REVIEW ESSAY

DIGNITY AND ENNUI

Amnesty International, Amnesty International Report2009: The State of the World’s Human Rights,London: Amnesty International PublicationsSTEPHEN HOPGOOD

Amnesty International, for many the archetypal global human rights non-governmental organization (NGO), is nearly 50. Since its birth in 1961, ithas outlived many regimes and institutions that were its political midwives,from the Cold War, the Soviet Union and apartheid to the final eclipse of theBritish and French Empires; from sectarian violence in Northern Ireland todictatorship in Portugal, Spain, and Greece. This remarkable longevity hasnot been achieved without cost. For those who work for or with Amnesty, itsinner working culture has often been unsympathetic and unforgiving, sacrifi-cial even, most notably so at its newly renovated headquarters, theInternational Secretariat (IS), in Easton Street, central London. To say that itis not an easy organization to manage and work in is an understatement thatwill provoke rueful smiles among those who have included a spell atAmnesty as part of their human rights journey.

Part savvy global NGO, part witness and institution of record, part trans-national social movement, and even part corporation, it is remarkable that inits post-foundation era Amnesty has had only five Secretary Generals (SGs),the latest of whom, Irene Khan, was scheduled to leave the organization atthe end of 2009.1 The Amnesty International Annual Report of 2009, theforeword to which carries Ms Khan’s by-line, will be her last as SG. Thereport’s title, ‘The state of the world’s human rights,’ reflects Amnesty’ssense of itself as the pre-eminent voice on the condition of human rightsobservance in the 157 countries, including the Palestinian Authority, that arecovered in the report (this is Amnesty as authoritative witness). The forewordbegins: ‘In September 2008 I was in New York to attend the UN high-levelmeeting on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreedtargets to reduce poverty by 2015’ (Amnesty Annual Report, 2009: 5). MsKhan, formerly an international civil servant with the UNHCR, has also

1 Arrangements were ambiguous and fraught pre-1968. Following founder Peter Benenson’sdeparture (in 1967), the five SGs (in the sense we would understand the term today) havebeen Martin Ennals, Thomas Hammerberg, Ian Martin, Pierre Sane, and Irene Khan.

Journal of Human Rights Practice Vol 2 | Number 1 | 2010 | pp. 151–165 DOI:10.1093/jhuman/hup025Advance Access publication January 19, 2010# The Author (2010). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

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been a regular attendee at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, during hertenure as SG (this is Amnesty as global NGO complete with its own coterieof international lawyers). To balance this insider status, we are reminded atthe end of the foreword of Amnesty’s credentials as a worldwide solidaritymovement.

It is to people power that we must now turn to bring pressure to bearon our political leaders. That is why, together with many local, nationaland international partners, Amnesty International is launching a newcampaign in 2009. Under the banner of ‘Demand Dignity,’ we willmobilize people to seek accountability of national and internationalactors for human rights abuses that drive and deepen poverty (AmnestyAnnual Report, 2009: 17).2

Amnesty’s 2009 Annual Report launches the Demand Dignity Campaign,although the three initial projects on which the campaign focuses, maternalmortality, corporate accountability, and slums, are not much in evidence inthe detailed country entries. The report’s foreword contains rhetoric thatspeaks to the case for corporate accountability, but there is little sign in thecountry research that this priority has made it into the work stream of any ofAmnesty’s researchers. A few of the country entries deal with ‘housingrights’, in Egypt for example, and here slums are mentioned by name, but aswith maternal mortality (only two entries, Peru and the USA) detailedcountry work is yet to come. There is understandably a time lag, with workfrom Amnesty’s 2004 Stop Violence Against Women campaign only now inevidence in several of the country entries from the report of 2009. Thisreflects a long-running tension between thematic campaigns and countryexpertise, the former championed by parts of the global membership outsideLondon and campaigners within the IS, the latter by Amnesty’s formidableresearchers. It is these researchers who produce the annual report entries,giving them a strategically pivotal position. And, their view of the prioritiesin ‘their’ countries can be and often has been at odds with those of influen-tial sections and campaigners.

Despite the fact that Amnesty has since the early 1990s undergone anextensive and intensive internal reform process culminating in its

2 As with all global NGOs, Amnesty must raise substantial income to sustain its activities,including the branding, marketing, and merchandizing that goes with such an ambitiousworldwide operation (hence its designation as part corporation). The InternationalSecretariat’s 2007–2008 income, drawn mostly from assessed Amnesty section contri-butions, was £35 million, with net assets of a further £12 million. Added together theannual income of all Amnesty sections approaches perhaps £100 million, a large sum butstill tiny in comparison with the global income of humanitarian and development organiz-ations like the ICRC, Oxfam, Save the Children, World Vision, CARE and Feed the Poor.Amnesty, of course, famously remains resistant to taking money from governments for itscore work and that significantly impacts on its fundraising potential.

