Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Finnish Red Cross and UNICEF are probably the most popular charities among people I know. I happen to think the first two choices are no good, at least in their Finnish incarnations.
AI and GP suffer from the same fundamental problem: while their broadly stated objectives are commendable, they are run by people who divert the organisations’ money and (more importantly) mind share towards pet issues that are peripheral or even irrelevant to the really important goals.
Amnesty international
AI was originally formed around the idea of international solidarity towards people who are persecuted for their opinions or beliefs. The idea of a common front in support of all oppressed political oppositions, religions, investigative journalists and conscientious objectors regardless of ideology was and is a powerful idea and, in my opinion, extremely worthy of support. Those groups are as badly in need of help and attention today as they have ever been.
Two things are especially important to effectively fight persecution by mobilising public opinion:
- Having no ideological bias, so that when you report an abuse, people will believe that your statement is not politically motivated
- Focusing single-mindedly on this core objective, so that people don’t dismiss you as “just another” activist organisation
I think Amnesty has essentially abandoned both of those critical assets. Between 1986 and 2000 it issued more press releases regarding the United States than any other region, with Israel in second place. Finnish Amnesty’s recent campaigns have dealt with eg. domestic violence and Finnish sex crime legislation (it’s too easy on the rapists, they say). It’s one thing to expand Amnesty’s scope from freedom of opinion, speech, association and religion to “human rights” in general, but quite another to get involved in the details of criminal law in one of the safest and most rights-respecting countries in the world. Amnesty has become yet another organisation for people who are vaguely leftist, want to feel good about themselves and don’t like America.
Greenpeace
Greenpeace doesn’t care about nature so much as “naturalness”. Science, engineering, artificiality and human progress are its enemies. While the last two are debatable (I happen to be for them), science and engineering are precisely the ways humans can be of benefit to nature.
Correspondingly among its most famous campaigns have been opposition to
- DDT (a minor environmental problem, extremely important in fighting malaria [edit: turns out that Greenpeace doesn’t mind DDT when used to fight malaria])
- nuclear power (a safe, practical and abundant energy source)
- genetic engineering (I can only attribute this to latent Gaianism)
I hasten to say that they have had many excellent campaigns as well, and have done more to raise awareness about environmental problems than any other organisation. Still, I wish they were overtaken by a more scientifically minded and realistic organisation – in any case, they’re far too flaky and unpredictable to get my money at the moment.
Umm Greenpeace supports the use of DDT in malaria control. But otherwise I hate them too, yes.
Bess
Okay, true. I’ll amend the post accordingly.
sam
Right after the Wikipedia table to which you linked, there are three paragraphs of text accounting for the very feature of Amnesty’s campaigning which you aimed to put in questionable light with the link. I must say that those paragraphs make a lot of sense to me.
As for “one of the safest and most rights-respecting countries in the world” – I wonder if you’re familiar with, for instance, this detailed ten article series in the New York Times, describing how the judicial system of the United States embraces any number of features (OK, ten features) that the rest of world opinion finds horrific, repellent, or at least completely unacceptable.
Tommi Uschanov
Yeah, I read them too. I’m just not convinced – a skew as strong as it is can just make it easier for western governments to dismiss reports as being made by a biased organisation. Does the US take Amnesty in account much in formulating policy? Inevitably, many Amnesty reports exist not because of the severity of the human rights violation in question but because it happened in some country Amnesty decided it has a good chance of changing.
I was talking about Finland as a relatively non-human-rights-violating place, but I’d say both it and the US are easily in, say, the best quarter of all nations. In the case of Amnesty’s original focus, ie. freedom of speech, opinion and organisation, the US probably is the freest country in the world.
I do agree that many aspects of the US legal system are completely crazy. The UK is even worse.
sam
Yes, and I still just don’t understand how this can be seen as a criticism.
Amnesty made its name as a champion of balance and unbiasedness during the Cold War, when it reported equally on human rights violations by the United States and its allies (leading to it being denounced as a communist propaganda tool) and by the Soviet Union and its allies (leading to it being denounced as a capitalist propaganda tool). Well, after the Soviet Union collapsed, there is unfortunately no longer any “anti-United States” to whom one could be fair and thus earn a licence to be fair to the United States. It’s a unipolar world, as we all are tired of hearing by now.
Oh.
Well, it’s surely inadvertently revealing that I didn’t even manage to recognize Finland in your description – although I did wonder a bit about your apparent newfound enthusiasm about the United States.
In the 2009 annual report, on Finland there is a tiny summary of less than 500 words, only part of which can be construed as having to do in any way with matters of criminal law. Compared with typical countries such as Nigeria (2,395 words), Sudan (2,493 words) or Russia (3,144 words), this is nothing.
I agree with you completely about Greenpeace, by the way, if it’s any consolation.
Tommi Uschanov
There’s no Soviet Union, but there’s Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan… any number of large countries with severe human rights problems (compared to the US). Do you think they shouldn’t be reported on because they’re not powerful enough? Is the proper goal of Amnesty to “speak truth to power”? I don’t know, but that’s still not a goal I’d particularly want to give money towards.
I think ideally an Amnesty report about a human rights violation in the US should satisfy its readers that the report was made because there’s a serious problem, not because a problem of some kind can be located in the US. Not to say that I expect there to be a shortage of serious problems in the US.
It wasn’t so much the description as the context:
Oh, I take what I can get.
I do (of late) try to avoid blogging about things I expect “everyone” to agree with or know about already.
sam
A very baffling question, as Amnesty hardly does anything else but report on the human rights situation in just such countries (and smaller similar ones). Just like they should, in my view.
According to the tables you linked, only 4.24 % of their press releases and 3.46 % of their reports have dealt with the United States. That’s less than even the United States’ share of the world’s population. A country that is the subject of a report every twenty-ninth time a report is issued is hardly being singled out for disproportionate attention at the expense of other deserving targets. You’re making it sound like it was every second or third time.
Tommi Uschanov
Okay, my mistake if I made it sound like that. I still think there’s some bias and that it isn’t desirable. But actually that’s not what annoyed me most about Amnesty, it was this:
Granted, this isn’t about Amnesty International as a whole but just its Finnish chapter.
sam