Amnesty International USA Research Articles

Pregnant Prisoners in Shackles

Pregnant Prisoners in Shackles

Cornering the Canvasser: Amnesty International USA Maria Drivenes and Herbert Sherman Long Island University - Brooklyn

The following is an instructional, disguised field-based case study that was written for an introductory course in human resource management although the case could be utilized in either an introductory management or business ethics class. Primary data from the case was retrieved from an informal interview with a former employee at Amnesty and extended via secondary research from relevant internet sites. The case focuses on several major human resource issues in terms of wearing symbols of faith at work and negligent hiring. It also indirectly raises questions of using personality tests in recruiting and leadership training.The story line is as follows: Aida, a recent college graduate, was having little success obtaining second interviewees after three months in the job market. She conducted some online research to firm the “perfect” organization to work for which was Amnesty International USA (AI USA).Applying and successfully hired for a canvasser position, Aida struggled to hit her weekly-required collection quota of $125/week. Her team leader Luke finds the situation frustrating and starts to believe that Aida’s hijab is getting in the way of her performance based upon his perception of donor discrimination.The situation becomes convoluted when Luke, in the process of assisting Aida sign up a donor (Luke’s main concern), overheard a conversation between Holly (an excellent and experienced canvasser) and a potential donor leading Luke to suspect Holly of committing theft and fraud. The case ends with a series of questions about using symbols of faith at work, personality and job fit, and job descriptions/specification.

Nonprofit Product Placement: Human Rights Advocacy in Film and Television

ABSTRACTAs non-governmental organizations attempt to gain influence, membership, and funds in an increasingly crowded field, they are turning to popular culture as a way to spread both their brand and their message. This article examines Amnesty International USA’s use of what has traditionally been a corporate advertising technique: product placement in popular film and television. It argues that NGOs engage in product placement as a form of strategic communication with three interrelated goals: brand management, issue advocacy, and social norms marketing. This overlap creates theoretical outcomes and ethical considerations which, while not unique to second-order forms of communication, have not yet been explored with relation to human rights advocacy. This article first defines and gives examples of such product placement and concludes with a discussion of ethics considerations for advocacy organizations contemplating using this strategy.

Environmental Law, <em>Clapper v. Amnesty International USA</em>, and the Vagaries of Injury-in-Fact: "Certainly Impending" Harm, "Reasonable Concern," and "Geographic Nexus"

Clapper v. Amnesty International USA further muddies the already confusing doctrine of injury-in-fact in the law of Article III standing. This article examines Clapper and proposes clarification of three problematic aspects of injury-in-fact, which arise in environmental litigation: the concepts of “certainly impending harm;” “reasonable concern;” and “geographic nexus.” Clapper’s broad language suggesting that imminent injury must meet a very strict, “certainly impending” standard should be viewed in light of the case law adjudicating probabilistic harms, which reveals that “certainly impending” does not even approach a preponderance standard. Rather, it encompasses a wide range of environmental and public health risks where the plaintiffs have established a nexus to the challenged action. Clapper should be interpreted as denying standing because of the plaintiffs’ inability to establish a nexus to surveillance activities, akin to the geographic nexus required in environmental cases. Clapper can also be distinguished because of its reliance on the uncertainty associated with subsequent, intervening actions required to consummate the alleged injury. Clapper’s language conflating the “reasonable concern” doctrine from Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (TOC), Inc. with the “certainly impending” test must be corrected, and “reasonable concern” should be presumed in future cases where the plaintiffs establish a geographic nexus to violations of environmental law. Finally, the test for geographic nexus in environmental cases should account for indirect and cumulative impacts, and should not depend on proof of nexus to precise acreages.

The Boomerang Pattern: Verification and Modification

When Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink published Activists Beyond Borders in 1998, they offered the emergent field of human rights history the first clear model of the relatively new phenomenon of international human rights activism. Termed the Boomerang Pattern, the model demonstrates how NGOs of the (predominantly) Third World work with international NGOs to address human rights violations in their own countries. A document from the archival collection of Amnesty International USA, created in the 1980s but only available to the public since 2007, verifies the accuracy of the Boomerang Pattern in describing transnational human rights activism. However, the Boomerang Pattern primarily describes how activism is designed to work, rather than present the complications and difficulties that NGOs encounter in their international campaigns. This article complicates the Boomerang Pattern in order to more accurately describe transnational human rights activism by drawing on examples from the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran human rights movements of the 1980s.