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commitment to what are called ‘full spectrum rights’ (i.e., all human rights),many specific violations detailed under the country entries in the 2009 reportfocus on rights that have been Amnesty’s stock in trade since the 1970s andearlier. The Annual Report itself has been an Amnesty institution for morethan three decades. It is the moment when Amnesty gets to present itself asthe preeminent authority in the modern human rights movement. And the ISresearchers are the key contributors in the time-consuming and expensiveannual organizational ritual of preparing, editing, and publishing the report.Amnesty’s SG from 1992 to 2001, Pierre Sane, attempted many controversialinternal reforms directed at overhauling the research culture, but still hedared not touch the Annual Report (Hopgood, 2006: 233, n. 42). It is theepitome of the researcher’s art.

Annual Reports: Past and Present

There was a time when all we knew about ‘human rights’ in many parts ofthe world came through Amnesty, the Annual Report serving as the epitomeof this pre-eminence. That this is no longer the case is obvious. This makesthe Report in many ways anachronistic. There are other ways now to findout what is going on almost anywhere else, and so rather than a record ofwitness to human rights abuses worldwide, the report has come to be morean account of what Amnesty as an NGO has been saying and doing, a subtlebut important shift. Internal momentum, not external need, drives its pro-duction and content. Its deep cultural significance within Amnesty createsambiguities and idiosyncrasies that are hard to explain in any other way.Organizational priorities are now hard to spot (compared with the 1980swhen each country entry was organized around the same generic headings),and sometimes the use of individual case material in such a highly truncatedform can even detract from the sense that human rights abuses of the sort inquestion are systematic; it is a sometimes awkward fusing of Amnesty’s his-torical attachment to individual cases with the shift to more thematicconcerns.

Some entries cover children’s and some workers’ rights; some prison con-ditions; and some legal and constitutional developments. In the case ofTogo, one gets ‘international scrutiny’, in Swaziland ‘right to health’, andunder the Russian Federation (the longest entry by my estimate) we get‘armed conflict with Georgia’.3 This latter action was not a human rightsviolation in itself, even if violations took place within the conflict. We getland disputes in Guatemala and people trafficking in Greece, missing personsin Cyprus and child soldiers in the DRC, ‘impact of the US embargo’ underCuba and ‘para-political scandal’ under Colombia. There are then those

3 The salience of the Israel–Palestinian conflict ensures that Israel and the PalestinianAuthority get substantial coverage out of all proportion to their relative size. Historically,the relative length of entries was monitored in the reports to avoid any show of bias.

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more traditional Amnesty concerns – torture, impunity, death penalty – andsome newer ones, discrimination and violence against women – that affordsome degree of continuity. The regional overviews (pp. 1–49) that precedethe specific country entries are organized under headings that arerights-related in various ways but are not in themselves human rights con-cepts like deprivation, insecurity, and exclusion.

One might say, so what? What for other organizations might be an uncom-fortable not to say precarious position to be in – an insider NGO and anoutsider solidarity movement and a detached witness and a commercialentity with an entrenched internal tension between country-based researchand thematic campaigns – is a stance that has evolved naturally for Amnestysince 1961, and one despite which it endures and thrives. The 2009 AnnualReport reflects this. Like the Queen’s Christmas message, it is unthinkable tohave a year go by without the institution that is the Amnesty Annual Report,even though given the move to full spectrum, the overwhelming importancefor NGOs of their websites, the instantaneous speed of communicationsabout human rights abuses, and the relative decline in the activist nature ofAmnesty membership (while its donor base has grown), the Annual Reportitself might be considered no longer ‘fit for purpose’ (Amnesty would con-tinue to produce its research in ongoing reports, press releases etc., many ofwhich are cited in the report).

