Beyond norms and interests: understanding the ...

The International Journal of Human Rights Vol. 14, No. 3, May 2010, 442 –459

Beyond norms and interests: understanding the evolution of transnational human rights activism Emily B. Rodio and Hans Peter Schmitz

Downloaded By: [Schmitz, Hans Peter] At: 12:51 16 June 2010

Syracuse University, New York, USA

This article explores the evolution of transnational human rights activism since the end of World War II. It argues that the scholarly literature has focused too much attention on how interests and principles drive transnational mobilisation, while neglecting the profound evolutionary changes within the sector itself. In challenging interest-based explanations of human rights activism, we show that human rights groups have shifted from predominantly reactive ‘shaming’ strategies to more proactive efforts designed to address root causes of gross violations. Keywords: Amnesty International; mandate changes; norms; transnational activism

Introduction After a decade of sustained scholarly research on transnational non-governmental activism, an increasing number of publications challenge the earlier, optimistic claims about transnational activists as catalysts of progressive social change. In early accounts of the principled power of transnational or global civil society,1 weak domestic activists are empowered by principled networks of activists mobilising on their behalf.2 Those positive evaluations of transnational activism have been challenged by scholars exploring the negative or unintended consequences of transnational transfers and the diffusion of universal principles.3 Negative views of transnational activism primarily focus on how self-interests allegedly subvert the mobilisation for universal principles and lead global activists to ignore deserving local causes which are either not appropriately framed according to norms prevalent in Western democracies4 or are not attracting sufficient media and donor attention.5 As a result of these biases, transnational activists divert important resources away from targeting the most severe human rights violations and unilaterally impose their views of environmental protection and human rights onto populations abroad. While positive evaluations of transnational activism emphasise shared principles across borders and see domestic activists exchange information about human rights violations for international protection and support, critics see this relationship dominated by resource-rich Western non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and diagnose a lack of bottom-up input.6 In the context of this debate, our contribution is twofold. First, we disagree with critics of transnational activism on their claim that interests are the main culprit compromising effective

Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1364-2987 print/ISSN 1744-053X online # 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13642980802535575 http://www.informaworld.com


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transfers of ideas across borders. NGOs as the main carriers of such norms have always been driven by principles (mandate) and interests (e.g., competition and survival) in making key strategic and tactical decisions.7 The question is not if material interests compromise the promotion of universal values, but if the evolution of transnational human rights activism over the past decades represents a more effective response to human rights violations and atrocities committed around the world. This article provides some initial sketches of this evolutionary development, focusing primarily on the role of Amnesty International (AI). Second, we show that a historical and qualitative analysis of transnational human rights activism reveals significant changes in how major NGOs are shaping the diffusion of human rights norms. This practice has evolved slowly from a largely reactive practice of publishing reports about abuses and writing letters to a more proactive approach addressing some of the structural root causes of many gross violations. These changes are not well captured by either a principled or interest-based view of NGO activism and reveal themselves most clearly when exploring changes in the reporting practice of individual organisations. To this end, we provide a brief overview of mandate changes within a major transnational human rights organisation, Amnesty International (AI), and also analyse the content of AI reports over a 10-year span, from 1994 to 2004. Using qualitative methods, we examine the catalogued press releases and background reports on the most frequently covered countries. We chose to focus empirically on the work of AI because it remains the most prominent independent human rights group and its almost half a century of activities provide a continuous basis to trace evolutionary changes within the field of transnational human rights activism. For decades, AI human rights reports have been widely accepted as authoritative in assessing the human rights record of countries and have even shaped how states evaluate the human rights conditions in other nations.8 In making this choice, our study pragmatically reflects AI’s central role in almost five decades of transnational human rights activism. We recognise that for many decades AI’s focus on individual Prisoners of Conscience (POC) did not reflect an inclusive understanding of all human rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and particularly ignored many human rights violations in the developing world. Transnational transfers of ideas such as human rights have become a prominent feature of scholarly research and public debate. Organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have risen to global prominence, attracting intense scrutiny of their goals and behaviours. Such transfers of ideas across borders are more problematic and difficult to sustain than defenders of transnational activism tend to acknowledge. Critics have identified some of those problems of transnational organising, but solely blame the role of self-interests as the main culprit. Instead of perpetuating the distinction between norms and interests, this article argues that transnational activism should be understood as the result of an evolutionary process reflecting intense contestation about the meaning of universal principles defining the mandate of individual organisations and the sector overall. From lobbying to shaming: human rights activism since 1948 The literature on transnational activism focuses on how universal principles and expanding communication opportunities serve as a basis for the creation and success of non-governmental advocacy networks. Transnational scholarship studying the role of human rights groups in world politics emphasises the role of norms and broader institutional structures in shaping the identities and interests of states and international institutions. Many of these studies focus on the ability of transnational networks to quickly disseminate information about abuses across borders, mobilise allies for their causes, and put moral pressure


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on states and other actors. This moral pressure can socialise others into accepting norms such as human rights as basic guidelines for their actions.9 A historical perspective offers an important context to understanding the evolution of transnational activism since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. Understanding how transnational human rights mobilisation emerged and became institutionalised provides important clues to its current strengths and limits. It is not enough to know that mass media strategies have become a central feature of activism during the past three decades, but it is equally important to understand why and how this development took place. This evolution is most visible with regard to the goals and the strategies selected by transnational activists over time. First, we show how dominant human rights NGOs have narrowed our understanding of human rights to a particular set of norms and strategies reproduced in their activism. Second, the particular strategies of transnational activism emerging in the 1960s and 1970s have empowered the human rights agenda but also limited its long-term viability and success. The professionalisation and media-driven character of transnational campaigns have frequently demobilised the grassroots level and led to the erroneous belief that human rights promotion is the task of a professional elite of activists. We argue that these past choices of activists are responsible for the tremendous success and visibility of human rights today. However, they also account for some of the challenges facing current and future activism. The adoption of the UDHR after World War II marks the beginning of the modern era of transnational activism. The UDHR, albeit not a legally binding treaty per se, still represents the basic human rights document for most activists and intergovernmental organisations. Although the principles have not changed, human rights activism has evolved significantly since the adoption of the UDHR on 10 December 1948. The activism of the 1940s, exemplified by Eleanor Roosevelt’s, largely relied on the individual capacities of norm entrepreneurs and capitalised on their close ties to policymakers.10 By contrast, the activism emerging during the 1960s and 1970s distanced itself from the political arena and sought to develop an independent and transnational base which enabled a non-partisan challenge to states’ human rights records. This strategic shift of the 1960s and 1970s was primarily a reaction to the gap between states’ human rights rhetoric as expressed in documents such as the UDHR and their poor human rights records at home. While many activists had hoped shortly after World War II that the United Nations would become an effective agency for human rights, states quickly reasserted their sovereignty and the UN focused on its main mandate of protecting international peace and security. In 1947, the Commission on Human Rights decided that it had ‘no power to take any action in regard to any complaints concerning human rights.’11 While the 1945 Charter of the United Nations authorised the organisation to promote human rights, its member states soon thereafter clarified that the UN would not have authority to directly investigate allegations of human rights violations, let alone punish member governments for any domestic actions protected by state sovereignty. Since the main purpose of the United Nations was the protection of peace among sovereign nations, the human rights idea represented a fundamental challenge to the foundations of a sovereignty-based international system. Moreover, all the major powers at the time, democracies included, had little interest in pushing beyond using the human rights language to express their rhetorical distance to the horrors of fascism and the Holocaust.12 While the Soviet Union expressed major objections to the individual freedoms contained in the UDHR and ultimately abstained at the 10 December 1948 vote, the United States failed to overcome race discrimination at home and European powers violated human rights in defending their crumbling colonial empires in Asia and Africa.13



