
Amnesty International (commonly known as Amnesty or AI) is an global non-governmental organization with the stated purpose of promoting all the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international standards. In particular, Amnesty International campaigns to free all prisoner of conscience; to ensure fair and prompt trials for political prisoners; to abolish the death penalty, torture, and other treatment of prisoners it regards as cruel; to end political killing and disappear; and to oppose all human rights abuses, whether by governments or by other groups. ==History== Amnesty International was founded in 1961 by a United Kingdom lawyer named Peter Benenson. Benenson was reading his newspaper and was shocked and angered to come across the story of two Portugal 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'' [http://www.amnesty.fi/history/the_forgotten_prisoners.htm] 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 Universal 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 strategy== AI 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: * Free all Prisoner of conscience (a "POC" is a person imprisoned for the peaceful exercise of their beliefs, which differs somewhat from the typical use of the term political prisoner). * Ensure fair and prompt trials. * Abolish all forms of torture and ill-treatment of prisoners, including the use of the death penalty. * End state-sanctioned terrorism, killings, and disappearances. * Assist political asylum-seekers. * Co-operate with organizations that seek to put an end to human rights abuses. * Raise awareness about human rights abuses around the world. To fulfill these goals, Amnesty sends teams of researchers to investigate claims of human rights abuses. It publicizes its findings and mobilizes its members to Lobbying 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 International 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 recently overturned policy of executing juvenile offenders in Capital punishment in the United States). Amnesty works primarily on the local level but its forty-year history of action and its Nobel Peace Prize give it international recognition. Most AI members utilize letter-writing to get their message across. When the central Amnesty International organization finds and validates to its satisfaction instances of human rights abuse, they notify each of more than 7,000 local groups as well as over one million independent members, including 300,000 in the United States alone. 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 International follows a neutrality policy called the "country rule" stating that members should not be active in issues in their own nation, which also protects them from potential mistreatment by their own government. This principle is also applied to researchers and campaigners working for the International Secretariat to prevent domestic political loyalties influencing coverage. ==Organisation== ''[[Image:Irene Khan 2003.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Irene Khan, Secretary General since August 2001]]'' Amnesty International 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 itself composed of delegates from each country's Board of Directors. The IEC hires a Secretary General (since 2001, Irene Khan) and an International Secretariat, located in London. National and local organizational structures vary. In the United States, individual members, regardless of age, and each individual organization votes to elect members to the 18-seat national Board of Directors for a three-year term. The Board of Directors hires an Executive Director and a staff. ===Finances=== Amnesty International is a non-partisan organization 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. It does not accept donations from governments or governmental organizations. Amnesty's budget for the 2000 fiscal year included: * Membership Support: Pound Sterling2,486,700 (13%) * Campaigning Activities: £1,811,200 (10%) * Publications and Translation: £2,487,200 (13%) * Research and Action: £5,065,100 (26%) * Deconcentrated Offices: £1,246,300 (7%) * Research and Action Support: £2,615,900 (14%) * Administrative Costs: £3,247,200 (17%) * Relief Payments: £125,000 * Total: £19,510,000 ==Criticism and rebuttal== Criticism of Amnesty International may be classified into two major categories, accusations of selection bias and ideological bias. In addition, many governments, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo[http://www.namibian.com.na/Netstories/2000/January/Africa/aggression.html], China[http://www.uscpf.org/news/2001/02/021601.htm], the Taliban[http://www.indiapolicy.org/lists/india_policy/2001/Feb/msg00069.html], Vietnam[http://www.thienlybuutoa.org/Misc/cream_of_the_diplomatic_crop.htm], and Russia[http://www.hrvc.net/news8-03/updates8-03.htm]and the United States of America have attacked it for alleged bias, one-sided reporting, or failure to take security threats as a mitigating factor. The majority of these criticisms are from governments (or supporters of a government) pleading mitigation for admitted infringements of human rights, either because of special circumstances (such as security threats) or because other countries' records are worse. ===Selection Bias=== It is widely accepted that there are a disproportionate number of AI reports on relatively more democratic and open countries. This is the major source of the charge of "selection bias", with critics pointing to a disproportionate focus on allegations of human rights violations in for example Israel, when compared with North Korea or Cambodia. The term "selection bias" is however potentially misleading, since it derives from statistics, and AI's intention is not to produce a range of reports which statistically represents the world's human rights abuses. Instead, its aim is (a) to document what it can, in order to (b) produce pressure for improvement. These two factors slew the number of reports towards more open and democratic countries, because information is more easily obtainable, and because their governments are more susceptible to public pressure. A tendency to over-report allegations of human rights abuse in nations that are comparatively lesser violators of human rights has been called "Moynihan's Law," after the late United States Senate and former United States Ambassadors to the United Nations Daniel P. 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. ==== Examples ==== One example is the allegation of NGO Monitor, a publication of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which noted that between September 2000 until the beginning of 2003, when AI became active in the crisis in Darfur, AI issued 52 reports on the human rights abuses against Christians and animists in southern 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.[http://www.ngo-monitor.org/editions/v2n12/NGOsAndSudan.htm] (These numbers refer in fact to the total number of documents including press releases, not to reports alone.) As the NGO Monitor report points out, after the start of the Darfur crisis, AI became much more involved in Sudan. The total number of documents from the beginning of 1996 to March 2005 is 315 for Sudan and 398 for Israel. AI defenders respond by asserting that all nations should aspire to absolute respect for human rights, and that the difficulties associated with monitoring 'closed' countries should not mean that 'open' countries should receive less scrutiny. ===Ideological bias=== Amnesty International has been criticised for having an ideological bias both from the right wing and from the Left-wing politics. Criticism from some parts of the left includes the view that the very idea of Human Rights is based on individualism, capitalism, colonialism, and classical liberalism (as meant by John Locke, John Stuart Mill, et al.), and takes the view that cultural relativism means that the Human Rights are not in fact universal. Conservative commentators have alleged that AI's reporting reflects ideological bias toward a left-wing 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. Supporters of AI have pointed out that AI was critical of Hussein's regime while Donald Rumsfeld was shaking the dictator by the hand, and that when the White House later released reports on the human rights record of Hussein, they depended almost entirely on AI documents that the US had ignored when Iraq was a US ally in the 1980s. ===2004: Guantánamo Bay is "the Gulag of our times."=== In a 2004 Human Rights report, the Secretary General referred to the Guantánamo Bay prison as "the gulag of our times," comparing the United States' treatment of unlawful enemy combatants held in the camp with the massive Gulag Archipelago covertly run by the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin to "re-educate" over 20 million "political dissidents" through torture, forced labor, and other tactics. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called the report "reprehensible", Vice President Dick Cheney said he was "offended" by the report, and President Bush called the report "absurd" in a May 31, 2005 press conference. In an editorial, the ''Washington Post'' lamented that "lately the organization has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world's dictators but for the United States":