The 2009 Annual Report symbolizes, I suggest, the powerful legacy of onevision of what Amnesty is, of Amnesty as an identity. This vision is far fromredundant. In reading through the report, I conducted an experiment,opening it at random and then googling the abuse I first came across (I gotfreedom of expression in Cambodia and abuses by armed groups inSenegal). Each internet search yielded a vast array of detailed and specializedsites, seemingly confirming the lack of necessity (even the inappropriateness)of Amnesty claiming to be an authority on these issues. But as I scrolleddown, I realized that, given the paucity of my knowledge of either thecountry or abuse in question, I had no idea whether what I was reading wasreliable, accurate, politically skewed, or otherwise manipulative. I neededeither to invest massively in building my own expertise or find an experi-enced guide, one I could trust to be tell me ‘the truth’ so far as that is poss-ible. This is classic Amnesty, the unrivalled moral, and factual authority.This Amnesty has such historical gravitas and depth of meaning, especiallyin its Western European heartland, that still, today, 1 in every 50 Dutch citi-zens is a member of Amnesty, a truly astonishing statistic.

There is, however, another vision. Amnesty is now part of a human rights‘movement’ that numbers in the tens of millions, Amnesty’s own 2.2 millionregistered members unlikely to be exclusively just Amnesty supporters. Forthem Amnesty is less an identity, and more a means to an end. Many newerand younger members join because of one specific issue on which they seeksocial change. They do not join to share in, to be a part of, Amnesty as an

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institution. This global movement is full spectrum, its remit encompassingany cause that can be rendered in some way as relevant to human rights.4

Fidelity to doctrine is wholly secondary to passion for the cause. Humanrights is a battle of the powerless and the marginalized against the peopleand structures that oppress them. Vision 2 is more campaigns driven, lessconcerned about detailed research and factual correctness, and more aboutusing people power to change policy and practice. It is more political.Research, like rights, is thus instrumental to realizing other values, not avalue in itself. Amnesty could have gone in either direction in 1961. It privi-leged Vision 1, partly due to the inclinations of its founders, partly due tothe times (had it been formed in 1968, things would have been different).And even then, the more political vision, Vision 2, was never permanentlysuppressed (Amnesty’s Annual Reports in the 1960s attacked US imperialismin Vietnam, while in the 1980s it worked on issues like refugees and impu-nity). Internally, what held this alliance together was a strong commitmentto the identity (now ‘brand’) of Amnesty International and, until the 1990s,rigorously maintained organizational doctrine and centralized control (all ofwhich has made Amnesty, historically at least, a secular church in my view;Hopgood, 2006).

Irene Khan’s foreword to the 2009 report carries unmistakable signs of thejourney that Amnesty has made towards the second vision, the one sidelinedat birth, and of the reform process over which she has presided since she suc-ceeded Pierre Sane in 2001. For 17 years, from Sane’s arrival in 1992 toKhan’s departure in 2009, a cornerstone of the efforts of Amnesty’s refor-mers under these two ‘outsiders’ (in the sense that they were not ‘Amnesty’pre-appointment) has been to widen the scope of the work to include econ-omic, social, and cultural (ESC) rights. In other words, to head towards fullspectrum. Moving in this direction was essential, the argument went, for avariety of reasons including: that ESC rights were more relevant to the mostpressing and serious problems in the Global South; that they widened hugelythe relevance of Amnesty to potential new membership communities; andthat they placed the organization closer to the cutting edge of work withinthe professional human rights movement as a whole.In 2001, Sane argued:

In a world where globalization is undermining many nation states andbringing poverty to the forefront of the human rights agenda, thechallenge for AI is to remain relevant. In my opinion, this means

4 The 2.2 million includes members, supporters, and subscribers. The number of these peoplewho actively engage in pro-human rights work in the name of Amnesty (like the weeklyletter-writing for prisoners of conscience (POCs) and fundraising groups of old) is vastlylower and probably declining. A big majority will simply be direct debit payers. Some oldersections, AI Germany, for example, still differentiate supporters from members with thelatter required to undertake activism not just make financial contributions.

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broadening our aim from the protection of civil and political rights toembrace all human rights (Amnesty Annual Report, 2001: 7).

The 2001 foreword recognized that these (post-Seattle, pre-9–11) challengeshad brought forth a new kind of protest movement, and that human rightswould play a role in it:

A global solidarity movement to address the negative consequences ofglobalization is in the making. AI will bring its unique contribution tothis endeavour (Amnesty Annual Report, 2001: 7).

