ON

On Tue, 20 Aug 1996, James A. Donald wrote:

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At 03:18 PM 8/19/96 -0700, Rich Graves wrote:

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You know, Amnesty has some outstanding policies regarding accuracy, objectivity, and universality.

Such as their policy that disappearances in Cuba are only mentioned in a vague and euphemistic way somewhere in the fine print of the middle of their Cuban reports, whereas similar disappearances are shouted from the rooftops when they happen in right wing South American dictatorships?

In a word, no. I wasn't talking about their policy to oppress the Easter Bunny, either.

I meant their policy of not taking sides, which in Latin America has often meant that they have less of a left-wing bias than Human Rights Watch. They do not describe people with loaded terms like "pro-democracy," "worker's rights advocate," "freedom fighter," or "social justice activist." They say "this person is in prison for political reasons," and leave it at that. Usually, they don't even identify the reasons -- just the abuse of state power.

I've always favored a carefully tailored formalistic approach to human rights and free speech issues, without taking sides on the underlying issues of political controversy. Amnesty and the ACLU generally follow this approach. When they have deviated from that approach to make sweeping statements not tied to *individual* human rights, as Amnesty's general opposition to apartheid and the ACLU's guarded support for majority-minority gerrymandering, I have opposed them.

Happily, most of the time, they stay above the fray, which I believe is the only appropriate role for a "human rights organization." I have no objection to anti-communist, anti-fascist, or whatever organizations, but I don't think they should bill themselves as human rights organizations. The Wiesenthal Center to be a "human rights organization"; it's an anti-fascist organization, which does some good, some bad, but always focused on one issue. Human Rights Watch didn't start out as a "human rights organization"; it started out as an anti-communist organization. They have since broadened their scope and international coverage considerably, but their history of making substantitive statements on larger political questions remains. Ironically, now they tend to show a leftist bias.

Liar, you support imprisoning and deporting people based purely on their political ideas, such as the bile your mouth puked up all over the net this whole year. Re: Ernst Zndel and his years of imprisonment by a court for merely expressing his racist ideas, racist political ideas being strictly illegal in Canada, hell everywhere in the so called white world except for the USA, so far. -- National socialism is the opposite of everything today.