:...According to internal legends... If the person who added this has some evidence that the organisation's own account of its founding is incorrect, please add it. Otherwise, I think should be removed. --User:Robert Merkel 11:06 Dec 13, 2002 (UTC) === Criticism of AI === I'm sorry if there are those who don't think AI deserves criticism, while respecting their POV. Since we should strive for a NPOV article I think inclusion of critics of AI's viewpoint is warranted, provided that it isn't just another POV but is rather a presentation of factual information. User:Kaisershatner 22:13, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC) Xed, even if I were a "sock puppet," which I am not, you still ought to make revisions based on NPOV facts, right? Allegations of "propaganda" are highly POV. I'd be happy to discuss our disagreement, but given some of the evidence I've seen about your style on Wikipedia, I'm not convinced this will go anywhere. Still, I remain open-minded that we can co-edit peaceably according to Wiki convention. User:Kaisershatner 15:21, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC) :As far as I can tell, Xed thinks you, me, two wildly different IP addresses, and possibly others, are all sock-puppets. I wouldn't take it seriously or personally. User:Jayjg 18:16, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) Despite the sober and neutral way that the criticisms of AI is delivered I would still consider this section to be highly POV because it contains only negative cricisms of AI without any refutation of the points - a criticism is not necesarily a negative analysis of something, merely an analysis. I think it would be a gesture of cooperation if the author(s) of this section went through and added equally neutral responses for AI and it's supporters so as to assure the neutral stance of this page. I think the length and breadth of the cricticisms is also somewhat prohibitive - do we note every single criticism made against AI in the popular press? That would make a very long and un-wieldy article. Surely it would be better to provide an example of each criticism (claims of pro-Palistinian bias, anti-American bias, etc) backed up with one or two examples followed by one or two examples of statements in defense. --User:Axon 17:15, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC) Axon, as I stated on your User page, I think those are good criticisms and since I was responsible for listing all of those articles, I revised the main article by removing them and inserting a more abstract summary of types of criticism of AI, with fewer examples. I think this may be more effective. As a result I did not respond point-by-point to your criticisms of each example below, many of which raised good points. User:Kaisershatner 19:51, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) Kaisershatner, you edits are most welcome and go a long way to making this section more neutral and alleviating the edit war this page has been host to. You should be congratulated... erm... so I congratulate you ;) I would still like to modify this section a bit more. For example, the argument in support of AI is still a little one-sided. I think an argument can be made that human rights abuses are more likely to come to light in a democracy with a free press (although I think that statement itself might be a little contentious depending upon your definition of free press). However, it ignores the fact that western countries might actually be guilty of more human rights abuses. Also, some links to examples of pro- and anti- argument might also be useful and improve the depth of the article. --User:Axon 10:38, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC) == Detailed Analysis of Criticisms == :''Last focused on a March 26 press release by AI that castigated "coalition forces for "war crimes" on account of the U.S. effort to take Iraq's state-run television station off the air," while including only brief reference to the history of war crimes perpetrated by the Hussein regime'' I'm not sure, but surely a report of American war crimes would naturally be quite brief with regard to the human rights abuses of others? Surely, a better point can be made by demonstrating that AI issues more reports about American war crimes rather than criticising individual reports (which would create a length article). Also, constantly referring to "war crimes" in inverted commas is highly NPOV... better to use the term ''alleged war crimes''. :''In another conservative American publication, frontpagemag.com, author Christopher Archangelli presented a timeline of AI press releases during the Iraq war in an effort to establish what he called "one-sided and transparently tilted condemnation of the United States, to the exclusion of the evils of Saddam Hussein."'' Again, this seems like repeating itself. Perhaps we should merely establish that AI has been accused of anti-American bias. :''In the same publication, author Steven Plaut praised AI's international work on behalf of human rights, and noted among other things AI's opposition to Iranian persecution of Jews [4] (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=8141). However, Plaut also observed that human rights violations are disproportionately identified and reported on in nations with a free press and with comparatively advanced rights protections, explaining "the AI reticence and almost total absence of denunciation of human rights abuses in places like North Korea and Cambodia. It also explains why AI apparently had no knowledge of the killing fields in southern Iraq until US and British troops uncovered them in the recent war.'' Again, this is starting to read like we've copy-and-pasted text directly from a NGO Monitor publications and it seems be using language repeated from previous sections. A simple paragraph detailing allegations of anti-Isreali bias would be sufficient. :''Plaut also noted that AI contends that "Palestinians have a “right”, not only to their own state in the West Bank and Gaza but also to migrate to and reclaim any property inside Israel they may wish to claim," without taking similar positions on the "right" of "Jews who were evicted from Moslem countries to reclaim their property."'' Again, we seem to be repeating ourselves here. And we see those naughty, naughty inverted commas sneaking in. More detailed research for more sober quotes is perhaps required here. Or, as Plaut might say, more "detailed" "research" for more "sober" "quotes" is "required". ;) Does he talk like that all the time? Must get quite annoying at meal time: ''Can you "pass" the salt, please, "Mom"? Ahem... :''n 2003, the Anti-Defamation League, an American Jewish organization with no political affiliation'' I think describing the ADL as an organisation with "no political affiliation" (whoops, doing it myself now) is a bit misleading - it's like describing the British Conservative party as having "no political affiliation" with the American Republican party. Let's leave discussion of the existence or non-existence of ADL political affiliations on the ADL page. :''The ADL has also complained that AI's reporting led to unsubstantiated accusations of a "massacre" perpetrated by the Israeli armed forces in the Jenin refugee camp.'' I think there is a good deal more to this story than what is described above. As I recall, accusations were flying about all over the place. :''The Plaut article also points out that AI has in the past "regarded the PLO itself as a reliable source about “abuses” committed by Israel. Addressing the media in Jerusalem in November 1989, Amnesty International spokesman Richard Reoch acknowledged that his organization regarded the PLO, which works with the PHRIC, as an objective information source. "Since the PLO is not a government body," he said, "we feel comfortable with Amnesty using them as a source."'' I'm slightly more dubious about the above claim: a quick google for the phrase "Since the PLO is not a government body" only brings up four hits and all of those seem to a right-wing site, pro-Israeli site and this page. I can find no first-hand verification for this quote. I'm extremely dubious about the idea that AI really does regard the PLO as an objective source and this statement needs some more concrete citations otherwise it should be deleted. Even if (a big if) AI does source information from the PLO but that is not the same thing as regarding them as an objective source. Is there evidence that AI doesn't similarly source information from the Isreali government? Again, research is required here to achieve a neutral objective. :''Writing in The Boston Globe on April 29, 2002, Charles Radin and Dan Ephron asserted that "Amnesty International’s charges against Israel were contradicted by Palestinian witnesses themselves. The group had falsely said that "Israel failed to provide safe passage from the camp to noncombatants."'' One cannot help ask what is the relevance of the above. We've already established (again and again) that some individuals consider AI to be biased. What purpose does this serve? In summary, this section is POV and needs careful, sensitive and well researched notes on this talk page before it can be modified into an NPOV state without kick-starting an(other) edit war. Let's all take a deep breath and remember that Wikiedia is not a soap box and you can't use it to prove one argument or another. Controveries must be clearly detailed, rather than presenting one side as fact with Wikipedia: weasel words. And let's refrain from putting words in quotation marks unless they are actually quotations. ;) --User:Axon 17:42, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) == NGO Monitor == I also think it's slightly dubious making references from NGO Monitor - isn't this site funded by the right-wing purely for the purpose of discrediting left-wing NGOs? I think for the sake of neutrality and balance we need to be more careful about the references we source from. I would prefer that we reference broadsheet newspaper articles and other, more reliable and balanced media sources (such as the Conservative-leaning Daily Telegraph and it's international equivalents). I'm sure there are (many) other sources of criticism for AI rather than sourcing such material from NGO monitor directly. --User:Axon 17:02, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) :Is NGO Monitor "funded by the right-wing purely for the purpose of discrediting left-wing NGOs"? What makes you think so? User:Jayjg 18:13, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) ::Regardless