In other words, Amnesty would contribute in a distinct way to the widermovement against the downsides of globalization without being subsumedby it (or tempted to try to make human rights the master narrative to encom-pass it). Irene Khan’s foreword, written eight years later at the height of theglobal financial crisis, goes further. She is engaged in a more delicate balan-cing act, one that simultaneously elevates ‘rights’ from the 2001 position, tokeep Amnesty front and centre as one of the global NGOs alongside HumanRights Watch, Oxfam International, World Vision etc., while also locatingthose rights as part of a wider movement dedicated to relieving forms ofhuman suffering not usually associated first and foremost with rights. Thisassociation with emotionally resonant moral ideas like ‘freedom’ and ‘inse-curity’ is a move away from the ‘sacred’ understanding of human rightswork (of Vision 1) and makes Amnesty harder to distinguish, rhetorically atleast, from Oxfam.

Khan’s foreword is titled, ‘It’s not just the economy, it’s a human rightscrisis.’ The strong language about poverty and inequality that follows isunsparing and would not be out of place at an anti-globalization rally:

By the end of 2008, it was clear that our two-tier world of deprivationand gluttony – the impoverishment of many to satisfy the greed of a few– was collapsing into a deep hole (Amnesty Annual Report, 2009: 5).

These sentiments have been expressed by Amnesty before, under Pierre Sanein the 1990s, but in Irene Khan’s 2009 language there is a ferocity and indig-nation that is unprecedented. This is a long way from the Cold War dayswhen Amnesty did not comment on the nature of a regime, capitalist or com-munist, but just on its civil and political rights record. The foreword goes on:

Billions of people are suffering from insecurity, injustice and indignity.This is a human rights crisis (Amnesty Annual Report, 2009: 6).

These substantive moral harms – insecurity, injustice, and indignity –feature heavily in the report, and are as frequently cited as ‘human rights’.As this sentence makes clear, these harms are the problem and human rightsis one way to think about them. The 2009 foreword ends with the words:

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Almost 50 years ago Amnesty International was created to demand therelease of prisoners of conscience. Today we also “demand dignity” forprisoners of poverty so that they can change their own lives. I am confi-dent that with the help and support of our millions of members, sup-porters and partners around the world we will succeed (AmnestyAnnual Report, 2009: 17).

No mention of human rights here. On the yellow cut-out-and-send member-ship form at the back of the 2009 report, it says: ‘Whether in a high-profileconflict or a forgotten corner of the globe, Amnesty International campaignsfor justice, freedom and dignity for all and seeks to galvanize public supportto build a better world.’ (Amnesty Annual Report, 2009: 75, emphasis inoriginal). No mention of human rights here either, although in smallerletters immediately beneath ‘human rights’ as a phrase is used.

Are Human Rights Past Their Sell-By Date?

Just as the Annual Report can be seen as an anachronism in a high speed,low loyalty mass media world of ubiquitous rights claims, isn’t it possiblethat ‘human rights’ as ideas are themselves approaching the end of their shelflife? Isn’t that what Amnesty, unconsciously perhaps, is groping towards?Why not go to the source – freedom, justice, dignity – and have humanrights claims as one mechanism among others to realize those more founda-tional values? The problem with poverty is not that people’s human rightsare being abused; the problem is that people starve, lose self-respect, andsuffer endless indignities and insecurities. It adds nothing morally to reframethese concerns in human rights terms. It may, in certain cases, be judiciousor efficacious to do so, by facilitating legal cases, for example, but thatmakes human rights means not ends. This is an acute intuition for Amnesty.What if it just became the global NGO against all bad things, or put morepositively, in favour of social values like respect, equality, freedom fromfear? Could it not then demand action on the basis of unnecessary sufferingor need rather than on the basis of rights? What if it allied itself with politi-cal parties and trades unions to change a government, or campaigned toelect a preferred party or leader, or sanctioned an armed intervention toprevent human rights violations? What if it became a transnational politicalforce? The historical record shows that founder Peter Benenson was wellaware of this potential for Amnesty even in the early 1960s (Buchanan,2002). Why can’t Amnesty move onwards and upwards from being ‘merely’a human rights organization to being a democratic political party for a bor-derless world?

The hard-fought move to ESC rights, still a controversial shift withinAmnesty, is a step in this direction. Even in 2001, Pierre Sane could still write:

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The victim is always at the heart of the battles we fight. The first battleis the battle to preserve the individual identity of the victim. A victim isnot a statistic or a sociological category. A victim is a human being.And every human being has the right to the elemental human dignity ofbeing named (Amnesty Annual Report, 2001: 10).

