source: http://humanrightsinvestigations.org/2012/11/14/amnesty-international-and-the-human-rights-industry/
by Daniel Kovalik (reproduced by kind permission of the author)
When I studied law at Columbia in the early 1990s, I had the fortune
of studying under Louis Henkin, probably the world’s most famous human
rights theoretician. Upon his passing in 2010, Elisa Massimino at Human
Rights First stated in Professor Henkin’s New York Times obituary that
he “literally and figuratively wrote the book on human rights” and that
“[i]t is no exaggeration to say that no American was more instrumental
in the development of human rights law than Lou.”
Professor Henkin, rest his soul, while a human rights legend, was not
always good on the question of war and peace. I know this from my own
experience when I had a vigorous debate with him during and continuing
after class about the jailing of anti-war protestors, including Eugene
V. Debs, during World War I. In short, Professor Henkin, agreeing with
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, believed that these
protestors were properly jailed because their activities, though
peaceful, constituted a “clear and present danger” to the security of
the nation during war time. I strongly disagreed.
That Professor Henkin would side with the state against these war
protestors is indicative of the entire problem with the field of human
rights which is at best neutral or indifferent to war, if not supportive
of it as an instrument of defending human rights. This, of course, is a
huge blind spot. In the case of World War I, for example, had the
protestors been successful in stopping the war, untold millions would
have been saved from the murderous cruelty of a conflict for which, to
this day, few can adequately even explain the reasons. And yet, this
does not seem to present a moral dilemma for today’s human rights
advocates. (I will note, on the plus side, that Professor Henkin did
become increasingly uneasy with the Vietnam War as that conflict
unfolded, and specifically with the President’s increasing usurpation of
Congress’s war authority).
In the end, it was not from Professor Henkin, but from other,
dissident intellectuals who I learned the most about human rights and
international law. The list of these intellectuals, none of whom
actually practice human rights in their day job, includes Noam Chomsky,
Edward S. Herman, Jean Bricmont and Diana Johnstone. And of course, I
have read a lot of what they have to say on this subject on these very
pages of CounterPunch.
And, what all of these individuals have emphasized time and time
again is that international law, as first codified in the aftermath of
World War II in such instruments as the UN Charter and the Nuremberg
Charter, was created for the primary purpose of preserving and
maintaining peace by outlawing aggressive war. And, why is this so?
Because the nations which had just gone through the most destructive war
in human history, with its attendant crimes of genocide and the
holocaust, realized full well that those crimes were made possible by
the paramount crime of war itself. As Jean Bricmont, then, in his
wonderful book Humanitarian Imperialism, explains, the first crime for
which the Nazis “were condemned at Nuremberg was initiating a war of
aggression, which, according to the 1945 Nuremberg Charter, ‘is the
supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes is
that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’”
In other words, the logic of the very founders of international law,
including international human rights law, was that, to preserve human
rights, the primary task of nations is to ensure peace and to prevent
war which inevitably leads to the massive violation of human rights. As
Noam Chomsky has noted for years, quite notably in his 1971 Yale Law
Review article entitled, “The Rule of Force in International Affairs,”
80 Yale L.J. 1456, one of the very first substantive norms established
by the UN Charter is prohibition against aggressive war. Such a norm is
contained, as Chomsky relates, in Article 2(4) which provides that all
UN members “shall refrain in their international relations from the
threat or use of force…” And, contrary to the position of the new
humanitarian interventionists, Article 2(7) of the Charter specifically
states that “[nothing in the present Charter shall authorize the United
Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the
domestic jurisdiction of any state...”
Sadly, as Chomsky noted even back in 1971, these norms, the paramount
ones of the entire UN system, have sadly been read out of international
law. And, they have been read out by, among others, such chief human
rights groups as Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch
(HRW). As Jean Bricmont, citing international law scholar Michael
Mandel, explains in Humanitarian Imperialism, while AI and HRW urged all
“beligerents” (without distinguishing between the attackers and the
attacked) at the outset of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq to respect the
rules of war, neither group said a word about the illegality of the war
itself. As Bricmont quite correctly stated, “[t]hese organizations are
in the position of those who recommend that rapists use condoms,”
ignoring the fact that once the intervention they failed to oppose
“takes place on a large scale, human rights and the Geneva Conventions
are massively violated.”