of who does and does not fund the NGO Monitor, I'm sure there are better sources of criticisms of AI which was my main point. Quoting only sources from the NGO Monitor is not a good way of presenting the argument against AI apart from anything else. --User:Axon 18:32, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) :::How do you measure "better" when it comes to sources of criticism? User:Jayjg 18:39, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) ::::The accusation is that AI is biased. However, by using a source of information that is itself accussed of bias you are not really helping your own argument. Also, using a single source of information is not really a neutral way of presenting your information (and most of the quotes seem to be filtered through NGO Monitor). Finally, you combative and abrasive tone are not really helping anyone reach compromise and neutrality on this issue. --User:Axon 09:55, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC) :NGO Monitor is published by Dore Gold. Draw your own conclusions about its potential bias. --User:Alberuni 18:25, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) ::NGO Monitor is published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which has been around for over 30 years. User:Jayjg 18:39, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) :::I think Gold's [http://www.jcpa.org/dgold.htm biography], itself printed on the JCPA site, says a lot about the bias of the JCPA, Gold and, by association, NGO Monitor. They print papers entitled "Wartime Witch Hunt: Blaming Israel for the Iraq War" and Gold himself has written a book called "Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism". Whether you agree with his sentiments on not, you would be hard pushed to describe him as impartial on the issues of Palestine, Israel and Islam. --User:Axon 10:30, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC) ====Counting reports==== It is clear that NGO Monitor is playing games with its relative counts of Amnesty reports for Israel/OT versus Sudan. If you go to [http://web.amnesty.org/library/engindex?open=&dropdown=true], and select the place you want, you can see a complete list. According to AI's own interpretation of what a report is (click "Reports" in the blue heading), 2001-2004 saw 42 for Israel/OT and 50 for Sudan. (Always assuming Zero can count...) In both cases the number includes any "report" that mentions the specified place, even if it is a single paragraph in a long document, so there is further opportunity for cooking the comparison. Counting all the documents listed there (not just "reports") I get 261 for Israel/OT and 268 for Sudan. From all this I conclude that the claim by NGO Monitor is unsustainable and so we should not quote it. --User:Zero0000 15:02, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC) :The dates given were wrong. The correct timeframe is given now, and the correct report linked to. User:JayjgUser_talk:Jayjg 21:56, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC) == big vs. small letters? == referencing the [http://www.amnesty.org/images/home_ai_title.gif ai-logo], shouldn't amnesty international be written using small letters? --User:Addicted 16:19, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC) :No, that's just the logo. The group refers to itself as ''Amnesty International'' or ''AI''. --User:Viriditas | User_talk:Viriditas 03:29, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC) :: I see. Thanks. I was just wondering because the austrian AI group uses small letters itself. but. when in Rome ...
Human rights bodies Social justice International charities
#Redirect Amnesty International
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Amnesty International
Amnesty International (commonly known as Amnesty or AI) is an global non-governmental organization with the stated purpose of promoting all the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international standards. In particular, Amnesty International campaigns to free all prisoner of conscience; to ensure fair and prompt trials for political prisoners; to abolish the death penalty, torture, and other treatment of prisoners it regards as cruel; to end political killing and disappear; and to oppose all human rights abuses, whether by governments or by other groups. ==History== Amnesty International was founded in 1961 by a United Kingdom lawyer named Peter Benenson. Benenson was reading his newspaper and was shocked and angered to come across the story of two Portugal 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'' [http://www.amnesty.fi/history/the_forgotten_prisoners.htm] 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 Universal 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 strategy== AI 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: * Free all Prisoner of conscience (a "POC" is a person imprisoned for the peaceful exercise of their beliefs, which differs somewhat from the typical use of the term political prisoner). * Ensure fair and prompt trials. * Abolish all forms of torture and ill-treatment of prisoners, including the use of the death penalty. * End state-sanctioned terrorism, killings, and disappearances. * Assist political asylum-seekers. * Co-operate with organizations that seek to put an end to human rights abuses. * Raise awareness about human rights abuses around the world. To fulfill these goals, Amnesty sends teams of researchers to investigate claims of human rights abuses. It publicizes its findings and mobilizes its members to Lobbying 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 International 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 recently overturned policy of executing juvenile offenders in Capital punishment in the United States). Amnesty works primarily on the local level but its forty-year history of action and its Nobel Peace Prize give it international recognition. Most AI members utilize letter-writing to get their message across. When the central Amnesty International organization finds and validates to its satisfaction instances of human rights abuse, they notify each of more than 7,000 local groups as well as over one million independent members, including 300,000 in the United States alone. 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 International follows a neutrality policy called the "country rule" stating that members should not be active in issues in their own nation, which also protects them from potential mistreatment by their own government. This principle is also applied to researchers and campaigners working for the International Secretariat to prevent domestic political loyalties influencing coverage. ==Organisation== ''[[Image:Irene Khan 2003.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Irene Khan, Secretary General since August 2001]]'' Amnesty International 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 itself composed of delegates from each country's Board of Directors. The IEC hires a Secretary General (since 2001, Irene Khan) and an International Secretariat, located in London. National and local organizational structures vary. In the United States, individual members, regardless of age, and each individual organization votes to elect members to the 18-seat national Board of Directors for a three-year term. The Board of Directors hires an Executive Director and a staff. ===Finances=== Amnesty International is a non-partisan organization 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. It does not accept donations from governments or governmental organizations. Amnesty's budget for the 2000 fiscal year included: * Membership Support: Pound Sterling2,486,700 (13%) * Campaigning Activities: £1,811,200 (10%) * Publications and Translation: £2,487,200 (13%) * Research and Action: £5,065,100 (26%) * Deconcentrated Offices: £1,246,300 (7%) * Research and Action Support: £2,615,900 (14%) * Administrative Costs: £3,247,200 (17%) * Relief Payments: £125,000 * Total: £19,510,000 ==Criticism and rebuttal== Criticism of Amnesty International may be classified into two major categories, accusations of selection bias and ideological bias. In addition, many governments, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo[http://www.namibian.com.na/Netstories/2000/January/Africa/aggression.html], China[http://www.uscpf.org/news/2001/02/021601.htm], the Taliban[http://www.indiapolicy.org/lists/india_policy/2001/Feb/msg00069.html], Vietnam[http://www.thienlybuutoa.org/Misc/cream_of_the_diplomatic_crop.htm], and Russia[http://www.hrvc.net/news8-03/updates8-03.htm]and the United States of America have attacked it for alleged bias, one-sided reporting, or failure to take security threats as a mitigating factor. The majority of these criticisms are from governments (or supporters of a government) pleading mitigation for admitted infringements of human rights, either because of special circumstances (such as security threats) or because other countries' records are worse. ===Selection Bias=== It is widely accepted that there are a disproportionate number of AI reports on relatively more democratic and open countries. This is the major source of the charge of "selection bias", with critics pointing to a disproportionate focus on allegations of human rights violations in for example Israel, when compared with North Korea or Cambodia. The term "selection bias" is however potentially misleading, since it derives from statistics, and AI's intention is not to produce a range of reports which statistically represents the world's human rights abuses. Instead, its aim is (a) to document what it can, in order to (b) produce pressure for improvement. These two factors slew the number of reports towards more open and democratic countries, because information is more easily obtainable, and because their governments are more susceptible to public pressure. A tendency to over-report allegations of human rights abuse in nations that are comparatively lesser violators of human rights has been called "Moynihan's Law," after the late United States Senate and former United States Ambassadors to the United Nations Daniel P. 