The final sentence from the 2009 report eschews the language of victimhood,the foreword’s tenor as a whole being to shift the balance on from witnessingand moral authority towards social change and social values (like dignity,respect, security, freedom, and justice). Having ditched its narrowly defineddoctrine, after 2001, Amnesty can move towards political-style protest anddemands for recognition and social justice that are backed by ‘people power’through the whole array of democratic impact mechanisms. What would bethe problem with this as a vision for Amnesty’s second half century?

Briefly put, the danger is that in abandoning Vision 1 Amnesty specifically(and human rights in general) lose what marketers would call its ‘uniqueselling point (USP)’. During the Cold War, human rights proved a powerfullanguage with which to demand fairness and decency without speakingeither from the left or (less frequently) from the right. Latin America in the1970s and 1980s provides a good example of this. Once we entered the1990s and the liberal vision of markets, rights and democracy triumphed,human rights had to find a revised role, one that took in identity rights,international justice, and ESC rights (in this latter case entailing work onproblems within an ascendant democratic capitalism that also funded,through middle class donations and philanthropy, the human rights move-ment). When it was founded, Amnesty’s pioneers understood that in manyways this was to be a ‘spiritual’ organization that compensated for thedecline of established religion and the discrediting of the left post-Stalin.Now, 20 years after the end of the Cold War, religion and the left are back(if they ever went away), both equally concerned about precisely the issues –economic and social injustice under globalization – that Amnesty is prioritiz-ing. This leaves the global human rights movement in a vulnerable positionbecause its USP is harder and harder to discern.

Thus, we can ask in 2009 why join a global human rights organizationrather than established religious networks, political parties and movements,trades unions, community associations, or national and ethnic solidaritymovements? What is the ‘value added’ of couching claims of injustice andinequality in human rights language and of working on them through aglobal NGO? The claim that there is a right to life, for example, is derivedfrom a deeper moral claim about intrinsic human worth, the classicexpression of which is the idea of ‘dignity’. The idea of ‘dignity’ features inthe preamble to the UDHR, and has been a regular feature of human rightsconventions and declarations ever since. ‘Dignity and justice for all’ was theUN’s human rights day theme in 2008 (UN, 2007). The declaration from the

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1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna stated unequivocallythat ‘all human rights derive from the dignity and worth inherent in thehuman person’ (UNHCHR, 1993). The reason injustice and insecurity areproblematic is because they undermine dignity. Rights function as ways topreserve that dignity, by enhancing security and freedom, or by redressinginjustices. But ‘the problem’ is not a ‘human rights problem’ – human rightsmight be an answer, but it is an answer to threats that assail freedom orsecurity and so undermine dignity. As the decade has worn on, it hasbecome harder and harder to maintain the privileged position of the rightsframework when it is increasingly only one narrative among others. ESCrights undermine Amnesty’s distinctiveness, both within the human rightsworld and in ‘competition’ with other ways to organize against social andeconomic harms. One difference between the Amnesty reports of 2001 and2009 is that in the former, the language of rights is still the master lensthrough which economic and social problems like poverty are initiallyviewed. In 2009, in contrast, human rights are awkwardly bolted on whenthe ‘real’ problems is, for example, poverty, insecurity, or discrimination (toname but three).

If one uses the language of dignity, why does one need the language ofrights at all? They are a legal and rhetorical expression of a more profoundvalue, and thus it is not rights we need to protect and nurture but dignity.5

As tools they can be replaced by other tools if and when their effectivenesswanes. This entails that the term ‘human rights organization’ is a misnomer– they are ‘freedom organizations’, or ‘justice organizations’, (or ‘anti-tortureorganizations’) and they use rights to argue for enhanced freedom or justicefor pragmatic reasons. Even if ‘dignity’ can be seen as a kind of meta-narrative that stresses the universality and indivisibility of rights, especiallyon issues like slums, for example, where civil and political and social andeconomic rights are hard to separate, the mere fact that when the view of anissue provided by ‘human rights’ is obscured, or rights clash, ‘dignity’ canhelp us find a way through suggests that the more ‘sacred’ understanding ofrights is in fact to mistake a means for an end. In a moral context likehuman rights work, deep doctrinal disputes about rights are in reality aboutorganizational priorities not first principles. In short, there is nothing specialabout human rights beyond their contingent effectiveness at realizing deepervalues.

Oxfam, for example, has worked out that rights organizations cannotsustain a monopoly on rights language. Oxfam International’s strategic planfor 2007–2012 (‘Demanding Justice’) frames all its work with a commit-ment to five broad rights-based aims: the rights to sustainable livelihood,

5 Amnesty’s leadership recently discussed the question of whether to amend the statute of theorganization to state explicitly that rights were a tool for the realization of dignity, a sugges-tion that was rejected.