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Considering the Cold War context of the 1950s and 1960s, the adoption of the two human rights covenants14 in 1966 represents a significant strengthening of human rights within the United Nations system and signaled the beginning of a new era of increased attention to human rights issues at the United Nations. Although both covenants translated the declaratory UDHR into more detailed and legally binding treaties, they did not contain any complaint or enforcement mechanisms. Until 1970, all discussions of human rights situations at the United Nations were confidential and no government had to fear serious censure for their behaviour at home.15 By the end of the 1960s and during the 1970s, (1) the completed decolonisation process; (2) a temporary easing of Cold War tensions; and, (3) the growing prominence of transnational human rights groups helped to turn the United Nations into a more hospitable environment for discussing human rights issues. Newly independent nations in Asia and Africa legitimated human rights language at the UN by framing their anti-colonial rhetoric in the language of universal principles. The Helsinki Accords of 1975 contained explicit references to human rights, which would become an inspiration to dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain, including Charter 77 in the former Czechoslovakia.16 Finally, human rights groups began to systematically submit their reports to United Nations human rights bodies. The growing prominence of human rights and transnational NGOs at the UN faced an immediate backlash. The UN Charter provided in Article 71 that ECOSOC ‘may make suitable arrangements for consultation with nongovernmental organisations which are concerned with matters within its competence’.17 Consultative status usually allows NGO representatives to attend UN meetings, but falls well short of the right to ‘participate without vote’ which is reflected in the observer status granted to representatives of UN specialised agencies or non-member states.18 In 1967, the Soviet Union initiated the first review of Article 71 provisions, calling for the withdrawal of consultative status for all NGOs violating the principle of state sovereignty. In 1978, Argentina initiated a second review whose ‘sole motivation was to condemn activities of human rights NGOs’.19 The reviews resulted in the establishment of periodic reviews of individual NGOs and their consultative status, but no organisation was expelled. Those efforts to silence NGO criticism had also little effect on the steadily increasing number of NGOs with consultative status, which increased from less than fifty in 1946 to more than 3,000 NGOs today.20 The only successful permanent measure advocated by states critical of human rights activism at the UN was to move the UN human rights system away from the headquarters in New York City to Geneva, Switzerland.21 The ECOSOC review of NGO participation and the reaffirmation of state sovereignty as a core principle of the United Nations forced activists to develop more contentious and distinctly transnational strategies of promoting human rights. While the UDHR continued to serve as a central inspiration for transnational activism, a leading human rights activist at the time observed that NGOs’ ‘principal efforts would need to be focused for a long time outside the UN’.22 In this sense, the sustained attack by a coalition of authoritarian states to silence NGOs became a major cause of organisational innovation. This shift from lobbying to transnational mobilisation was not just the result of cheaper travel and more advanced communication technologies,23 but represented a necessary step in exposing and challenging human rights violations around the world. The core of this strategic innovation emphasises a focus on individual countries, the development of sustained transnational ties between local activists and international NGOs, and systematic gathering and publication of human rights information. Transnational networking offered two important benefits that set the activists of the 1970s apart from the lobbyists of the 1940s. First, it allowed activists to collect reliable


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information about human rights abuses, which can be used to directly ‘shame’ violators and undercut efforts to simply deny the existence of abuses. Second, the human rights information served as a basis for mobilising individual members to write letters and engage more directly and emotionally with the cause of an organisation like Amnesty International. Over time, an organisation such as Amnesty International strengthened its legitimacy through reliable research, a growing membership base, and annual reports about human rights conditions in a majority of nations around the world. The emotional link of transnational activism was particularly strengthened by the practice of assigning individual ‘prisoners of conscience’ (POC) to local Amnesty groups. Thus, human rights abuses were no longer abstract but expressed in individual stories. This process conferred ownership and responsibility to the local level and also created personal ties between victims and activists. But the strategy of linking victims to individual supporters of Amnesty also limited the activism in two crucial ways. First, letter-writing campaigns are always directed outward and explicitly prevent Amnesty members to address human rights violations within their home societies. Second, letter-writing represented a largely non-confrontational effort that rarely addressed the root causes of abuse patterns. The release of a political prisoner was an important success but did not necessarily prevent targeted governments engaging in the same abuses in the future. In 1977, 16 years after its creation, Amnesty International received the Nobel Peace Prize for its work. This recognition prepared the ground for other organisations to form and attempt to mimic Amnesty International’s strategies and methods. The success also pushed Amnesty International itself to expand its mandate and adopt a more campaign-style form of activism. Although claiming to promote the entire UDHR, Amnesty really focused on civil and political rights, primarily freedom of religion and political thought (Art. 18 and 19 of the UDHR). By the late-1970s, the organisation expanded from focusing on individual cases to more abstract campaigns against certain human rights violations, including torture and capital punishment. In the early 1990s, extrajudicial executions and ‘disappearances’ were added to the list of unconditionally condemned violations and the organisation began to target not only governments but also non-governmental actors for gross violations. By 2001, Amnesty International embarked on a trial period of abandoning its mandate in favour of broader campaign themes, including the promotion of social and economic rights. These mandate changes have been met with resistance within AI and represent a significant challenge for an organisation seeking to balance needs for reform with traditional strengths. After the initial success of Amnesty’s simultaneous transnational and grassroots-based human rights activism in the 1970s, new organisations such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) entered the field or existing transnational groups24 began to adapt to a more campaign-driven style of activism. Unlike Amnesty International, HRW never aspired to have individual members and focused mainly on lobbying major policymakers in the United States and Europe. Financially, HRW relies heavily on large donors such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, while Amnesty International refuses to accept any donations except from its own members and supporters. By the 1990s, HRW was quicker in developing new campaigns such as the plight of child soldiers during armed conflicts, while Amnesty International was still largely focused on individual cases and the promotion of a narrow set of civil rights. For Amnesty International, change came much more slowly because major modifications to the mandate had to be approved in biannual meetings of elected delegates from its membership of about fifty national sections all over the world. Hence, it took years in the 1990s to discuss, prepare, and convince its members and supporters that fundamental change was necessary if Amnesty International wanted to remain a global leader on human rights issues.