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. ==== Examples ==== One example is the allegation of NGO Monitor, a publication of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which noted that between September 2000 until the beginning of 2003, when AI became active in the crisis in Darfur, AI issued 52 reports on the human rights abuses against Christians and animists in southern 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.[http://www.ngo-monitor.org/editions/v2n12/NGOsAndSudan.htm] (These numbers refer in fact to the total number of documents including press releases, not to reports alone.) As the NGO Monitor report points out, after the start of the Darfur crisis, AI became much more involved in Sudan. The total number of documents from the beginning of 1996 to March 2005 is 315 for Sudan and 398 for Israel. AI defenders respond by asserting that all nations should aspire to absolute respect for human rights, and that the difficulties associated with monitoring 'closed' countries should not mean that 'open' countries should receive less scrutiny. ===Ideological bias=== Amnesty International has been criticised for having an ideological bias both from the right wing and from the Left-wing politics. Criticism from some parts of the left includes the view that the very idea of Human Rights is based on individualism, capitalism, colonialism, and classical liberalism (as meant by John Locke, John Stuart Mill, et al.), and takes the view that cultural relativism means that the Human Rights are not in fact universal. Conservative commentators have alleged that AI's reporting reflects ideological bias toward a left-wing 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. Supporters of AI have pointed out that AI was critical of Hussein's regime while Donald Rumsfeld was shaking the dictator by the hand, and that when the White House later released reports on the human rights record of Hussein, they depended almost entirely on AI documents that the US had ignored when Iraq was a US ally in the 1980s. ===2004: Guantánamo Bay is "the Gulag of our times."=== In a 2004 Human Rights report, the Secretary General referred to the Guantánamo Bay prison as "the gulag of our times," comparing the United States' treatment of unlawful enemy combatants held in the camp with the massive Gulag Archipelago covertly run by the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin to "re-educate" over 20 million "political dissidents" through torture, forced labor, and other tactics. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called the report "reprehensible", Vice President Dick Cheney said he was "offended" by the report, and President Bush called the report "absurd" in a May 31, 2005 press conference. In an editorial, the ''Washington Post'' lamented that "lately the organization has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world's dictators but for the United States":
"The Soviet gulag, by contrast, was a massive forced labor complex consisting of thousands of concentration camps and hundreds of exile villages through which more than 20 million people passed during Stalin's lifetime and whose existence was not acknowledged until after his death. Its modern equivalent is not Guantanamo Bay, but the prisons of Cuba, where Amnesty itself says a new generation of prisoners of conscience reside; or the labor camps of North Korea, which were set up on Stalinist lines; or China's laogai , the true size of which isn't even known; or, until recently, the prisons of Saddam Hussein's Iraq."[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/25/AR2005052501838.html?nav=mb]William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, defended the statement, saying, "What is 'absurd' is President Bush's attempt to deny the deliberate policies of his administration." and "What is 'absurd' and indeed outrageous is the Bush administration's failure to undertake a full independent investigation". Secretary General Irene Khan also responded saying, "The administration's response has been that our report is absurd, that our allegations have no basis, and our answer is very simple: if that is so, open up these detention centres, allow us and others to visit them." Critics have also claimed that Amnesty International has failed to give proper weight to, or take a strong enough stance against: *Alleged Israeli abuses of Palestinian human rights. *Alleged abuses against human rights in Puerto Rico. *Apartheid South Africa. ===Manipulation of AI=== Critics have also claimed that AI had a role propagating "disinformation" in a press release before the 1991 Gulf War, in which it charged that Iraqi soldiers were responsible for the deaths of "scores of civilians, including newborn babies, who died as a direct result of their forced removal from life-support machines." 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 – POTUS George H. W. Bush showed AI's press release on a primetime interview. Prof. Francis Boyle, an AI director at the time, gives a detailed insider account of the way the AI press release was handled[http://www.corkpsc.org/db.php?aid=4573]. The normal process of double-checking and consultation was shortcircuited in a rush to issue the press release. In an April 1991 statement, AI said that although its team was shown alleged mass graves of babies, it was not established how they had died and the team found no reliable evidence that Iraqi forces had caused the deaths of babies by removing them or ordering their removal from incubators.[http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/kuwait/document.do?id=D45F2AF72CFB7A7E802569A600600E2C] Supporters of AI point out that such mistakes by AI are rare; and that in any case such propaganda claims are common in war, and AI was merely an unfortunate conduit for them in this instance. === Leading critics === Perhaps the main critic of AI is Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign, and a former member of Amnesty International USA's board of directors – he left AI because of his disagreements about the coverage of human rights in certain countries, especially Israel/Palestine. In fact, he threatened to sue AI over its biased coverage, but at the last minute the lawsuit was settled out of court. Diana Johnstone, in her book ''Fool's Crusade'', alleged that AI played an uncritical role 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 close confidante of President Franjo Tudjman. *Prof. Michael Mandel, a professor of international law at York Univ., Toronto, Canada. Mandel criticizes AI's stance pertaining the wars in the Balkans and Iraq. *Prof. Nabeel Abraham, professor anthropology at Henry Ford Univ., Michigan, USA. He has written a comparative study of ten human rights organizations. *Prof. Clare Brandabur, professor of Comparative English Literature at Dogus Univ., Turkey. *Prof. Agustin Velloso, UNED, Dept. Comparative Educational Systems, Madrid, Spain. *Paul de Rooij (three articles discussing various aspects of AI's alleged bias). ==See also== *Human Rights Watch *International Freedom of Expression Exchange *The Secret Policeman's Ball *Action alert *Freedom House *Reporters Without Borders ==External links== * [http://www.amnesty.org/ Amnesty International's website] * Peter Benenson: ''[http://www.webalice.it/enricomaria.boschetti/Files_ChiSiamo/observer.html The Forgotten Prisoners]'' ''The Observer'', May 28, 1961 *William Schulz, [http://student.cs.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/articles/article0006804.html Security Is a Human Right, Too], ''New York Times'', April 18, 2004. *[http://web.amnesty.org/report2004/index-eng AI's 2004 annual report on human rights abuses] (Summary [http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1225027,00.html]) * NEW: [http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/index-eng AI's 2005 annual report on human rights abuses] === Articles critical of AI === *Jonathan V. Last, [http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/477lfquo.asp?pg=1 Calling It Like They See It], FrontPageMag.com, April 3, 2003. Alleges AI has anti-American/Israel bias. *Christopher Archangelli, [http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=7463 Amnesty for Iraq], FrontPageMag.com, April 24, 2003. Alleges AI has anti-American bias regarding Iraq. *NGO Monitor [http://www.ngo-monitor.org/archives/infofile.htm#amnesty Criticisms of Amnesty International] – Points to a running list of criticism of various NGOs, AI in particular. *Nabeel Abraham, et al.; [http://www.corkpsc.org/db.php?aid=4388 International Human Rights Organizations and the Palestine Question], Middle East Report (MERIP), Vol. 18, No. 1, Jan.-Feb. 1988, pp. 12 – 20. Argues that several organizations, including AI, are biased against Palestinians. *Nabeel Abraham, [http://www.corkpsc.org/db.php?aid=4414 Torture, Anyone?], ''Lies of Our Times'', May 1992, pp. 2 – 4. Claims AI and other groups are reticent in describing alleged torture on the part of Israel. *Dennis Bernstein's [http://www.corkpsc.org/db.php?aid=4573 interview] with Prof. Francis Boyle, ''CAQ'', Summer 2002. Boyle, a former AI-USA board member, threatened to sue AI-USA over its alleged biased coverage. *Alexander Cockburn, [http://student.cs.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/articles/article0005098.html How the US State Dept. Recruited Human Rights Groups to Cheer On the Bombing Raids: Those Incubator Babies, Once More?], CounterPunch newsletter, April 1-15, 1999. Alleges several human rights organizations "fell into line" regarding the bombing of Serbia. *Michael Mandel, ''How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against Humanity'', Pluto Press 2004. Alleges AI is selective in defending "human rights", in particular, regarding the US-Iraq war 2003, and the War in the Balkans. *Paul de Rooij, [http://www.counterpunch.org/rooij1031.html AI: Say It Isn't So], CounterPunch, October 31, 2002. *Paul de Rooij, [http://www.counterpunch.org/rooij11262003.html AI: The Case of a Rape Foretold], CounterPunch, November 26, 2003. *Paul de Rooij, [http://www.counterpunch.org/rooij10132004.html AI: A false beacon?], CounterPunch, October 13 2004. Contains a reading list. *American Gulag at National Review Online.[http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/rivkin_casey200505270804.asp ] Amnesty International Social justice Human rights bodies British charities Nobel Peace Prize winners Erasmus Prize winners vi:Ân xá Quốc tế