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basic social services, life and security, to be heard, and to have an identity(Oxfam, 2007). Save the Children is also considering an Oxfam-like move tobecome a more cohesive and singular global brand; it sees itself as intrinsi-cally a rights-based organization too. The idea of dignity can, of course, bepicked up by these organizations – it is no more ‘patentable’ than humanrights. But what is, or was, a less replicable niche was the classic Amnesty ofmoral authority. With an emphasis on individual case work, laboriousresearch, legal precedents and obligations, and what was right (rather thanwhat was necessary), Amnesty possessed a moral authority that organiz-ations like Oxfam could envy but never replicate. They were impartial, it istrue, but they rejected the language of right and wrong as anathema to thehumanitarian creed of needs. As rights became more about ESC rights, andless about the ‘religious vocation’ of civil and political human rights work,Oxfam discovered it need not invest in its own ‘candle’. The rights churchwas moving in its direction, increasingly ecumenical to the point of near-secular Unitarianism.

One of the extraordinary things about Amnesty is that so many of itsinternal debates were prefigured at its creation. The reason is that Amnestydid not so much create something as embody something. We can call thiswhat you will: soul, spirit, sacredness, a sense of the transcendent. All theseterms connote the comforting and very human notion that life must havesome higher purpose. Any organization that seeks to organize systematicallythe energy generated by human beings who share principled beliefs will facesimilar structural dilemmas, the most important of which is the strategicchoice of breadth or depth. Put simply, this entails choosing between fewermembers with deeper commitment to a narrow range of issues (Vision 1), ormore members with weaker commitment to a wider range of issues (Vision 2).The depth choice leads to monopoly authority that is detached and tends tooperational techniques that are text based and complex to understand – thisis the realm of expertise and claims to privileged insight. The breadth choiceleads to wide identification with numerous causes and derives its impactfrom protests, demonstrations, lobbying, and organized resistance on a widescale. Breadth means an organization is easy to join and the costs of being amember are low (as exiting is cheap). Depth means an organization requiresmore of you but in turn develops a more distinctive and durable reputation.Most movement organizations exist on a spectrum somewhere betweenthe two.

More Members, More Profile, Less Authority?

If ESC rights and their logic of wider alliances for social impact are aboutbreadth, and thus growth in members, money and profile-raising globaladvocacy, what happens to depth? With its ‘spiritual’ origins, Amnesty’s con-tribution historically has been as much about creating a sense of depth forthe human rights movement as a whole as it has been about discernible

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impact on the general human rights situation in any given country. IsAmnesty’s Demand Dignity Campaign an attempt to give itself a renewedsense of higher purpose by association with a more foundational moralnotion – dignity – than rights? Is it a claim to possess depth to compensatefor and counter-balance the pursuit of breadth – to give actual and potentialmembers a sense that ‘Amnesty’ is still about something transcendent atheart? That it is still an identity.

How well human rights NGOs adhere to their moral foundations is criticalto their legitimacy. Integrity and impact exist in a complicated relationship.Human rights activists do not meet direct material needs (like humanitar-ians), and they find it hard to point to definitive evidence of their positiveimpact except in discrete cases. Amnesty took a strong stand, under IreneKhan, against Guantanamo Bay, for example, calling it a ‘gulag’, but anyclaim that this was a critical factor in putting Guantanamo on the timetableto closure would be met with intense scepticism. With prisoners of con-science (POCs) one can make a plausible claim that in many cases Amnesty’swork was of vital importance. But this is not the case with a campaignagainst poverty, because its level of generality, the scale of those affected, themulti-causal explanations for poverty, the complex mechanisms required toalleviate it, and the number of organizations active in amelioration efforts,creates a cause–effect morass. Even when there is prima facie evidence ofimpact, it is unclear whether what makes the difference is the power of themoral and legal argument – you should release this person, you have a legalobligation to free them – or the mere fact of pressure from a global NGOwhich makes a state look bad in terms of the negative publicity causedsimply by allegations of immoral or illegal behaviour. It is the political costsof continuing with a course of action not the rights or wrong of the case thatmake the difference.

