Converted WP file Amnesty_Unbound_or

Amnesty Unbound or Amnesty Undone ?
THE “FULL SPECTRUM APPROACH” (FSA): A REALITY CHECK

1 • DOES A FOCUSED MANDATE MAKE AI HYPOCRITICAL?

FSA proponents would have us believe that, by hesitating to embrace the FSA, we are being hypocritical about the indivisibility of human rights. They assert that no one will believe AI takes economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR) seriously unless we adopt the FSA.

In fact, AI actively promotes awareness of and respect for ESCR and could do more “promotional” work of this kind under its current mandate. It is not logical to infer from AI’s “oppositional” focus on violations of many civil and political rights that we consider economic, social and cultural rights to be less important.

Furthermore, it is not true that AI never opposes violations of ESCR. A few of the many examples include house demolition, denial of food and medical care to prisoners, and interference with property rights of returning refugees & displaced persons who have been victims of “ethnic cleansing”.

Every NGO must have a specific mandate in order to manage limited capacity and resources responsibly. No single environmental NGO deals with the full range of environmental issues worldwide. The mandates of these organizations are mostly complementary. Practical people do not accuse them of not caring about the issues they don’t work on. No reasonable person would assume that, because a cardiologist treats only heart disease, she therefore believes that other vital organs are less important.

2 • MUST AI DOMINATE THE HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN ORDER TO BE EFFECTIVE?

Many FSA advocates seem concerned that AI will be unable to maintain prominence in the human rights movement unless it is willing to take action against violations of any right set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Perhaps we need to rethink the best role for Amnesty. Do we want to be THE human rights movement, or do we want to be a key actor in the human rights movement? Is it essential for AI to be bigger and more dominant than all other human rights organizations in order to be effective? Must we compete with our colleagues, or can we be respectful partners, each honing a particular strength that, combined, will more effectively protect all human rights everywhere? AI can be most effective with a carefully focused role rather than by trying to be the big tent of the human rights movement.

3 • IS AI’S MANDATE CONFINING OR A BARELY TAPPED OPPORTUNITY?

Those who support the FSA claim that AI’s mandate is confining, anachronistic, and unappealing, especially to people who are not white, heterosexual Europeans or North Americans. It’s difficult to prove or disprove this assumption, and there’s been insufficient discussion of its basis. Is there evidence that the opportunity to work to end torture, the death penalty, political & identity-based killings, and imprisonment based on beliefs or identity is unappealing to people from populations that are often disproportionately affected by these abuses? If you were a prisoner of conscience or torture victim in Botswana who had been forgotten by everyone except Amnesty, would you want AI to shift its attention to election monitoring?

“Defending the defenders”, as we do, means that they become free to work on the social and economic issues of their choice in their own cultural context.

There is already more flexibility and scope in the mandate than we have time & funds to exercise.

4 • SHOULDN'T WE FACE THE OBSTACLES TO FSA IMPLEMENTATION MORE FORTHRIGHTLY?

FSA supporters argue that adopting the FSA would not mean our actual work would change dramatically or that our resources would be stretched too thin, because implementation would happen slowly. Concerns about limited resources shouldn’t prevent us from seizing the opportunity that FSA represents, they say. By adopting the FSA, AI would be giving itself permission to oppose violations of any right set forth in the UDHR, but would not be obligated to work equally against all such violations.

Of course, full implementation of the FSA would be slow. It would take time to acquire the capacity to research, educate our members, and act on many new issue areas, as we would have to do under the FSA. But no matter how slowly we might abandon the mandate, it is a mistake to divorce consideration of the FSA from assessment of our current capacity to implement it. We must consider how we would acquire this capability, and whether that would be the most effective expenditure of the required resources. Even at the outset we would need to be able to research new areas of the UDHR in order to make informed judgments about including them in campaigning priorities.

And, if we undertake more and more work on ESCR under the FSA, it will be hard to avoid reducing the amount of time and resources we devote to traditional areas of the mandate (e.g., torture, POC work, political killings, fair trials), without a large infusion of new resources. Is expansion worth that sacrifice?

Because adopting FSA would create expectations that work actually will be undertaken on the new issue areas, wouldn’t it become even harder to explain why we are not working on certain abuses without appearing to be indifferent to them? Almost every FSA decision about priorities would seem to involve explicit rejections.

5 • IF WE DISCARD THE MANDATE, HOW WILL WE MAINTAIN FOCUS IN OUR CAMPAIGNING AS WELL AS IN OUR RESEARCH?

Some argue that, if we adopt the FSA, we’ll be a larger, more powerful organization, attracting more members from more diverse backgrounds, yet our work will remain focused because AI members will continue to choose from a limited menu of action opportunities, established by (as yet unknown) priority-setting processes to be created over the next few years.

We may or may not acquire a larger and more diverse membership under FSA. That is impossible to predict. We must, however, consider whether or not FSA will make us a more cohesive organization or one increasingly fragmented into specialized categories of concerns.