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While global human rights organisations have undergone significant change, the challenges to their legitimacy and effectiveness have also increased. First, the end of the Cold War created new sources of human rights abuses and shifted attention to previously ignored violations. Ethnic and communal violence, global economic inequality, and certain cultural practices gained in recognition as traditional state-sponsored repression lost its dominant status in the global human rights discourse. During the Cold War, activists could effectively use strategies of ‘shaming’ to expose violations to bodily integrity, such as torture, extrajudicial killings, and disappearances. Symbolically, those violations created a strong link between cause and effect by connecting a victim’s face with a responsible government leader such as the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet or Uganda’s Idi Amin. Transnational activists face a different challenge when they shift their attention to social, economic, or cultural rights. While all rights are universal and indivisible, social and cultural rights shift attention away from transnational activists. Activists can no longer simply ‘shame’ a powerful government agent, but need to develop more complex and localised strategies taking into account possible ramifications of their interventions. Efforts to address poverty or ethnic divisions as root causes for many human rights violations force human rights organisations to become more overtly political, join alliances with development NGOs, and debate the relative merits of different conflict resolution and poverty reduction programmes. Second, the success of NGOs has created a growing complacency on the part of (liberal) states and the general public. The more visible human rights groups are and the more professionally they are presented in the media, the more the general public is likely to withdraw and delegate the task to those activists. While the proliferation of degree programmes in human rights and not-for-profit/NGO studies are a sign of their mainstreaming as career options, they also indicate a trend towards specialisation and professionalisation. One unintended consequence of this trend is exemplified in the membership development of Amnesty International which peaked at 1.8 million in the late 1980s and has shown no significant increase since then. While the reasons for this leveling of popular support have not yet been systematically explored, we argue that the professionalisation of human rights activism plays an important role in accounting for the public’s withdrawal. However, volunteers and potential supporters do not necessarily feel mobilised by an increasingly professionalised organisation, which is viewed as promoting a limited mandate and cooperating with states and intergovernmental organisations. In sum, human rights activism has evolved since the 1940s from a limited lobbying effort by committed individuals to a transnational movement led by professionals, heavily reliant on campaigns and media attention. When Amnesty International emerged in the 1960s, the system of adopted political prisoners created a powerful and emotional link between victims and their defenders abroad. But the very success of human rights shifted the activism away from such personal links towards pursuing more abstract and legalistic strategies. As human rights NGOs became increasingly prominent, the general public and many states have come to delegate the task of human rights promotion to those specialised agencies. While this has created a more professional human rights sector, it has also demobilised the public and many potential grassroots efforts. The politics of Amnesty International (AI) Under the leadership of Peter Benenson, AI cultivated a close relationship with the British government shortly after its creation in 1961.25 In 1966, those ties seriously threatened the legitimacy and very existence of the organisation, when allegations about secret government funding for operations in former Rhodesia led to a split within the AI leadership.26


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In 1967, Benenson was replaced by Martin Ennals as Secretary General and the organisation moved to clearly distance itself from all governments, including its own. Combined with the non-partisan strategy of exposing human rights violations and ‘shame’ those responsible, this early crisis helped AI to become the leading transnational voice for human rights and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. While early critics of this movement alleged that it was infiltrated by state intelligence agencies, current critics claim that transnational activism is driven by competition for media exposure and donor funding rather than universal principles and a non-partisan effort to address all human rights violations equally. While we do not deny that transnational human rights organisations are self-interested and concerned for organisational survival, we reject the idea that pursuing such interests necessarily comes at the expense of their mandate. A more fruitful perspective moves beyond the ‘norms versus interests’ dichotomy and explores the evolution of transnational activism over an extended period of time. This evolutionary perspective allows us to move away from seeing NGOs solely as carriers of norms or as interest-maximising players reacting in similar ways to external incentives. It also draws crucial attention to variation among NGOs, for example in membership, internal organisation, and fundraising strategies. Reducing NGOs to the norms they promote or the interests they have ignores the process of how they change and adapt. In particular, we argue that this perspective allows for the explanation of crucial differences between a membership organisation such as Amnesty International and a non-membership organisation in the same field, such as Human Rights Watch. In this section, we will show how internal politics shape in peculiar ways the responses of Amnesty International to its external environment as well as the resulting mandate changes. AI has changed its mandate in ways that cannot be explained in reference to norms or interests alone and this mandate change plays a crucial role in accounting for the evolution of reporting practices. Transforming Amnesty International (AI) Norms- and interest-driven accounts of transnational human rights activism ignore the history and internal politics of those organisations and thus have trouble accounting for significant variation among NGOs. Explaining the activism of specific organisations is not adequately captured by a debate about the primacy of norms or interests but requires an analysis of their institutional differences and historical evolution.27 We have chosen Amnesty International as one of the most prominent human rights groups to demonstrate how understandings of principles and interests change over time, thereby crucially shaping internal debates of the organisation’s mandate. AI not only provides almost fifty years of continuous activism, but its reports are widely used in the literature to assess human rights conditions around the world. As a result, scholars have begun to study more closely AI’s activism and we challenge in this article some of the assertions made concerning this particular organisation’s strategic choices. Since its creation in 1961, Amnesty International has faced an ‘inherent tension between the logic of the movement and the logic of human rights’.28 Human rights are universal and indivisible, while techniques of mobilisation and ‘shaming’ are specific to violations and cases. As long as Amnesty International focused on core concerns such as the non-violent ‘prisoner of conscience’ or torture, the success of information politics relied exclusively on the unacceptability of the violation. ‘Calling governments to account on these basic principles they accept in theory and violate in practice brings governments closer to applying these principles.’29