Amnesty International
:...According to internal legends... If the person who added this has some evidence that the organisation's own account of its founding is incorrect, please add it. Otherwise, I think should be removed. --User:Robert Merkel 11:06 Dec 13, 2002 (UTC) === Criticism of AI === I'm sorry if there are those who don't think AI deserves criticism, while respecting their POV. Since we should strive for a NPOV article I think inclusion of critics of AI's viewpoint is warranted, provided that it isn't just another POV but is rather a presentation of factual information. User:Kaisershatner 22:13, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC) Xed, even if I were a "sock puppet," which I am not, you still ought to make revisions based on NPOV facts, right? Allegations of "propaganda" are highly POV. I'd be happy to discuss our disagreement, but given some of the evidence I've seen about your style on Wikipedia, I'm not convinced this will go anywhere. Still, I remain open-minded that we can co-edit peaceably according to Wiki convention. User:Kaisershatner 15:21, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC) :As far as I can tell, Xed thinks you, me, two wildly different IP addresses, and possibly others, are all sock-puppets. I wouldn't take it seriously or personally. User:Jayjg 18:16, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) Despite the sober and neutral way that the criticisms of AI is delivered I would still consider this section to be highly POV because it contains only negative cricisms of AI without any refutation of the points - a criticism is not necesarily a negative analysis of something, merely an analysis. I think it would be a gesture of cooperation if the author(s) of this section went through and added equally neutral responses for AI and it's supporters so as to assure the neutral stance of this page. I think the length and breadth of the cricticisms is also somewhat prohibitive - do we note every single criticism made against AI in the popular press? That would make a very long and un-wieldy article. Surely it would be better to provide an example of each criticism (claims of pro-Palistinian bias, anti-American bias, etc) backed up with one or two examples followed by one or two examples of statements in defense. --User:Axon 17:15, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC) Axon, as I stated on your User page, I think those are good criticisms and since I was responsible for listing all of those articles, I revised the main article by removing them and inserting a more abstract summary of types of criticism of AI, with fewer examples. I think this may be more effective. As a result I did not respond point-by-point to your criticisms of each example below, many of which raised good points. User:Kaisershatner 19:51, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) Kaisershatner, you edits are most welcome and go a long way to making this section more neutral and alleviating the edit war this page has been host to. You should be congratulated... erm... so I congratulate you ;) I would still like to modify this section a bit more. For example, the argument in support of AI is still a little one-sided. I think an argument can be made that human rights abuses are more likely to come to light in a democracy with a free press (although I think that statement itself might be a little contentious depending upon your definition of free press). However, it ignores the fact that western countries might actually be guilty of more human rights abuses. Also, some links to examples of pro- and anti- argument might also be useful and improve the depth of the article. --User:Axon 10:38, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC) == Detailed Analysis of Criticisms == :''Last focused on a March 26 press release by AI that castigated "coalition forces for "war crimes" on account of the U.S. effort to take Iraq's state-run television station off the air," while including only brief reference to the history of war crimes perpetrated by the Hussein regime'' I'm not sure, but surely a report of American war crimes would naturally be quite brief with regard to the human rights abuses of others? Surely, a better point can be made by demonstrating that AI issues more reports about American war crimes rather than criticising individual reports (which would create a length article). Also, constantly referring to "war crimes" in inverted commas is highly NPOV... better to use the term ''alleged war crimes''. :''In another conservative American publication, frontpagemag.com, author Christopher Archangelli presented a timeline of AI press releases during the Iraq war in an effort to establish what he called "one-sided and transparently tilted condemnation of the United States, to the exclusion of the evils of Saddam Hussein."'' Again, this seems like repeating itself. Perhaps we should merely establish that AI has been accused of anti-American bias. :''In the same publication, author Steven Plaut praised AI's international work on behalf of human rights, and noted among other things AI's opposition to Iranian persecution of Jews [4] (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=8141). However, Plaut also observed that human rights violations are disproportionately identified and reported on in nations with a free press and with comparatively advanced rights protections, explaining "the AI reticence and almost total absence of denunciation of human rights abuses in places like North Korea and Cambodia. It also explains why AI apparently had no knowledge of the killing fields in southern Iraq until US and British troops uncovered them in the recent war.'' Again, this is starting to read like we've copy-and-pasted text directly from a NGO Monitor publications and it seems be using language repeated from previous sections. A simple paragraph detailing allegations of anti-Isreali bias would be sufficient. :''Plaut also noted that AI contends that "Palestinians have a “right”, not only to their own state in the West Bank and Gaza but also to migrate to and reclaim any property inside Israel they may wish to claim," without taking similar positions on the "right" of "Jews who were evicted from Moslem countries to reclaim their property."'' Again, we seem to be repeating ourselves here. And we see those naughty, naughty inverted commas sneaking in. More detailed research for more sober quotes is perhaps required here. Or, as Plaut might say, more "detailed" "research" for more "sober" "quotes" is "required". ;) Does he talk like that all the time? Must get quite annoying at meal time: ''Can you "pass" the salt, please, "Mom"? Ahem... :''n 2003, the Anti-Defamation League, an American Jewish organization with no political affiliation'' I think describing the ADL as an organisation with "no political affiliation" (whoops, doing it myself now) is a bit misleading - it's like describing the British Conservative party as having "no political affiliation" with the American Republican party. Let's leave discussion of the existence or non-existence of ADL political affiliations on the ADL page. :''The ADL has also complained that AI's reporting led to unsubstantiated accusations of a "massacre" perpetrated by the Israeli armed forces in the Jenin refugee camp.'' I think there is a good deal more to this story than what is described above. As I recall, accusations were flying about all over the place. :''The Plaut article also points out that AI has in the past "regarded the PLO itself as a reliable source about “abuses” committed by Israel. Addressing the media in Jerusalem in November 1989, Amnesty International spokesman Richard Reoch acknowledged that his organization regarded the PLO, which works with the PHRIC, as an objective information source. "Since the PLO is not a government body," he said, "we feel comfortable with Amnesty using them as a source."'' I'm slightly more dubious about the above claim: a quick google for the phrase "Since the PLO is not a government body" only brings up four hits and all of those seem to a right-wing site, pro-Israeli site and this page. I can find no first-hand verification for this quote. I'm extremely dubious about the idea that AI really does regard the PLO as an objective source and this statement needs some more concrete citations otherwise it should be deleted. Even if (a big if) AI does source information from the PLO but that is not the same thing as regarding them as an objective source. Is there evidence that AI doesn't similarly source information from the Isreali government? Again, research is required here to achieve a neutral objective. :''Writing in The Boston Globe on April 29, 2002, Charles Radin and Dan Ephron asserted that "Amnesty International’s charges against Israel were contradicted by Palestinian witnesses themselves. The group had falsely said that "Israel failed to provide safe passage from the camp to noncombatants."'' One cannot help ask what is the relevance of the above. We've already established (again and again) that some individuals consider AI to be biased. What purpose does this serve? In summary, this section is