On rights vs. Amnesty

The Economist has a thought provoking and, I think, ultimately wrong take on the role major human rights groups like Amnesty International have assumed in recent years.

Filtering out all of The Economist's glibness, the main points are:

some years ago [Amnesty] decided to follow intellectual fashion and dilute a traditional focus on political rights by mixing in a new category of what people now call social and economic rights....

Food, jobs and housing are certainly necessities. But no useful purpose is served by calling them “rights”. When a government locks someone up without a fair trial, the victim, perpetrator and remedy are pretty clear. This clarity seldom applies to social and economic “rights”. It is hard enough to determine whether such a right has been infringed, let alone who should provide a remedy, or how. Who should be educated in which subjects for how long at what cost in taxpayers' money is a political question best settled at the ballot box. So is how much to spend on what kind of health care....

And it could not be further from the truth. For people in the poor world, as for people everywhere, the most reliable method yet invented to ensure that governments provide people with social and economic necessities is called politics. That is why the rights that make open politics possible—free speech, due process, protection from arbitrary punishment—are so precious. Insisting on their enforcement is worth more than any number of grandiloquent but unenforceable declarations demanding jobs, education and housing for all.

It's true that politics are the place where big changes in economic and social justice arise. But Amnesty's role is to bring international attention to issues of injustice--whether they be the kind The Economist cares about or not--with the hope that the pressure inherent in that attention inspires the perpetrators of those injustices to change their politics. It's not particularly their role to incite internal revolt.

The other problem with their argument is that there's nothing really empirical to back it up. Amnesty can't be all things to all countries--and I don't know if or how they organize their efforts country by country--but what's definitely true is that, sometimes, a stiff critique (by a group like Amnesty) of economic and social policies in one country will actually help more people than will a stiff critique of anti-libertarian policies in another. The gravest injustices are different, for instance, in North Korea than they are in Egypt, or than they were in apartheid South Africa and so on.

Amnesty has never committed itself to be the Global Civil Liberties Union. What Amnesty says they hope to advance is, "a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards."

That Declaration states no ideological preference between, say, Article 5 and Article 13. And while it would be a good thing for everybody if Amnesty had near-infinite resources to devote equally to all major abrogations of the Universal Declaration, that's just not reality. And so they allocate their resources to bringing to light the injustices they think they can best forestall.  It may be for that reason that (to the Economist's dismay) Amnesty takes up the cause of migrant birth certificates in the Dominican Republic. But Amnesty may be able to do more to improve the lives of Haitians in the Dominican Republic than they can do to enforce the rights Castro's political prisoners.

And that, too, doesn't mean they're not also focusing on other individual liberties issues such as America's detainee policies or Russia's destruction of free speech.