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On one hand, such a narrow strategy of defending only a limited list of rights is inconsistent with the principle of the universality and indivisibility of human rights.30 It limits the activities to protecting against bodily harm and focuses largely on violations commissioned by governments. On the other hand, the strategy is appropriate to an organisation with limited resources, provides a unique and non-partisan identity, and avoids discussions about the most appropriate means of promoting a certain right. Defending the right to clean water is certainly more important to a larger number of people in the world than detention without trial, but such a campaign may easily create a gap between those supporting privatisation and those insisting on the government’s responsibility to provide such a basic good.31 While the logic of human rights and the complex patterns of violations pushes the organisation to expand its mandate, limited resources and concerns for its identity pull the organisation towards a more circumscribed effort. How individual human rights organisations negotiate those conflicting demands is determined by their specific history and internal make-up. A membership organisation such as AI will react differently than a group like Human Rights Watch. Neither norms nor external incentives can account for this variation without including an analysis of the internal politics of norm appropriation and interest formation. The change those organisations undergo is driven by the inherent tension between the need for a mandate/identity (‘Amnesty’, focus on prisoners) and the opportunities arising from organisational growth and strategies (‘International’, universal appeal and transnational activism). Hereafter, we will show how AI’s organisation into national sections and its internal modes of collective decision-making explain their choices of policies and strategies. Mandate change prior to 1991: the politics of ‘mission creep’ Amnesty International accepted its first major mandate expansion in 1973 when it added opposition to the death penalty to its work. This expansion was logically consistent with its efforts to protect the basic right to life. At that point, AI focused on the opposition to torture, detention of prisoners of conscience, and the death penalty. Only one of these mandate areas was strictly based on international human rights law (torture), while the others were yet to become recognised at the UN level (death penalty) or were simply Amnesty’s specific understanding of international human rights (prisoner of conscience). Since the 1973 decision almost every single aspect of AI’s mandate has been controversially debated,32 studied in working groups, and repeatedly voted on in the biennial International Council Meetings (ICM).33 In 1989, AI finally decided to establish a formal Mandate Review Committee at its Council Meeting in Ireland. The expansion to a global human rights organisation had led to ‘mission creep’, and the statute was neither appropriate for its future activities, nor did it even accurately reflect its current work. Until 1989, statute amendments were rare because they required a two-thirds majority, while resolutions ‘interpreting’ the mandate could be passed with a simple majority. Policy decisions by the Secretariat did not require approval by sections until they were challenged at an ICM. Amnesty had also developed a practice of distinguishing between promotional and oppositional work. While the organisation promoted respect for all human rights (Human Rights Education, general appeals for respect of rights), it only used the entire spectrum of techniques (adoption of victims, investigative missions, etc.) in selected areas. While these developments allowed the organisation to remain flexible and respond to changes in its environment, they slowly undermined the consensus about the identity of AI. The Mandate Review Commission was charged with suggesting a solution to how AI should make changes to its mandate: incrementally and in response


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to changing circumstances or by abandoning a mandate altogether and simply working for the ‘protection of all human rights’. During a decade of intense mandate debates during the 1990s, the International Secretariat in London played a dominant role in shaping the direction of the organisation focusing on the practical side of how changes in the mandate affect the work of the organisation and its standing in the global human rights community. National sections would take a more principled stand and regularly use the ICM to add amendments to the proposals coming from the leadership. The topics debated and decided during this time period included the defence of individuals incarcerated because of their sexual orientation, the definition of violence, the expansion to non-state violations of human rights, and the position of AI during armed conflicts.34 While the mandate debates of the 1980s primarily centered on reconciling the statute of the organisation with its actual activities, the reform process of the 1990s turned towards defining what AI should be doing in the future. This process tentatively ended in 2001 with the abandonment of the mandate, replaced with a statement of ‘vision and mission’. The following case of non-governmental violations provides an in-depth perspective on how internal politics shaped the mandate change process. Examples of ‘mandate creep’: government inaction and non-state violations At the ICM 1983 in Paris, the French section argued that consistency required AI to target non-state actors and their human rights record. Previously, AI had only targeted state actors and adhered to the rule that governments are responsible for what happens on their territory. Opponents to this expansion of the mandate pointed out that only states are signatories to international human rights treaties and that it is next to impossible to ‘shame’ guerilla leaders or terrorists with letter-writing campaigns. While AI began to look into the issue, it continued to make a distinction between ‘abuses’ (committed by non-state actors) and ‘violations’ (committed by states). After the end of the Cold War and in light of increasing numbers of failed states and civil wars, ignoring non-state violence had become untenable. Moreover, decades of feminist writings had emphasised that some of the most systematic human rights violations had little to do with government actions but were sewn into the fabric of societies. As Amnesty had already been debating for close to a decade about how to address human rights violations by guerilla groups and other non-state entities, the window of opportunity opened to further expand this focus to women’s rights and societal repression.35 The Boston meeting of 1993 decided to investigate the case of female genital cutting/mutilation as a case of government inaction in preventing violations. While the Japanese section led the resistance against the expansion of Amnesty’s mandate into the family and private sphere, the 1995 Ljubljana meeting decided to take promotional steps against the practice but refrained from a more proactive oppositional position. It also expanded the concern to other women’s rights issues such as honour killings, domestic violence, and slavery. The most proactive sections pushing for this expansion were based in Western Europe and North America. This compromise between proponents and opponents of an explicitly women’s rights focus remained inherently problematic since AI is mandated to use an oppositional mode in combating any grave violations of personal integrity, in particular torture or other forms of cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment.36 The three core rights protected remain freedom of expression, freedom from discrimination, and the right to physical and mental integrity. In 1997, the national sections of Bermuda, Ivory Coast, and the United Kingdom successfully motioned to elevate AI’s work on female genital cutting/ mutilation (FGC/M) from ‘promotional’ to ‘oppositional’. Thus, FGC/M was now the