One of AI’s traditional strengths has been the ability to unite our global membership and engage significant public support for goals that are universally compelling (e.g., ending torture, freeing forgotten prisoners, stopping the detention and other mistreatment of asylum seekers in the US). Under FSA, is it clear how we would sustain the same degree of unity and solidarity that we’ve had in the past? Already a significant segment of our membership does not participate in our death penalty work, either because they do not agree with AI’s unconditional opposition to the death penalty or because ending the death penalty is not a priority for them. Other activist members work only on the death penalty, or on the JustEarth program, or on LGBT issues, or on violations of women’s human rights. This fragmenting trend seems likely to accelerate if we implement FSA. Also, who would decide on the limited menu of action opportunities?

Apart from a possible loss of focus in our campaigning, there is the issue of diffusion of resources for research. Given that those resources are already stretched to the breaking point, would this not become an even greater problem under FSA? If our research is weakened, our campaigning will falter; if research becomes less reliable, we surely will lose members and financial support.

We have not figured out how we would prevent excessive diffusion and fragmentation in our campaigning and research if we adopted the FSA.

6 • ARE DECISIONS ABOUT WHAT WE WILL WORK ON LIKELY TO BECOME EASIER OR HARDER UNDER THE FSA?

FSA supporters imagine that the FSA will end protracted arguments about what is or isn’t in the mandate and what we should be working on — that once we’ve adopted the FSA, we presumably could decide what to work on quickly and easily.
The FSA may end protracted debates about changing the mandate at the International Council Meetings (ICMs). However, it will not eliminate debates and disagreements about our campaigning priorities . If there are no agreed-upon boundaries to our work, arguments about choices are sure to proliferate, not dissipate. Adopting the FSA simply would move these arguments from the ICM to the strategic planning process. At the international level, that process is criticized from all sides as inscrutable and inaccessible to Amnesty members. At the section level, we have no idea how we will set priorities within AIUSA, how the process will take membership opinions into account, or how the conflicting values of efficiency and democracy will be balanced.

One question that should be considered is how to ensure that the membership input phase of the priority-setting process is not dominated by small but vocal minorities who are dedicated to getting one particular priority into the section's strategic plan, while the silent majority of AIUSA members is too immersed in its ongoing human rights work to voice an opinion about the section's action priorities. Even under the current mandate, AIUSA’s programs compete for attention and resources, and there is no orderly, transparent mechanism for negotiating among them. Does it make sense to adopt FSA if doing so is likely to foster the fracturing of activist members into even more interest groups lobbying for the inclusion of particular issues/violations in our campaigning priorities?

It would seem more logical to reform and test our strategic planning/priority-setting processes — on which the FSA would place more stress than our current mandate does — before expanding the scope of our work.

7 • WOULDN’T ADOPTING THE FSA MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE TO KEEP OUR POLICY OF GLOBAL COVERAGE?

To the extent that FSA advocates have addressed this question at all, they have suggested that the FSA is compatible with our global coverage policy. This lacks credibility, though, when one considers that our important commitment to global coverage is not being met as it is.

AI is distinguished from other human rights organizations partly by its official policy of covering human rights violations within its mandate in every country. Under this “Universal Coverage” policy, there are Minimum Adequate Coverage (MAC) standards, which differ for each country according to the level of priority assigned to it. Because of insufficient resources, however, AI has yet to implement the policy fully. How, then, can we propose to do so under a vastly expanded mandate (or none at all)?

Even now, unfortunately, there are countries on which Amnesty is doing no work at all, although serious human rights violations within AI’s current mandate occur there. There are other countries on which AI is doing some work, but not at the level required by the Minimum Adequate Coverage standards. The International Secretariat continues to be plagued by chronic inadequate staffing, high turnover, uncompetitive salaries, and long delays in filling vacancies. These and other longstanding problems have slowly worsened.

How can we pay more than lip service to the “Universal Coverage” policy if current resource levels prevail and we adopt the FSA? If we adopt FSA, honesty would require that we explicitly revoke the “Universal Coverage” policy & the MAC standards and allow ourselves to abandon certain countries, but which ones?

8 • IS IT TRUE THAT OUR CURRENT MANDATE PREVENTS AI FROM WORKING IN COALITIONS WITH OTHER NGOs?

This is an assertion that FSA proponents often make. However, AI already works in coalition with other NGOs, including NGOs focusing on rights not included in our current oppositional mandate. Nothing prevents us from continuing to do this. AI in recent years has greatly expanded its partnerships. Notable examples include the JustEarth program and the “Arrest Now!” campaign, seeking justice for war crimes in the Balkans. It is very common for AI to issue joint statements and otherwise collaborate with many domestic human rights organizations, as well as with other international human rights NGOs.

9 • HAVE WE ADEQUATELY EXPLORED ALL OTHER ALTERNATIVES TO THE FSA?

Those who favor the FSA would have us believe it is the only way to free ourselves from having irrational and indefensible boundaries between what we can and can’t work on.

It is true that there are logical inconsistencies in our current mandate. It is also true that, under any focused mandate, there will be boundaries that make some of us uncomfortable at times. However, it is possible to retain the benefits of a focused mandate while minimizing inconsistencies. Several ways of improving coherency are under discussion, ranging from a modest clarification of which “grave measures” AI opposes to a broader “Core Concept”, which would allow AI to undertake a lot of work on ESCR within a logical framework.

These and other options deserve greater scrutiny before we consider leaping all the way to FSA.

Thesil Morlan
Group 169
Area Coordinator for Maine
Chair, Northeast Regional Planning Group
Western Europe Coordination Group