Consider Amnesty alongside the institution it in some ways was a secularalternative to, the Catholic Church. Here the source of authority and organ-izational form are well established and highly resilient. This Church is aboutsuffering, sacrifice, and poverty, is familiar with the language of dignity, hasa formidable network for social activism and public advocacy, and has noanxieties about its foundational mission – doing God’s work in the world. Ithas breadth and depth. In the 2009 Third Encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI,‘Charity in Truth’, the Pope addresses very similar issues to AmnestyInternational’s Annual Report – insecurity, injustice (‘development, socialwell-being, the search for a satisfactory solution to the grave socio-economicproblems besetting humanity’; Vatican, 2009). This breadth is accompaniedby a steady commitment to depth, to the thing that anchors the Church; thatcharitable work is about ‘the truth’ in action, that truth being the message ofJesus. This truth has a ‘persuasive and authenticating power’, without which‘charity degenerates into sentimentality’. Against any sense of relative truth,or the virtues of interest-driven humanitarianism, the Pope argues:

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Without truth, without trust and love for what is true, there is no socialconscience and responsibility and social action ends up serving privateinterests and the logic of power, resulting in social fragmentationespecially in a globalised society at difficult times like the present.

This has positive consequences for the Church: no agonizing about motiv-ation, no difficulty about policy (God’s word – via the church’s social teach-ing – guides how you work and how you resolve dilemmas about who tohelp), and no problem with justification. Religious belief remains high in thevery areas of the world, Africa, Latin America, and many parts of Asia,where ESC rights are taken to be an organizing principle. Amnesty is trespas-sing onto core Church (and Mosque) territory.

Further, Amnesty has always had a sizeable membership from religiousgroups, and a long-standing association with various churches. Its founderssaw it as a kind of secular but ‘religious’ alternative. Amnesty as a secularchurch met a certain kind of spiritual need. If it loses that religiosity, doesAmnesty risk losing some of its more activist members back to the church?This is less of a concern for most secular organizations; they understand thatthey will only ever draw on a small subset of potential religious members.But Amnesty is different. The ferocity of the debate over abortion withinparts of the Amnesty membership is testament to the underlying religiosity ofmany members. If they decline as a proportion of the 2.2 million, Amnestywill gain operational and policy flexibility at the cost of no longer attractingthose with deeper loyalty than their direct debit payment. One empirical testof this will come during the global financial crisis. Religious adherents whosupport the development work of their churches tend to join for longer andgive more generously than secular supporters. If we see Amnesty as a kind ofchurch, then its core support should maintain its income at reasonable levelsand it ought not to suffer to the same extent as wholly secular organizations(like Oxfam, Save the Children etc.). In addition, the Vision 1 of Amnesty isstronger in Western Europe than the United States, meaning that fundingought to hold up better in France and the Netherlands than for AIUSA (theUS section is also more dependent on institutional and individual large-scaledonors but less so than its main competitor for funds, Human RightsWatch).

Imagine the three organizations – Amnesty, Oxfam, and the CatholicChurch – as global brands. They compete for market share. Oxfam doesadvocacy work but it is mainly known as a humanitarian organization thatuses donations to alleviate suffering directly. It can fall back on alleviatingneeds as a USP. That leaves Amnesty and the Church to fight it out on theturf of morality. The Church has no qualms about charity, motivation, legiti-macy, justification – God underwrites all. This may be off-putting for somebut it provides a clear and easily comprehensible reason for providing assist-ance, and a detailed guide about how to do it. In the broad, complex, and

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less certain world of ESC rights – with the difficult political and economicas well as ethical questions that are raised – the ‘rightness’ of Amnesty, soassured when the individual victim was being tortured or disappeared, islost. Demands for an end to poverty lose force because they are so general-ized. As Irene Khan puts it:

The world needs a different kind of leadership, a different kind of poli-tics as well as economics – something that works for all and not justfor a favoured few. We need leadership of the kind that moves statesfrom narrow national self-interest to multilateral collaboration, so thatthe solutions are inclusive, comprehensive, sustainable and respectful ofhuman rights (Amnesty Annual Report, 2009: 6).

This is a million miles away from the classic Amnesty ethos. None of that workis complete, although the number of POCs may have declined (on Amnestyinternational’s restrictive understanding of who qualifies – those imprisonedsolely for exercising in a non-violent way their right to freedom of expression,thought, etc.). The dominant liberal democratic state in the international systemhas just openly practiced torture, colluded in disappearing people, and is stilltolerant of the death penalty. As Amnesty pursues breadth, the justification forassuming moral authority to make such demands will come under greater scru-tiny because there are now alternatives and Amnesty risks vacating its niche.That niche had limited horizons, to be sure. But it was nonetheless a vocation,classically about shining a light in the darkness where no other lights wereshone. It is the Pope’s encyclical that claims ‘integral human development is pri-marily a vocation’, and that ‘truth is the light that gives meaning and value tocharity’. This was once Amnesty’s space, in a secular idiom.