This brings us to the present time. Just last week, Amnesty
International issued a long statement in opposition to an article I
penned for Counterpunch on “Libya and the West’s Human Rights
hypocrisy.” AI, in its counter-blog, entitled, “A Critic Gets it Wrong
on Amnesty International and Libya” (see here),
AI claims that I was wrong in stating that it had supported the NATO
intervention in Libya. AI, affirming the critiques of Bricmont and
Mandel, claims in this blog, that “Amnesty International generally takes
no position on the use of armed force or on military interventions in
armed conflict, other than to demand that all parties respect
international human rights and humanitarian law.” AI then goes on to try
to clarify that, in advance of the NATO intervention in Libya, AI, in a
February 23, 2011, release, merely called on the Security Council to
take immediate measures against Libya and Gaddafi, including [but not
limited to] freezing the assets of Gaddafi and his senior military
advisers, and investigating the possibility of a referral to the
International Criminal Court.
In its blog contra my article, AI claims that it called for such
action based upon Gaddafi’s verbal “threat to ‘cleanse Libya house by
house’” to end the resistance. While this is true, this is not the whole
truth. Thus, in AI’s February 23, 2011 release, it also based this call
upon “persistent reports of mercenaries being brought in from African
countries by the Libyan leader to violently suppress the protests
against him.” And, as we learned from our own Patrick Cockburn in an
Independent article from June 24, 2011, entitled, “Amnesty questions
claim that Gaddafi ordered rape as a weapon of war,” Amnesty ended up
debunking the reports (though well after NATO’s attack against Libya had
begun) that Gaddafi was bringing in foreign mercenaries to fight.
As Cockburn, citing Donatella Rovera, senior crisis response adviser for Amnesty International, explains:
“Rebels have repeatedly charged that mercenary troops from
Central and West Africa have been used against them. The Amnesty
investigation found there was no evidence for this.
“Those shown to journalists as foreign mercenaries were
later quietly released,” says Ms Rovera. “Most were sub-Saharan migrants
working in Libya without documents.”
In other words, AI, on Feburary 23, 2011, was calling for Security
Council action against Libya based upon reports about foreign
mercenaries which it would later conclude were false, and upon verbal
threats Gaddafi had made — very weak bases indeed for Security Council
action.
And what about the calls for such action themselves? As we all know,
the Security Council did act, authorizing a NATO attack upon Libya which
began on March 19, 2011. The ordering of such an attack was a possible
and indeed likely action which the Security Council would take,
especially given that countries like the U.S. and France were
aggressively pushing for such action at the time. And, AI full well knew
this, and its calls for Security Council action worked in tandem with
the efforts of the U.S. and France to obtain authorization for such an
intervention.
In other words, AI, based at least in part on false reports, was
pushing for Security Council action which it knew could, and most likely
would, result in the authorization of force against Libya. And indeed,
AI’s other call for possible referral of sitting Libyan officials to the
International Criminal Court was tantamount to a call for armed
intervention, including regime change, because only such intervention
could bring about the hauling of sitting government officials to The
Hague. AI’s current professions of neutrality on the issue of
intervention notwithstanding, it can truly be stated that AI supported
the intervention that took place in March of 2011 as an objective
matter.
And sadly, this objective support was based in part on false reports
of foreign, black mercenaries being brought into Libya. These false
reports of mercenaries, in addition to feeding the calls for
intervention, had another terrible effect – they helped lead to the
massive reprisals against black Libyans and foreign guest workers during
the conflict in Libya and continuing after the time that Gaddafi was
toppled. The most notable of such reprisals was the utter destruction of
the town of Tawarga, a town largely populated by black Libyans, by
anti-Gaddafi rebels. To its great discredit, AI, in its rush to push
for Security Council intervention, spread the very false reports which
fueled such acts of vengeance.