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only human rights ‘abuse’ committed by a non-state actor explicitly added to the mandate of the organisation. As a result of this new focus on non-state abuses, the ICM authorised pilot projects to investigate FGC/M in West Africa, the privatisation of security in Brazil, the tribal justice system in Pakistan, and sex work trafficking in Russia. The 1999 ICM in Portugal signified the end of a proper mandate for AI.37 The mandate review was still under way and was supposed to conclude at the 2001 ICM. Nonetheless, the delegates voted here to define ‘mandate’ broadly as the boundaries of AI’s permissible work. In reference to the situation in Sudan in 1994, the Deputy Secretary General Derek Evans lamented about the danger of irrelevance if ‘AI treated the shooting and torture of a few victims as human rights violations and the manufactured starvation of thousands as background’.38 Amnesty International had to address a greater range of violations and focus on those violations experienced by a greater number of victims. This also led AI to move away from the idea of universal coverage to what was now labeled ‘minimum adequate coverage’, which was meant to better focus the resources of the organisation by selecting among countries and identifying key issues within countries. Instead of covering all countries with the same concern for the rights expressed in the mandate, the organisation now sought to develop country-specific strategies to maximise its impact. The Secretariat proposed to shift the focus of the Annual Report from covering as many countries as possible to what AI actually had done and accomplished during the year covered. By the next ICM in Dakar/Senegal in 2001, the International Secretariat became the main promoter of dropping the mandate altogether, while many members of the stronger (and older) West European section resisted too much change. The ICM decided to drop the ‘mandate’ (for a trial period) entirely from its statute and end the practice of seeing every country through the rigid prism of pre-defined human rights violations. Social, economic, and cultural rights were finally elevated to a full concern of AI, at least in rhetoric if not yet in practice. Replacing its mandate with what is today called a ‘vision and mission’ creates more flexibility for Amnesty International to address new threats to human rights as well as violations experienced by larger sections of societies, particularly those in the Global South. The ‘vision and mission’ of Amnesty today is the basis of a six-year strategic plan, which expands beyond the traditional goals to include activism against impunity, armed conflicts, poverty, and violations of women’s and girls’ rights, as well as violations committed in the name of the ‘war against terrorism’. This broadened perspective allows Amnesty International to better recognise root causes and address the often complex issues of interdependence among different human rights violations. The primary risks of this strategy are the loss of a clear identity of what Amnesty stands for and the loss of those members that felt that the whole mandate debate wasted important resources that should have gone to promoting human rights. The next section shows how Amnesty International’s reporting practices have actually changed over the past decade. We hold that norm- and interest-driven explanations are only meaningful when put into a historical and internal politics context. The question is not if norms or interests matter (more), but how specific institutional conditions drive how AI (or another NGO) operationalises norms (human rights – grave violations – physical integrity, freedom of expression, and freedom from discrimination) and defines interests (consistency, expansion, competition, etc). Reviewing Amnesty International’s publications record, 1994 – 2004 In response to the new, critical transnational human rights NGO literature, we examine the transnational political agenda from a different perspective. To uncover how human rights


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NGOs choose topics for reports and choose target states, we examine how reporting has evolved and changed over time. We selected China, Russia, and Turkey as three states ranked in AIs top 10 target list of reports from 1986 to 2000.39 The choice of these three countries among the main targets of AI is random and focuses on reproducing (or challenging) the claims by Ron, Ramos and Rodgers (2005) that transnational human rights groups ‘contribute to the marginalisation of abuses in smaller, poorer or weaker countries’.40 We provide a qualitative reading of their largely quantitative analysis in order to uncover what reasons, other than interest in media exposure, may determine the frequency of human rights reporting about an individual country. We contend that our findings would not change significantly if we chose countries such as the United States or the United Kingdom for a similar analysis. Our analysis examines the 10-year time span from 1994– 2004, which is the most recent data available. Our data is collected from Amnesty International’s Cumulative Guide, a unique dataset of AI’s publications from 1962– 2004. We focus on two subsets of publications: press releases and background reports. Our approach is qualitative, analysing the topics, years, frequency, and language of publication content. Findings A systematic review of the publication content of China, Russia, and Turkey from 1994 until 2004 reveals a number of interesting observations about Amnesty International’s internal workings and reporting choices. First, Amnesty International is shifting from a reactive to a more proactive and preventive strategy. Rather than ameliorating individual human rights violations, such as rallying for the release of a Prisoner of Conscience (POC), Amnesty has begun to confront the root causes of violations, particularly mass violence. Second, in the post-Cold War period, Amnesty is beginning to focus on new topical issues that shift attention away from government-sponsored repression to more structural causes for violations. Finally, our systematic analysis reveals insights into how Amnesty plans for the introduction of a new topic. The process is gradual and strategic, building on existing topics that are accepted and understood. In addition to these three main findings and in response to the volume analysis performed by Ron, Ramos, and Rodgers, our analysis finds evidence that not only is an examination of volume output limited and incomplete, it is also deceptive. We show that a simple review of the content of publications reveals insights missed by a quantitative analysis.41 Addressing root causes of violations As the history of transnational human rights activism reveals, Amnesty International began as an organisation focused on the defence and release of prisoners of conscience (POC) through letter writing campaigns. Our subsequent discussion of mandate changes reveals an evolutionary pattern of ‘mission creep’ with many fits and starts. This result is confirmed by the actual publication record in the post-Cold War era. While the strategy of dealing with the symptoms of human rights violations continues to dominate Amnesty’s publications, the organisation has begun to confront the root causes of human rights violations instead of simply reacting to its consequences. This pattern is evident in reports on the arms trade and continuing armed conflicts in Africa and elsewhere. AI’s publications on China, Russia, and Turkey each report on this topic and we find similar reports for other major arms-exporting nations, including Germany and the United States. Titles include: ‘Russian Federation: Russian Weapons