POV and needs careful, sensitive and well researched notes on this talk page before it can be modified into an NPOV state without kick-starting an(other) edit war. Let's all take a deep breath and remember that Wikiedia is not a soap box and you can't use it to prove one argument or another. Controveries must be clearly detailed, rather than presenting one side as fact with Wikipedia: weasel words. And let's refrain from putting words in quotation marks unless they are actually quotations. ;) --User:Axon 17:42, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) == NGO Monitor == I also think it's slightly dubious making references from NGO Monitor - isn't this site funded by the right-wing purely for the purpose of discrediting left-wing NGOs? I think for the sake of neutrality and balance we need to be more careful about the references we source from. I would prefer that we reference broadsheet newspaper articles and other, more reliable and balanced media sources (such as the Conservative-leaning Daily Telegraph and it's international equivalents). I'm sure there are (many) other sources of criticism for AI rather than sourcing such material from NGO monitor directly. --User:Axon 17:02, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) :Is NGO Monitor "funded by the right-wing purely for the purpose of discrediting left-wing NGOs"? What makes you think so? User:Jayjg 18:13, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) ::Regardless of who does and does not fund the NGO Monitor, I'm sure there are better sources of criticisms of AI which was my main point. Quoting only sources from the NGO Monitor is not a good way of presenting the argument against AI apart from anything else. --User:Axon 18:32, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) :::How do you measure "better" when it comes to sources of criticism? User:Jayjg 18:39, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) ::::The accusation is that AI is biased. However, by using a source of information that is itself accussed of bias you are not really helping your own argument. Also, using a single source of information is not really a neutral way of presenting your information (and most of the quotes seem to be filtered through NGO Monitor). Finally, you combative and abrasive tone are not really helping anyone reach compromise and neutrality on this issue. --User:Axon 09:55, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC) :NGO Monitor is published by Dore Gold. Draw your own conclusions about its potential bias. --User:Alberuni 18:25, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) ::NGO Monitor is published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which has been around for over 30 years. User:Jayjg 18:39, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC) :::I think Gold's [http://www.jcpa.org/dgold.htm biography], itself printed on the JCPA site, says a lot about the bias of the JCPA, Gold and, by association, NGO Monitor. They print papers entitled "Wartime Witch Hunt: Blaming Israel for the Iraq War" and Gold himself has written a book called "Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism". Whether you agree with his sentiments on not, you would be hard pushed to describe him as impartial on the issues of Palestine, Israel and Islam. --User:Axon 10:30, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC) ====Counting reports==== It is clear that NGO Monitor is playing games with its relative counts of Amnesty reports for Israel/OT versus Sudan. If you go to [http://web.amnesty.org/library/engindex?open=&dropdown=true], and select the place you want, you can see a complete list. According to AI's own interpretation of what a report is (click "Reports" in the blue heading), 2001-2004 saw 42 for Israel/OT and 50 for Sudan. (Always assuming Zero can count...) In both cases the number includes any "report" that mentions the specified place, even if it is a single paragraph in a long document, so there is further opportunity for cooking the comparison. Counting all the documents listed there (not just "reports") I get 261 for Israel/OT and 268 for Sudan. From all this I conclude that the claim by NGO Monitor is unsustainable and so we should not quote it. --User:Zero0000 15:02, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC) :The dates given were wrong. The correct timeframe is given now, and the correct report linked to. User:JayjgUser_talk:Jayjg 21:56, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC) == big vs. small letters? == referencing the [http://www.amnesty.org/images/home_ai_title.gif ai-logo], shouldn't amnesty international be written using small letters? --User:Addicted 16:19, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC) :No, that's just the logo. The group refers to itself as ''Amnesty International'' or ''AI''. --User:Viriditas | User_talk:Viriditas 03:29, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC) :: I see. Thanks. I was just wondering because the austrian AI group uses small letters itself. but. when in Rome ...
:) --User:Addicted 16:49, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
== 52 vs. 54; 192 vs. 195 ==
The article currently has slightly different counts than the NGO Monitor report; isn't this just about choosing slightly different timeframes, based on an ambiguity in the wording of the NGO Monitor report? User:JayjgUser_talk:Jayjg 01:57, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)
: The whole exercise of counting ill-defined objects is completely ridiculous. The article looks really stupid. Your personal counts amount to original research since you had to made judgement calls as to what to include. --User:Zero0000 01:19, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)
::Well, the numbers were Mustafaa's counts, and yes they were original research, which he justified on the grounds that "I counted, and so can anyone else".[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amnesty_International&diff=11523611&oldid=11523239] I've had this debate with him before; his view of what constitues "original research" is much narrower than what is actually covered in the policy, though I note now that he is apparently also disputing the policy itself. So you think it should be deleted? User:JayjgUser_talk:Jayjg 03:01, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
::: The numbers were formerly mine, and while they - being verifiable - do not constitute original research, they certainly don't do anything for the readability. I have replaced it with an equally verifiable but much shorter parenthetical correction to the JCPA claim. - User:Mustafaa 10:29, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
::::Good re-write; less original research than before. User:JayjgUser_talk:Jayjg 17:47, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
== "Gulag" ==
The current entry says that
:"''In a 2004 Human Rights report, the Secretary General refered to Guantanamo Bay prison as "the gulag of our times," comparing the United States' treatment of unlawful enemy combatants held in the camp with the massive prison system covertly run by the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin to "re-educate" over 20 Million "political dissidents" through torture, forced labor, and other tactics.''"
From what I have seen, and the searches I have done in the online report, there is no comparison to the gulags in the report. According to one news story (which I found a few days ago when looking into other things), Irene Khan used the words at the press conference in conjunction with the release, but it was not clear whether she took the words from the report or not. It would be good if someone could source the gulag comparison, i.e. whether it is in the report or not (online version or otherwise) and in that case where.
--User:Kissekatt 03:30, 2005 Jun 3 (UTC)
:[http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGPOL100012005]: ''The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law.'' -- 09:32, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
::Looks like I was looking in the wrong place. Thank you. --User:Kissekatt 16:22, 2005 Jun 5 (UTC)
== terrorist organisation links - axon didn't see sources ==
user:Axon removed the following:
:===Support for leaders of allegedly terrorist organisations===
:On June 17, 2005, at a one-day conference at Warsaw University, Amnesty researcher Gerardo Ducos appeared alongside Omar Lopez Montenegro, executive director of the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), an allegedly terrorist organisation closely associated with the killing of 73 passengers via the bombing of Cubana Airlines 455 on October 7, 1976. The Polish section of Amnesty International gave publicity to the conference including this alleged terrorist leader on its website. [http://www.amnesty.org.pl/index.php/ai/content/view/full/2905] This appears to suggest that Amnesty International implicitly supports terrorist methods for improving the human rights situation in Cuba.
The source is for whe claim that Ducos and Montenegro appeared together in the conference is on Amnesty's own web site which was already included as a source - even without understanding much Polish, you can see their names and get the general idea: [http://www.amnesty.org.pl/index.php/ai/content/view/full/2905]
The sourcing of the claims about CANF are in the CANF article. So i guess adding ''(see Cuban-American National Foundation article for more)'' should be what Axon wants? User:Boud 15:45, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:You are correct: I certainly didn't see any sources in the above and previous versions of this section. You have only suppplied partial sources for the above: you have not cited evidence of links between CANF and terrorists, that the conference actually took place, etc, or a link to a reputable publication that makes the link that AI supports leaders of a terrorist organisation.