Another 50 Years? But to Do What?

Is Amnesty at a crossroads? Financially, it is in no worse a position than othercomparable groups: it has 2 million members, subscribers, and supporters, hashuge name recognition as a globally trusted witness, and its research workoften forms the basis for academic analyses of the impact of human rights. Itscondemnations can still headline the evening news bulletins and get front pagecoverage in the newspapers. Its Demand Dignity Campaign may well provesuccessful, at least as far as raising Amnesty’s profile and income is concerned.But ask yourself how it will contribute in any direct way to reducing povertyand some of the points I have been making become clearer; hence, my use ofthe words ‘ennui’ and ‘meander’. There is still, for me at least, a sense thatAmnesty has lost its way and the 2009 Annual Report exemplifies this feelingin its awkward mixture of the old and the new, the church and the transna-tional social movement, the bewildering panoply of rights that it supports andthe lack of message definition that goes with it. It is too much abouteverything.

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If I were to push this analysis further, I would say it retained the ambitionto remain a global secular church (breadth) while skimping on the invest-ment in symbolic power necessary to give such a universal organization therequisite depth. If Amnesty did not exist, would we bother to invent it now,in 2010? What is its value added? What does it achieve in the world? Is itdoing something others are not in arguing for ESC rights and an end topoverty? Is it really likely to be more effective than the Catholic Church,Oxfam, the ILO, the global social forum and anti-globalization movements,trades unions, local leftist political parties and social movements to name buta few? Amnesty’s senior members should have chosen, by the time you readthis, a new SG. It may well be clearer then what they think should beAmnesty’s mission in the coming decades. Will the new SG keep the AnnualReport? Of course! It is a marketing tool and the researchers are committedto it. Will it improve the human rights of a single child living anywhere inthe world, enhance the dignity of any identifiable woman, or lift even onesingle man out of poverty? No, of course not. The tens of thousands ofpounds it costs to produce the Annual Report each year would do moregood in terms of tangible benefits for more people given to Oxfam or Savethe Children or even, dare I say it, the Catholic Church. The Annual Reportis about identity, Amnesty’s identity (Vision 1), not impact (Vision 2). It is alegacy of the past not a tool for the future.

But then for me Amnesty is about something more important even than itsown identity, or any specific human rights impact it might have – a differentkind of less tangible, more ephemeral effect in the world. It is about the exis-tential idea of hope, an idea that emboldens and motivates us all andwithout which it can be hard to go on. It is always going to be attractive,especially for human rights professionals, to leverage their brand into globalprominence, to grow their budgets, increase their members, and raise theirprofile. It is what professional managers, marketers, advocates, campaignersare hired to do. They pursue success and the metric for that success isgrowth and visibility, legitimized by the claim that being bigger, and richer,will advance human rights more effectively. Shining a light in the darknesshas only limited attractions for those who did not sign up to be unsungheroes. Who chose, rather than fell into, this line of work. For all itsdeficiencies, the Annual Report has a kind of symbolic resonance, as doesAmnesty itself that will be missed when it is gone. Someone has to keepbuilding the secular church.

STEPHEN HOPGOODSchool of Oriental and African StudiesUniversity of Londonsh18@soas.ac.uk

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References

Amnesty International. 2001. Amnesty International Annual Report. London:Amnesty International.

———. 2009. Amnesty International Annual Report. London: AmnestyInternational.

Buchanan, T. 2002. ‘“The Truth Will Set You Free”: The Making of AmnestyInternational’. Journal of Contemporary History, 37(4): 575–597.

Hopgood, S. 2006. Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International.Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Oxfam International. 2007. ‘Oxfam International Strategic Plan’. Available athttp://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/oi_strategic_plan_2007_0.pdf(retrieved 7 October 2009).

UN (United Nations). 2007. ‘Human Rights Day: Dignity and Justice for All’.Available at http://www.un.org/events/humanrights/2007/ (retrieved 7 October2009).

UNHCHR (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights). 1993. ‘ViennaDeclaration and Programme of Action’. Available at http://www.unhchr.ch/huridocda/huridoca.nsf/(Symbol)/A.CONF.157.23.En (retrieved 7 October 2009).

Vatican. 2009. ‘Caritas in Veritate’. Available at: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate_en.html (retrieved 7 October 2009).

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