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Fuel African Conflicts’, ‘Turkey: European Companies to Help Construct Arms Factory’, and specific references to China in ‘Sudan: Arming the Perpetrators of Grave Abuses in Darfur’. Amnesty has sought to highlight the problem of continued violence and conflict in African states, such as the Sudan, by tracing the problem back to weapons supply and availability. Here, they seek to confront some of the root causes of violence and show how the behaviour of external actors and powerful states fuels the conflict. This observation challenges the idea that human rights NGOs strategically report more heavily on large, wealthy, and powerful states and ‘may ultimately contribute to the marginalisation of abuses in smaller, poorer, or weaker countries’.42 But a qualitative analysis of the same data reveals that coding reports by their title does not necessarily reveal the human rights violations targeted by the organisation. This aligns with the mandate debates during this time period, which resolved to pay greater attention to strategically important patterns of violations as well as their larger economic and social context. Amnesty International does not follow state power and neglects abuses in smaller nations but makes a conscious choice about its use of resources in addressing causes of violations found far away from the places where they actually transpire. Between 1994 and 2004, Amnesty began to report on those states in most dire need of attention through confronting the root cause in larger, more powerful states. Ron, Ramos, and Rodgers catalogue the states with the greatest violations of personal integrity rights. Of the 20 states listed, eight are African states including Angola, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia, and the Sudan. Similarly, the authors catalogued the states with the 10 deadliest armed conflicts, seven of which are within the territories of African states: Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Somalia, and the Sudan. Amnesty chose to target larger, more powerful states – such as China, Russia, and Turkey – for their role in these African conflicts. Amnesty called on China, Russia, and Turkey to stop ‘arming the perpetrators’, and to stop the irresponsible production and distribution of weapons. Had Ron, Ramos, and Rodgers looked at the content of the publications they were counting and regressing, they would have observed that some of the reporting on larger, more powerful states is directed at those states’ involvement and contribution to the most pressing human rights violations or those situations most in need of global attention. Topical changes in the post-Cold War period In the post-Cold War period, there are two main topical changes in Amnesty’s reporting: changes in what is viewed as a human rights violation and changes in who is being identified as perpetrators of repression. Initially, Amnesty International and other human rights NGOs targeted government-sponsored repression, such as government suppression of freedom of expression, unfair trials, and abuse of prisoners. However, our analysis reveals that in the post-Cold War context, the target has shifted. Now, Amnesty is beginning to focus on acts of omission and inaction as well as structural forms of repression not directly linked to government policies. Along with this shift in actor comes a shift in topic. The previous topics of violations of freedom of speech and expression now are part of a much broader agenda, which also includes social, economic, and cultural rights. However, this shift is still largely rhetorical in the operations of NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which have only begun to implement a small number of pilot projects. In the post-Cold War context, Amnesty International has begun to challenge structural causes of human rights violations, or society-sponsored repression. While the move is a


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logical conclusion from the standpoint of consistency and universality, it is hardly compatible with the existing strategies and techniques of targeting specific actors and exposing a gap between the rhetoric of human rights acceptance (internationally) and the practice of violation (at home). Hence, it comes as no surprise that a membership organisation faces peculiar challenges in moving beyond what it has practiced for many decades. First, long-time members more heavily invested in past practices are likely to dominate the leadership of national sections and have considerable influence in the meetings on mandate changes. Second, a rapid change of mandate undermines the familiar identity of the organisation and may not be compatible with the skills of its volunteers and staff. Letter writing campaigns are largely an obsolete concept when it comes to addressing structural causes of human rights violations, and researchers well-trained in the details of torture and detention without trial may find it difficult to switch to analysing social and economic patterns of violations. Third, a global human rights organisation regularly faces tensions based on cultural differences between more liberal and more traditional societies. When AI debated in the early 1990s the expansion of its mandate to include those imprisoned solely based on their sexual orientation, many members in the Global South openly rejected the idea. They argued that such a decision would undermine AI’s efforts to gain members and support in their home nations. Although AI ultimately added sexual orientation to its mandate, it remained a neglected area of activism. Thus, it is remarkable in and of itself to trace the process of how Amnesty International has moved away from the familiar to addressing previously neglected human rights areas. The publications on Russia provide significant empirical insight into the evolutionary changes of AI reporting. Beginning in 2002, AI began to report on racism in Russia, thus shifting attention away from traditional government repression to conditions imminent in the Russian society at large. The reports, with titles such as ‘Russian Federation: Indifference to Racism Must Be Addressed’43 and ‘Documenty! Discrimination on the Grounds of Race in the Russian Federation’,44 emphasise discrimination against a wide variety of groups, including those of African-descent, Chechens, Tagiks, Meskhetian Turks, Iranians, and Jews. In 2003, seven of the 40 press releases Amnesty wrote on Russia concerned racism. The topic was clearly on the agenda and reflected a significant qualitative shift missed by a pure quantitative analysis adding up the number of reports over a certain time period.45 Another example of Amnesty’s new reporting is the focus on the economic sector. As outlined earlier, Amnesty International abandoned its mandate in 2001 and embarked on a trial period focusing on broader campaign themes which included the promotion of economic rights. While this new theme has not manifested itself significantly in the 1994 – 2004 Amnesty publications, it is slowly moving from the background to a more prominent position. In 2003, AI published a report entitled ‘World Economic Forum/Media Briefing: Doing Business in the Russian Federation: The Human Rights Approach’.46 The publication confronts such issues as income disparity and corruption, encourages the business community to use its influence to promote human rights, and specifically demands that the local population benefit from the exploitation of oil and minerals. A similar report was published on China in 2001, titled ‘China: Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Treaty Must Become a Reality’.47 The report commends the Chinese government for ratifying the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) but criticises the addition of a reservation on Article 8, which restricts the right to strike and the right to create free trade unions. These few reports on economic, social, and cultural rights foreshadow the new direction of greater activism on issues such as nutrition, schooling, shelter, health care, and employment.


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The skill of introducing new topics: women’s rights The final observation of change in publications over time focuses on the skill of making new topics resonate with previous practices. This reflects the frequently contented nature of ‘mission creep’ and the compromises struck in biennial meetings, where delegates determine if a topic will gain ‘promotional’ consideration or will benefit from the full range of ‘oppositional’ techniques. Amnesty generally introduces new topics by first associating it with already established and approved themes of human rights. Then, the topic develops into its own category for consideration while the framing remains neutral and nonconfrontational. This skill of introduction is best exemplified by the introduction of women’s rights as a new topic for Amnesty International. Between 1994 and 2004, women appeared numerous times in the publications on China, Russia, and Turkey. Yet women first appeared as added descriptions to existing violations. For example, the publications identified the ‘torture of women’, ‘a female dissident was imprisoned’, and ‘a woman was executed’. Drawing on approved categories of repression, such as torture, free expression, and the death penalty, Amnesty began to identify the gender of the victims of government-repression. Over time, this strategy shifted and women themselves became the subject of reports and campaigns. In 2004, Amnesty launched a new campaign ‘Stop Violence Against Women’. In the lead up to the launch of the campaign, reporting specifically on violence against women began to surface. Publications on Turkey in 2002 and 2003 included new titles such as ‘Women Confronting Family Violence’, ‘Shelters not Cemeteries! – Appeal Cases’, and ‘The Women Who Have Spoken Out’. Similar titles appeared on Russia, including: ‘Violence Against Women – Time to Act’, ‘Violence against Women in the Family’, and ‘Women and Girls Victims of Human Rights Abuses’. The women’s rights campaign signifies the dual shift in topics and perpetrators. While early reports focused on women as victims of a traditional human rights violation committed by the state, subsequent campaigns are titled ‘Stop Violence Against Women’ and deal with a range of human rights violations perpetrated by both state and non-state actors. Most recently, Amnesty International has chosen to primarily focus on ‘family violence’ or domestic violence, which reflects the desire to simultaneously remain within the traditional identity of AI (protecting bodily integrity) and open the organisation to more relevant violations affecting larger sections of societies.