:In fact, the facts do not even back up the assertion you made above: that is CANF is not a "terrorist organisation" but has links to a terrorist organisation. The correct title would be (if you could provide a reference to back up the link at all) "Support for leaders of a group allegedly linked to terrorist organisations". Not quite so catchy and highly tenuous and POV.
:For the lack of citations above I deleted this section and rightly so according to Wikipedia policy. User:Axon 10:36, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
== POV ==
The criticism section of this article is getting out of hand. I would like to place a dispute tag on this article and focus on adding more neutral comments and expunging obviously biased information. User:Axon 16:56, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Axon, your arbitrary removal of factual, referenced information is highly POV. The sources are there for you to look at. i don't see anything in cite sources which says that wikipedia articles are invalid sources, though i'm still looking. However, since you want the sources, i can copy/paste them from the CANF article. i would have thought that that goes against modularity (best to have references closest to what they talk about), but since that's what you seem to want, so be it.
Associating with a terrorist organisation is an important fact. The sources are there in the CANF article and your claim that this is bad wikipedia style is a poor argument for simply removing the text. The sentence is written in NPOV with ''allegedly''. Maybe the CIA/FBI lied in their documents, but the documents are publicly available. User:Boud 17:34, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:This absurd, and unbelievably POV. (a) A single researcher appearing alongside a representative of an organisation does not constitute an endorsement of that organisation. (duh)
::When a human rights organisation representative appears next to a well-known terrorist organisation leader, and when that meeting is advertised on the human rights organisation's website, it is a form of endorsement. User:Boud 18:25, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:(b) CANF is a perfectly legal organisation in the US and elsewhere, and whilst undoubtedly dedicated to the overthrow of Castro, there is no evidence that as an organisation it endorses terrorist methods. There is little evidence even that any members do/did.
::The legality of CANF does not change the fact that it's a terrorist organisation. It claims to want to overthrow the Castro regime - and the links with terrorist methods seem rather uncontroversial to the CIA/FBI. Try reading the references, keywords ''Canosa'' - who was head of CANF from its founding in 1981 to his death in 1997 - and ''Posada''
*http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153/
*http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB157/
*http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JBFranklins/granma.htm
:(c) How can it possibly be AI's job to vet every minor action by every one of its members to a tougher standard than the US government?!! Critics seem to demand that AI is whiter than white, and so perfectly balanced, so much pleasing everyone, that no organisation could even hypothetically meet those standards. Then those critics conclude that just because AI doesn't meet some impossible ideal it's all a waste of time. This is the counsel of despair. AI does as much good as could reasonably be expected, which especially for individual prisoners of conscience is a lot; it isn't there to fix the world. User:Rd232 17:56, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
::i certainly agree that AI does a lot of very good stuff and i am not suggesting a counsel of despair. But this isn't about vetting every minor action. It's about associating with a terrorist organisation. Imagine if an Amnesty international researcher was present at a conference with a leader of al-Qaeda. Wouldn't this be rather embarrassing? This incident is an embarrassing fact - which Amnesty can live with and correct just as it continues to live on after the mistake about the test-tube babies in Kuwait. A human rights organisation should be able to admit (and then correct if possible) its mistakes, not deny them. User:Boud 18:25, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Hmmm, i agree that this sentence ''This appears to suggest that Amnesty International implicitly supports terrorist methods for improving the human rights situation in Cuba.'' can be interpreted as claiming that this is general Amnesty International policy. i'll try rewriting it... User:Boud 18:42, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It's still unjustified for an encyclopedia article. It's just not significant enough. It wasn't even a conference organised by Amnesty, and Montenegro appeared under a different name than the CANF. To demand the AI researcher to pull out of this conference - which included MEPs, Polish senators and others who (in full knowledge of Montenegro's background or not) shared a platform with Montenegro - is totally unreasonable. Sharing a platform with someone does not constitute an endorsement, even if the event in questioned is advertised on the AI website! There is no way that this non-event is significant enough for inclusion in an encyclopedia! I am removing it. User:Rd232 22:49, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:Would sharing a platform for a conference with a leader of al-Qaeda be a non-event unjustified for an encyclopedia article? Sharing a platform with a leader of al-Qaeda would constitute an endorsement by Amnesty, especially if it were advertised on an Amnesty website. The presence of MEPs and Polish senators is a sign of social acceptance of terrorism against ''official enemies'' - it does not change the significance of the fact.User:Boud 11:41, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
::No it wouldn't constitute an endorsement. In the UK, we have TV programme called Question Time, on which politicians of all stripes share a platform. They are not endorsing each other, any more than in Northern Ireland the parties endorsed terrorism by signing the Good Friday agreement that brought peace. How on earth is debate supposed to work if you can't share a platform with someone, at a conference organised by someone else (you make far far too much of a little advertising of a conference, which is standard), without being accused of endorsing everything all participants have ever said or done??? User:Rd232 13:28, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:::''Question Time'' claims to have people from opposing points of view. At this conference, the advertisement - http://www.amnesty.org.pl/index.php/ai/content/view/full/2905 - makes no pretence of being two-sided or including people with significantly opposed points of view. E.g. noone from the National Committee to free the Cuban Five http://www.freethefive.org/ was invited. User:Boud 00:54, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:In any case, without any significant people making a fuss about it, it qualifies as Wikipedia:no original research. Even if there was a fuss, the connection is so tenuous that it would be very difficult to justify inclusion unless it made major headlines in mainstream media. User:Rd232 22:49, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
::It is not original research. The terrorist nature of CANF is documented by many, including the CIA/FBI. The sources are there. The event which happened in Warsaw is documented on the Amnesty International Poland website. NPOV does not mean just reflecting the opinions of the mainstream press. It means documenting things which either are uncontroversially accepted are which are clearly documented from third party , reasonably reliable sources. The fact of the conference is documented '''on Amnesty International Poland's own web site'''. This is not original research. You cannot remove a highly significant NPOV fact just because you haven't heard about it on CNN. User:Boud 11:41, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
::The fact that Montenegro appeared under the name of a different organisation is only marginally relevant: Suppose that Amnesty advertised a conference in which ''Ossama bin Laden, North-West Pakistani Human Rights Association'' appeared alongside an Amnesty researcher. This would be still be a highly significant fact even though Ossama would appear, in principle, in a role independent of his terrorist activities. User:Boud 11:53, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:For someone who claims to "agree that AI does a lot of very good stuff", you give a very good impression of someone who hates them with a fiery passion.
::You make the error of assuming that because i have brought up a previously documented error by AI i am opposed to it. That is simply wrong. i strongly support Amnesty. :) User:Boud 00:54, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:To address your points (a) it ''is'' original research - ''IT being the allegation that this non-event has any significance, not that CANF has alleged terrorist links.'' Original research is not the same as "fiction" - I appreciate that you have made the effort to find original sources (AI website etc). However it is not reported in any media, mainstream or otherwise; there's not even any organisation of any kind, however tiny and pointlessly biased, that has complained. It is ''clearly'' original research.
::Now you're grasping at straws to avoid a fact that you don't seem to want to accept. The significance of associating with a terrorist organisation is not something that requires research. Common sense says that associating with a terrorist organisation is a surprising fact for a human rights organisation. Incidentally, i see nothing in Wikipedia:No original research about the ''significance'' of a fact having to be previously documented. User:Boud 00:54, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:(b) This non-event has no significance. You don't even know what was said at the conference! For all you know, that AI researcher opened his comments by saying, "Of course, neither AI nor myself could ever endorse terrorist methods which this person has been linked with, by this is not a reason for my walking out of this conference today."