And, what about AI’s response to crimes committed by NATO’s
intervention in and bombing of Libya? AI, in its response to my
article, cites its criticism of NATO as evidence of its even-handedness
in responding to the conduct of all sides of the Libyan conflict.
Specifically, AI cites the following criticism it made as such evidence:
Although NATO appears to have made significant efforts to
minimize the risk of causing civilian casualties, scores of Libyan
civilians were killed and many more injured. Amnesty International is
concerned that no information has been made available to the families of
civilians killed and those injured in NATO strikes about any
investigations which may have been carried out into the incidents which
resulted in death and injury.
Of course, this mere criticism demonstrates AI’s utter lack of
even-handedness. First of all, in order to please its NATO patron, AI
obviously felt compelled to lead its criticism with a compliment –
patting NATO on the back for allegedly trying to “minimize the risk of
causing civilian casualties,” as if aerial bombardment of major cities
can ever constitute the minimization of such risks.
Then, AI complains that “no information has been made available” to
the families of civilians killed or injured “about any investigations
which may have been carried out into the incidents which resulted in
death and injury.” What “investigations” is AI referring to here?
Clearly, AI is complaining that NATO, left to police itself, has not
shared the results of its own investigations into its own crimes.
The truth is that AI, which called for Security Council and possible
ICC action against Libya as NATO was sharpening its knives to invade,
has not called for a body outside NATO (e.g. the ICC) to investigate and
possibly prosecute NATO officials for their crimes. What is good for
the goose then, is not good for the gander in AI’s view. Of course, the
ICC does not exist to prosecute those from the paler, Western countries.
No, the ICC (which the U.S. is not even a signatory to and is therefore
exempt from) is, in practice, for the darker races of the poorer
countries; for those from Africa, Asia, and from time to time, the
lesser Slavic nations. And, therein lies the problem inherent in the
most famous human
rights theos system of which AI is an integral
part.
As we learn from Diana Johnstone in a CounterPunch article entitled,
“How Amnesty International Became the Servant of U.S. Warmongering
Foreign Policy,” AI’s journey to becoming an appendage of the U.S. and
NATO recently became complete with its appointment of Suzanne Nossel
as the new Director of Amnesty International USA. Diana Johnstone
explains that Suzanne Nossel openly advocated, and indeed coined the
term, “soft power” projection by the U.S. when she served in her last
job as Assistant Secretary for International Organizations at none other
than the U.S. State Department. And, as Jean Bricmont notes in
Humanitarian Intervention, and as Ms. Nossel herself and AI fully
understand, “soft power” only works because it has the very real threat
of “hard power” (including economic sanctions and military intervention)
behind it. AI has sadly forgotten that the wielding of such power by
the rich countries to bully the weak is forbidden by the UN Charter
which prohibits both the actual use and threat of force. It is those
prohibitions which must be enforced first and foremost to truly protect
human rights.
What’s more, as Diana Johnstone further explained in her CounterPunch
article, Suzanne Nossel, just before being hired by AI, played a direct
role while at the U.S. State Department in ginning up the pretexts for
the NATO intervention in Libya. Ms. Johnstone explains that, “As Deputy
Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, Ms. Nossel
played a role in drafting the United Nations Human Rights Council
resolution on Libya. That resolution, based on exaggeratedly alarmist
reports, served to justify the UN resolution which led to the NATO
bombing campaign that overthrew the Gaddafi regime.“ In other words, Ms.
Nossel’s role in pushing the NATO intervention was similar to that of
AI’s at the time, with both pushing exaggerated, and indeed false,
claims to justify stepped up action against Libya.
AI’s current attempts to distance itself from the very NATO
intervention which AI and Ms. Nossel worked together to help bring about
simply do not ring true. I would submit that it is time for AI to do
some real soul-searching on the issue of whether it wants to serve the
interests of human rights or to serve the interests of NATO and Western
military intervention, for it truly cannot serve both masters.
The article above originally appeared on the pages of Counterpunch.
Daniel Kovalik is a labor and human rights lawyer living in
Pittsburgh. He currently teaches International Human Rights at the
University of Pittsburgh School of Law.