The deceptive nature of large numbers Our analysis also reveals that aggregating the number of reports over a long period of time leads to questionable conclusions about relevance and continuity. Ron, Ramos, and Rodgers centre much of their argument on the idea that Amnesty International chooses to report more on large, more powerful states in order to increase its market share in the non-governmental world. Their analysis ranks the top 10 reported states between 1986 and 2000 and finds the USSR/Russia in second place with 374 background reports. However, when we disaggregate this data we see significant fluctuation over time and variation in topics. While 374 reports are significant compared to other countries, 309 of those reports were published between 1986 and 1994, the period just before, during, and after the fall of the Soviet Union. By contrast, in the 10-year period since 1994, there were a total of 119 reports published (see Table 1). A similar contextual evaluation of AI’s publications on China reveals that the country is a target based on the severity of human rights violations. AI’s long-standing anti-death penalty

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Table 1. Number of Amnesty International background reports on the Soviet Union/Russia. Time Period

Number of Background Reports

1986–1994 1994–2000 2000–2004

309 (38.6 per year) 65 (10.8 per year) 54 (13.5 publications per year)

campaign finds its greatest challenge in China as well as the United States. In 2004, the government of China officially reported 3,400 executions, although unofficial estimates are much higher.48 China is followed by Iraq (159 executions), Vietnam (64), and the United States (59). Even in per capita terms, China remains the nation leading the world in capital punishment. Thus, reporting on the death penalty in China is not driven by its power and media visibility but reflects an appropriate response to the severity of violations. Between 1994 and 2004, 20% of Amnesty’s background reports and 11% of their press releases on China concerned the death penalty and executions. 32% of the press releases and 26% of the background reports on China during this period concerned dissident action and freedom of expression. Therefore, between 1994 and 2004, executions and dissident action together accounted for 43% of press releases and 46% of background reports on China. A systematic review of the content of Amnesty International’s publications uncovers a number of findings about the importance of historical context and internal politics of NGOs. In the post-Cold War period, many changes in Amnesty International’s reporting have occurred. Amnesty International is confronting the root causes of human rights violations rather than just the symptoms; it is focusing on repression carried out by non-state actors; and it is introducing new issues following intense mandate debates within the organisation. Looking inside the ‘blackbox’ of NGOs, we discover that these organisations make determined, conscious decisions about the direction of their mandate, campaigns, and targets. These decisions, shaped by their internal makeup, affect how they define and understand human rights.

Conclusion Proponents and critics of the transnational human rights movement have lined up on one side of the norms vs interests fence. Their defenders claim that NGOs are primarily driven by norms and use information politics to ‘shame’ states and other actors into behavioural changes. The critics hold that human rights groups are actually self-interested and driven by external incentives, just like other utility-maximising actors in global affairs. We show in this paper that both perspectives ignore two important and related aspects of the transnational NGO movement: its history and the internal politics of individual organisations. Non-governmental organisations do not simply follow norms or interests; they are complex organisations that change and adapt as a result of the interplay of internal and external factors. Amnesty International as a membership organisation faces different internal pressures in efforts to respond to new human rights challenges than a nonmembership group such as Human Rights Watch. While our historical analysis provided a perspective on the professionalisation of this movement as a whole, the analysis of mandate changes adopted by Amnesty International adds more detailed insights. These include the influence of different constituents, the processes of selective norm appropriation, and the way the organisation formulates interests and strategies based on the ideas



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of consistency, efficiency, and universality. Finally, our review of reporting practices since 1994 reflects those mandate changes, the dual shift from a purely reactive to a more preventive activism, and the change from a limited focus on state perpetrators to a broader analysis of non-state and societal threats to human rights. An analysis of human rights NGOs, their agenda, and their impact is incomplete without an assessment of the history of the NGO movement and the internal politics driving particular organisations. Human rights organisations have to make difficult choices based on the availability of limited resources. They also face a constant dilemma caused by the tension between a universal mandate and the set of limited and known techniques of mobilisation. What may seem logical from a mission or funding perspective does not necessarily resonate with members or the skills available. Only an internal politics perspective allows us to understand why certain incentives do not translate into actions and how leadership has to promote successful change. This call for greater attention to the internal politics does not only apply to the organisations promoting certain norms and values, but also to their targets. Previous research has treated NGOs as unitary actors responding either to principles or material incentives. Both perspectives have also primarily inferred the relevance of those NGOs from their activities rather than analysing the actual effects of efforts in their targets. While it matters how much attention NGOs pay to a given problem, this is only a weak indicator for relevance and effectiveness. Human rights NGOs are not necessarily significant (or ‘good’) players in global politics because they publish reports and know how to use the international media. Rather, they are significant players because we can trace their impact in modified foreign policies or changed behaviour of governments and other collective actors. Acknowledgements For helpful comments, we would like to thank Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken, Amy Mehringer, and Sidney Tarrow.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Richard Price, ‘Transnational Civil Society and Advocacy in World Politics’, World Politics 55, no. 4 (2003): 579 –606. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders. Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue. Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Clifford Bob, The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media, and International Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). James Ron, Howard Ramos, and Kathleen Rodgers, ‘Transnational Information Politics. NGO Human Rights Reporting, 1986–2000’, International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 3 (2005): 557–87. Shareen Hertel, Unexpected Power. Conflict and Change among Transnational Activists (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame. Understanding Amnesty International (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). Steven C. Poe, Sabine C. Carey, and Tanya C. Vazquez, ‘How Are These Pictures Different? A Quantitative Comparison of the US State Department and Amnesty International Human Rights Reports, 1976–1995’, Human Rights Quarterly 23, no. 3 (2001): 650–77. Thomas Risse, ‘ “Let’s Argue!”: Communicative Action in World Politics’, International Organisation 54, no. 1 (2001): 1–39; Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘International Norm Dynamics and Political Change’, International Organisation 52, no. 4 (1998): 887– 917. Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New. Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).

