers, and help men, women and children, who thought they had been lost and forgotten, regain their dignity and their lives. And in the process of winning individual victories we saw dictators fall, whole countries liberated, and walls, some made of concrete and barbed wire, and some made of racial segregation and oppression, torn down. It was not our reports, or our legal documents, or our so-called organizational brand, but rather it was these victories for individuals that slowly built a faith in human rights – a faith that made it possible, to use again the immortal words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.”….
There is now an attempt to roll back or do away with those universal standards of decency that we thought were permanently established. Today there is an attack on the very idea that all human beings have rights and that all groups and governments, however powerful, must respect those rights. This counter-revolution takes many forms and has many leaders. There are the groups that, in the name of what is most holy and sacred, openly carry out and celebrate the killing of civilian men, women and children.
And there are the governments, some we know very well, who instead of honoring those deaths by renewing their commitment to human rights, instead use them to justify the unjustifiable – indefinite detention without trial or charge, disappearances and kidnappings, torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. When these human rights violations are carried out by democratic governments, they empower and facilitate the work of dictators and killers everywhere. They also undermine the brave men and women who fight against them. As does the continued refusal by governments to take seriously, or in one notable case to even accept, the idea of economic and social rights while the whole world can see on CNN the denial of those rights…. or in the faces of despair of those on the rooftops and in the stadium in New Orleans – trapped not just by a hurricane, but by the prolonged and inexcusably poverty in the richest country in human history..… As much as we like to celebrate our victories, we have to also find the courage to face and struggle with our painful limits. Despite all our efforts, we have been unable to slow down, let alone end or prevent, genocide. And not just once – but in Rwanda, Bosnia and now, God help us, in Darfur. We have been unable to free many prisoners of conscience including one, an extremely courageous woman, Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace prize while in prison in Burma.
And we have been unable to stop the … 1,000th execution in a country that claims it wants to leave no child behind but treats human beings as if they are disposable objects. We have to face all this because the painful truth is that the human rights counter-revolution is counting on those limits. It has been fed and has grown stronger because of our weaknesses. However, the good news is that the human rights revolution has never stopped seeking to overcome those limits, to grow and develop. And so, today there are not just new challenges but, if we can have the courage to seize them, also new opportunities to advance human rights, more than ever before.
The most important of these is the dramatic explosion in the past few decades of human rights organizations in all parts of the world…..
It is the spread of the human rights revolution to the global south and the leadership drawn from those who have been traditionally most excluded – women and people of color – that has led us back to the original vision of human rights. That is to say that every human being is entitled not just to freedom from fear, but also freedom from want. It is they who have reminded us that the death of a child from starvation, in a world we know is capable of feeding everyone, is no less a human rights violation than the death of a person in prison. They have reminded us that those who are forced out of their countries by economic deprivation are not less worthy than those who flee political repression. I know that this understanding of human rights has been controversial in this country and even in AI-USA. I can only assure you that it has not been controversial among millions around the world…..
One of the greatest hopes for the future is our work on violence against women, on racial profiling, on the abuse of persons because of their sexual orientation….
If you ask human rights activists around the world what human rights activists in the U.S. can do most to help them, one of the first answers will be please, please do something to change the policies and practices of your government, do something to end the pernicious and destructive idea of U.S. exceptionalism, the idea that the United States can apply human rights standards to other countries but no one, not even people in this country, should apply human rights standards to the U.S…. AI began with a promise that there would be no forgotten prisoner and there would be no forgotten country. But there is no way for Americans to do effective work on human rights violations abroad if we are not doing effective work on human rights violations at home. We need to do that work in a rigorous, non-partisan and evenhanded way.
The importance of this work cannot be overstated. Some 60 years ago, in response to the indescribable horrors of the holocaust and WWII, governments, with important leadership from the U.S., chose a new path of international cooperation and the rule of international law. That path led directly to the human rights revolution that has changed so much for the better.
In this decade, in response to the horrific attacks on New York and Washington, the world, again with leadership from the United States, chose a very different path – one of unilateral power and unlimited and unending war, a path away from human rights. We can all see the results. Our task is nothing less than to put our government and all governments back on the path to human rights. We have to make it clear that human rights do not get in the way of security. Human rights, with the emphasis on justice and meeting human needs, are the only way to guarantee genuine security. To do that will take all we have and more…. We need to reach out and seek the help of all people, not just those with whom we agree or are comfortable…. We need them to join – not necessarily Amnesty International – but the human rights revolution in whatever way they can. And to do that we have to show them that our work is not rooted in ideology or partisan politics, but in the unjust suffering of human beings….
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