AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL’S GOOD CONDUCT PASS
August 9, 2022 -Durt Fibo

Amnesty International is headquartered in the United Kingdom, and claims to be entirely unpolluted by government fundings or policies.

From 2008 to 2011, AI received £3,149,000 from the UK government. AI was in fact financed by the UK Foreign Office, which also directed its world-wide operatives to support the organization. AI’s British founder, Peter Benenson worked well with official UK aims, writing to the Colonial Office in 1963 (the 3rd year after AI’s birth): “I would like to reiterate our view that these [British] territories should not be used for offensive political action by the opponents of the South African Government (…) Communist influence should not be allowed to spread in this part of Africa, and in the present delicate situation, Amnesty International would wish to support Her Majesty’s Government in any such policy.” Benenson was discretely discussing refugees entering Botswana from South Africa.

With Benenson (and the UK Foreign Office) still in charge, by 1954 Amnesty International had canceled all Prisoner of Conscience merits for Nelson Mandela, purely on his legal status as decided by the apartheid South African government.

The reality is that Amnesty does accept government monies, both centrally and through its local offices. This same vice leads to its complicity regarding governmental judgments, and corrupts Amnesty’s internal structure as well as its branches across the world.

Per their own guidelines, Amnesty International asserts “AI neither asks for nor accepts direct donations from governments.” More publicly, their websie puts it: “We neither seek nor accept any funds for human rights research from governments or political parties.” However, their wording, “for human rights research”, deliberately excludes the mirrored-half of their enterprise, which they distinguish as “Human Rights Education”. They themselves finesse the issue by writing: “Human Rights Education (HRE) is distinct from the reactive research and campaigning usually associated with AI in that it is preventative, promotional human rights work. For this reason, on HRE projects AI sometimes works in a more co-operative way with governments and can even accept government money to fund educational work.”

There do exist several reports of specific sums handed over by governments to Amnesty branches during the first decade of this century, but those go no later than 2010 and are from sources which have made errors before, so I will not quote them here. Anything more reliable would have to come from inside leakers. That in itself raises questions about AI’s proactive opacity. However, confirmed information, always post-facto, shows quadruple-salary sized payouts to resigning Secretary-Generals and deputies in 2009, 7 large payouts to senior heads in 2019 forced to leave after the imputed organizational-misconduct inspired suicide of its West African representative (whose family AI then granted a secret payoff…which, when revealed, then led to public wonder about the use of Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) in such an altruistic agency), and –looking beyond mere financial facts–independent investigations of bullying, racism and systemic bias within Amnesty International, and, of course, criticisms of the neutrality of their employees and leaders all the way up to the top..

Regarding those (possibly) non-monetary involvements with governments, apart from the Mandela case cited above, two established and well-known instances of AI’s inexplicable methodology are:

In 1990, a young woman from Kuwait encouraged the United States to start the First Gulf War by telling Congress and the media how Iraq fatally ejected Kuwaiti babies from hospital incubators, and although the woman’s story was discovered to be a complete fabrication, Amnesty International, which at the time actually had investigators in Kuwait, widely publicized the lie, increasing their number of victims and even the number of incubators (to far more than existed in the hospitals).

In 2021, AI revoked the poisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny’s classification as a Prisoner of Conscience, based solely on Russian claims that he had made (in 2007) statements which –in Putin’s Russia– were, more than a decade afterwards, adjudged to have constituted “advocacy of hatred”. Three months later, Amnesty was publicly embarrassed into reinstating Navalny’s Prisoner of Conscience status, admitting on their website that they had “made a wrong decision.”

I have already written of AI’s current Secretary-General Agnes Callamard’s fabulation and the complete retraction and apology she and Amnesty were obliged to make public, as well as the asymmetrical integrity of Donatella Rovera, author of the August 4th report on the Ukraine situation (AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL’S BLIND SIDE August 5, 2022 -Durt Fibo), but now questions are erupting about what percentage of the information gathered was truly uncoerced. In synopsizing the report, Callamard wrote: “Survivors and witnesses of Russian strikes in the Donbas, Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions told Amnesty International researchers that the Ukrainian military had been operating near their homes around the time of the strikes, exposing the areas to retaliatory fire from Russian forces. Amnesty International researchers witnessed such conduct in numerous locations.”

Again, the methodology could lead to inaccuracies. Throughout the dates of the AI investigation (Callamard again: “Between April and July, Amnesty International researchers spent several weeks investigating Russian strikes in the Kharkiv, Donbas and Mykolaiv regions. The organization inspected strike sites; interviewed survivors, witnesses and relatives of victims of attacks; and carried out remote-sensing and weapons analysis.”), all the areas investigators are said to have interviewed or eyewitnessed their material in have been war zones rolling with displaced citizens. All those zones have Russian military and FSB forces herding, threatening, ‘governing’ and interring Ukrainian citizens. To any human being able to observe, it would appear more than likely that the Russian forces could easily intimidate virtually all the Ukrainians ‘allowed’ to speak with Amnesty investigators. The FSB, which is running invaded territories, could have directly selected which civilians were interviewed. The AI investigators could have been interviewing Ukrainian civilians being held in Russian-controlled ‘filtration’ camps. Thus far, AI’s own summary information already points right to these likelihoods.

Methodology, good people. Amnesty International should immediately provide details to show that the above errors were not the whole basis of their report.