458 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.


16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

E.B. Rodio and H.P. Schmitz ‘Communications concerning human rights,’ ECOSOC resolution 75V, adopted during the 5th session of the United Nations Economic and Social Council, 5 August 1947. Mark Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950’, The Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (2004): 379 –98. In 1953, the United Kingdom was the only European nation to extend the European Convention on Human Rights to most of its colonies; see Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2002), 87. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 2200A (XXI) of 16 December 1966; entry into force: 23 March 1976 and International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 2200A (XXI) of 16 December 1966; entry into force 3 January 1976, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/index.htm#core (accessed 26 June 2009). Jack Donnelly, ‘International Human Rights: A Regime Analysis’, International Organisation 40, no. 3 (1986): 599 –642. Daniel Thomas, The Helsinki Effect. International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). United Nations Charter, Article 71, adopted on 26 June 1945 in San Francisco. Dianne Otto, ‘Nongovernmental Organisations in the United Nations System: The Emerging Role of International Civil Society’, Human Rights Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1996): 107–41. Ibid., 115. The number of NGOs accorded consultative status at the United Nations has increased from less than fifty in 1946 to more than 3,000 in 2008. A searchable database of those NGOs is available online: http://www.un.org/esa/coordination/ngo/. The influence of NGO is not only reflected in numbers, but also in expanded participation rights during debates in United Nations bodies; for an overview of these qualitative changes, see Peter Willetts, ‘From “Consultative Arrangements” to “Partnerships”: The Changing Role of NGOs in the Diplomacy at the UN’, Global Governance 6, no. 2 (2000): 191 –202. William Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A Curious Grapevine (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998), 90. Sidney Liskofsky cited in: Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 139 (italics in the original). Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 10. Prominent examples of transnational groups include the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), the International League for Human Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, and Human Rights First (formerly: Lawyers Committee for Human Rights). Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, 97 –113. Tom Buchanan, ‘Amnesty International in Crisis, 1966– 7’, Twentieth Century British History 15, no. 3 (2004): 267 –89. Kerstin Martens, ‘Professionalized Representation of Human Rights NGOs to the United Nations’, The International Journal of Human Rights 10, no. 1 (2006): 19– 30. David Matas, No More. The Battle Against Human Rights Violations (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1994). Ibid. Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, adopted by the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights on 25 June 1993 (A/CONF.157/23). Jessica Budds and Gordon McGranahan, ‘Are the Debates on Water Privatization Missing the Point? Experiences from Africa, Asia and Latin America’, Environment and Urbanization 15, no. 2 (2003): 87–114. Keith Siviter, an AI pioneer, recalled that even during the 1960s mandate expansion was highly controversial: ‘When Benenson (the founder of AI, ER and HPS) proposed broadening the mandate to include torture cases, “there was great outcry . . . we’re dissipating our energies; we ought . . . only to keep to our work for prisoners of conscience. Then we moved into capital punishment. Exactly the same thing . . .”’, Linda Rabben, Fierce Legion of Friends: A History of Human Rights Campaigns and Campaigners (Hyattsville, MD: Quixote Center, 2002), 194. The International Council brings together the national sections as well as the Secretariat to decide on the general direction of the organisation. The important meetings for the mandate review were held in Dublin, Ireland (1989), Yokohama, Japan (1991), Boston, MA, USA


34. 35. 36.

37. 38. Downloaded By: [Schmitz, Hans Peter] At: 12:51 16 June 2010

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

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(1993), Ljubljana, Slovenia (1995), University of Western Cape, South Africa (1997), Troia, Portugal (1999), Dakar, Senegal (2001), and Morelos City, Mexico (26th and 27th meeting, 2003 and 2005). Peter Pack, ‘Amnesty International: An Evolving Mandate in a Changing World’, in Human Rights. An Agenda for the 21st Century, eds A. Hagerty and L. Siobhan (London: Cavendish, 1999). Stephen Hart, Cultural Dilemmas of Progressive Politics. Styles of Engagement among Grassroots Activists (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 143. A similar inconsistency existed in AI’s policies regarding defending individuals detailed for their sexual orientation. While the organisation became active in this area during the late 1980s, the issue never became officially adopted in the statute. Moreover, AI drew a line between those imprisoned because they said they were of a different sexual orientation (as part of a campaign, etc.) and those that were arrested for being of a different sexual orientation. The ICM was originally scheduled to take place in Morocco but was moved when the Moroccan government banned the meeting. Derek Evans, Amnesty International and Socio-Economic Rights (London: Amnesty International, 1999). Ron, Ramos, and Rodgers, ‘Transnational Information Politics. NGO Human Rights Reporting, 1986–2000’. Ron, Ramos, and Rodgers, ‘Transnational Information Politics. NGO Human Rights Reporting, 1986–2000’, 576. Ron, Ramos, and Rodgers’s study combines quantitative and qualitative methods. They used interviews with Amnesty personnel to confirm the results of their large-n analysis. Ron, Ramos, and Rodgers, ‘Transnational Information Politics. NGO Human Rights Reporting, 1986–2000’, 576. Amnesty International Index: EUR 46/020/2002 – News Service Nr. 69, published on 19 April 2002. Amnesty International Index: EUR 46/025/2003, published on 17 March 2003. Ron, Ramos, and Rodgers, ‘Transnational Information Politics. NGO Human Rights Reporting, 1986–2000’, 568 (Table 2). Amnesty International Index: EUR 46/007/2003, published on 23 January 2003. Amnesty International Index: ASA 17/007/2001, published on 28 February 2001. Amnesty International, ‘Death Penalty: Death Sentences and Executions in 2007’, http://www. amnesty.org/en/death-penalty/death-sentences-and-executions-in-2007 (accessed 12 August 2008).

Notes on contributors Emily B. Rodio is a graduate student in the Political Science Department at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University. Her dissertation explores if and how truth commissions contribute to the consolidation of democratic governance in Africa. Hans Peter Schmitz is Associate Professor of Political Science, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. His book publications include Transnational Mobilization and Domestic Regime Change. Africa in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Die Macht der Menschenrechte. Internationale Normen, kommunikative Prozesse und politischer Wandel in den La¨ndern des Su¨dens (with Thomas Risse and Anja Jetschke; Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden, 2002). His articles have appeared in Comparative Politics, International Studies Review, Human Rights Quarterly, and the Zeitschrift fu¨r Internationale Beziehungen.