::Now you are speculating. It would be easier if we just stick to documented facts from reliable sources rather than speculate. User:Boud 00:54, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:(c) Even if we accept the terrorist allegation and full knowledge on the part of the parties (but assume non-endorsement, as we must without further evidence), it is well demonstrated that only be engaging with violently hostile parties can progress be made. Look at the Northern Ireland peace process. Even if you don't accept this, CANF's views on why they take whatever actions they take (however reprehensible those methods may or may not be) are still valid views and not automatically to be excluded from polite conversation.
::In that case, why do you want to exclude this significant fact? User:Boud 00:54, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:(d) your Bin Laden example is absurd. You might as well say "But if AI demanded that we all hop on one leg whilst reciting the Kama Sutra backwards, that would be newsworthy." This is irrelevant - they haven't, and aren't likely to. It's also a false analogy, as Bin Laden is one of the world's most wanted men. Who in Poland has heard of CANF? User:Rd232 13:28, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
::i don't understand why you claim that the analogy is absurd. The fact that Ossama bin Laden is one of the world's most wanted men does not change the nature of CANF as being an (allegedly) terrorist organisation.User:Boud 00:54, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:To Boud: Removal of uncited content from an article is perfectly legitimate edit according to Wikipedia policy. If you don't like it I would ask that you carfully cite all controversial edits rather than just adding them and expecting people to take you at your word and you may find your edits get reverted less.
::i think you mean ''unsourced'' content. The material is sourced.User:Boud 00:54, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:::But it was clearly not when you first posted it and I reverted it. User:Axon 09:10, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:What is more, I agree with User:Rd232 this section seems tantamount to original research (see WP:NOR). It may be true AI was at the conference and it may be true CANF has been linked by allegations to terrorist groups (which is vastly differrent) but has any reputable source made this link or are you making this link between them? If not then this is original research.
:Was AI aware the CANF was "linked" to a terrorist organistion (FBI and CIA evidence exists for this but does this evidence stand up in a court of law? As we have seen by recent events, sometimes military intelligence can be trusted) or that they would be appearing at a conference? Conflating all of these facts into some tenuous accusation that AI therefore endorses terrorism seems not to be supported by the facts you have presented here. User:Axon 13:25, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
::i agree that the final sentence in the initial version that i wrote was badly written - in the most recent revert i removed it. i agree that it is possible to play the devil's advocate and assume that AI was ignorant of the facts, but speculating on the reasons for what happened is speculation, not reporting of sourced facts.User:Boud 00:54, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:::Please address the rest of my points above: has any reputable source made the link you make in this section or have you simply added tghe two facts together to make original research?
::::i have ''collected and organised'' the facts from primary and secondary sources. This discussion goes below in the discussion about what is ''original research''. User:Boud 13:08, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:::As for playing devil's advocate, the whole section seems like speculation to me. The points I raise above are simply the unanswered questions as warnings that can come from original research. As we can see from the above questions a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: that is, one or two carefully selected facts can be used, by themselves, to create a novel interpretation of events. In this case to somehow arrive at the conclusion that AI is somehow associating with terrorists. Of course, your evidence demonstrates no such thesis. Using your logic, one could equally argue that judges are complicit in the crimes they try: after all, the are "associating" with the criminals at the trial which is all very suspicous, but only if you only consider a minority of the facts. User:Axon 09:10, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
::::There is no novel interpretation of events here. It is only collecting together of sourced facts, which, given the stated goals of Amnesty International, are significant as a surprising (though possibly isolated) event. The analogy with a judge judging an alleged criminal is a poor analogy: the theme of the conference was not the terrorist events with which Omar Lopez Montenegro is allegedly associated, he was assumed to be one of many promoting human rights, his association with terrorism was not the theme of the conference.User:Boud 13:08, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
==No Original Research==
Wikipedia:No original research:
:''However, research that consists of collecting and organizing information from existing primary and secondary sources is strongly encouraged. In fact, all articles on Wikipedia should be based on information collected from primary and secondary sources. This is called source-based research, and it is fundamental to writing an encyclopedia.''
So ''collecting'' and ''organising'' information from existing primary sources is strongly ''encouraged''.
In the section Association with a leader of an allegedly terrorist organisation of this version (see above discussion):
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amnesty_International&oldid=15494084
IMHO there is only ''collecting'' and ''organising'' the information from primary sources and secondary sources.
:''Primary sources present information or data, such as archeological artifacts; photographs; historical documents such as a diary, census, transcript of a public hearing, trial, or interview; tabulated results of surveys or questionnaires, records of laboratory assays or observations; records of field observations.''
There is no primary source in the section i added. It is collecting and organising information from existing primary and secondary sources and it is strongly encouraged.User:Boud 00:54, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:There are no secondary sources. And the "no original research" issue is one of two issues sufficient to exclude the paragraph - the other that the facts you have collated cannot support any conclusions and are therefore meaningless. User:Rd232 08:39, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:I've been through this numerous times before with others: you are misinterpreting the original research policy. The purpose of a encyclopedia is the collection and summation of primary and secondary sources - this is allowed. However, this is not what you are doing: you are providing an original thesis by combining sources in an original way. The starting paragraph clearly prohibits this:
::''"The phrase "original research" in this context refers to untested theories; data, statements, concepts and ideas that have not been published in a reputable publication; or any new interpretation, analysis, or synthesis of published data, statements, concepts or ideas that, in the words of Wikipedia's founder Jimbo Wales, would amount to a "novel narrative or historical interpretation"."''
:Clearly, without a reference from a reputable source making the link between CANF and AI and terrorism you are performing original research through a "synthesis of published data" for the purposes of discrediting AI. You are clearly not merely "organizing information from existing primary and secondary sources", as per the section of WP:NOR you are citing, but are going beyond this allowance to publishing "untested theories".
::Here ''you'' are adding interpretation which goes beyond organising and collecting facts. The event does not do major discredit to AI - the fact of all the good work done by AI remains true independently of this event - it only shows an example of an event where AI made a mistake. It does not attempt to generalise further. So it is not an "untested theory".User:Boud 13:14, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:::An insignificant event from which one cannot generalise further. Sounds like encyclopedia material to me! User:Rd232 17:36, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:::I'm not sure what intepretation you mean: this is a talk page so all sorts of conjecture is possible. My intepretation of the no original research policy is itself far from original.
:::You are clearly taking the fact the A) a CANF spokesperson attended a panal with AI and B) CANF has been linked to terrorism to come up with the original conclusion C) AI supports or associates with terrorists. Without evidence for C from a reputable publication, you are performing original research and C and B do not belong in this article. It really is irrelavent if this section does or does not discredit AI.
:::I don't really know what else to say about this: you cannot include original research in an article and you have not provided any evidence that your assertion is not original research. Ergo. User:Axon 13:30, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:If you really feel the need you could note that AI was at a conference in which CANF was also in attendance (and noting other attendees for balance) but I think such an insignificant factoid (we cannot note the presence of AI at every single conference in the world) would be quickly deleted as irrelevant. User:Axon 09:20, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
::Hmmm, maybe we're getting somewhere :). User:Boud 13:14, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)Amnesty International
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#Redirect Amnesty International
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AB | AC | AD | AE | AF | AG | AH | AI | AJ | AK | AL | AM | AN | AO | AP | AR | AS | AT | AU | AW | AX | AY | AZ |Words begining with Amnesty_International:
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