Decision Support For Human Rights: A Case Study

A computerized system has been developed for the preparation and dispatch of telegrams by the Amnesty International USA Urgent Action Network. The system includes automation of billing procedures, funds receipt management, and membership management for a 2000 volunteer database. The system currently produces and sends an average of 1000 telegrams, world-wide, each month. This paper describes the decision tasks and the tools created to aid decision-making for the Telegram Pledge Program.

Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors (review)

Reviewed by: Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors William F. Schulz (bio) Steven H. Miles, Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors (Univ. of California Press, 2d ed. 2009) 312 pages, ISBN 9780520259683. In his classic account of the French-Algerian War, The Battle of the Casbah, French General Paul Aussaresses, a fierce defender of the utility of torture, recounts this exchange with a doctor (“an old friend of mine from my school days in Bordeaux”) over the body of a man Aussaresses has just tortured to death: “I was talking to the prisoner and he fell ill,” I said unconvincingly. “He told me he had tuberculosis. Can you see what’s wrong with him?” “You were talking to him? But he’s drenched. You must be kidding!” said the doctor. “No, I wouldn’t do such a thing.” “But he’s dead!” “It’s possible,” I answered, “but when I asked for you he was still alive.” Since the doctor was still complaining I lost my cool and said: “And so? You want me to say that I killed him? Would that make you feel better? Do you think I enjoy this?” “No, but then why did you come to get me if he’s dead?” I didn’t answer. The doctor finally understood. I had called him so he would send the body to the hospital and get it out of my sight once and for all.1 There is no evidence the doctor ever reported the General’s crime. As Steven H. Miles reports in Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors,2 “oversight” is hardly unique. Miles, a Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School, systematically and compellingly details the myriad of instances in which US doctors, nurses, and other health professionals have collaborated with the purveyors of the “war on terror” to violate not only the Hippocratic Oath, the professional ethical strictures, and the Geneva Conventions but also the country’s highest ideals. By now, much of what Miles recounts is familiar to those who have followed the vagaries of torture perpetrated at the behest of top US leaders, rationalized by their lawyers, and implemented by far too many security officials. Mental health professionals helped devise torture techniques, physicians and psychiatrists monitored the application of “coercive interrogation,” prison medics withheld treatment, and other health professionals repeatedly looked the other way or conducted cursory investigations of alleged mistreatment. All of this comes despite professional standards that unambiguously preclude such behavior. For example, the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Tokyo asserts that “[t]he physician shall not countenance, condone or participate in the practice of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading procedures, whatever the offense of [End Page 1158] which the victim of such procedures is suspected, accused or guilty.”3 Miles builds his case carefully and thoroughly. He details, for example, nineteen cases of prisoners who died under torture, although the number is far higher by the US military’s own admission. As Human Rights First reported in 2006, of the nearly one hundred detainees who died in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2002 and 2006, thirty-four were considered homicides by the military and another eleven may well have been. Given that this study did not include Guantánamo Bay or so-called black site secret prisons, the number is no doubt even higher today.4 Miles also has the courage to name the names of health professionals he regards as responsible for abuse and neglect. He is particularly searing in his indictment of the reticence showed by the American Psychological Association and American Medical Association in the face of the involvement of medical professionals in torture. But why should those in the helping professions be exempt from the common human failing to ignore one’s highest ideals and “go along to get along?” It is hardly unknown for physicians to serve the state—no matter how vicious—or even in some cases to lead that miscreant state, such as Papa Doc Duvalier and Radovan Karadžić. When I was Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, we tried repeatedly to find US doctors willing to bring professional charges...

New Directions in Transnational Activism: Non-Governmental Organizations and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights

During the last two decades, the literature on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and transnational activism has become voluminous and increasingly sophisticated. Both of these books provide novel insights into transnational activism. In particular, both books offer a fresh perspective on the ways in which economic, social and cultural rights are being promoted by NGOs. The most general of these books, New Rights Advocacy, looks at the growing convergence in the work of leading development and human rights NGOs. In particular, it is the first significant study of what is termed “new rights advocacy.” According to the authors, one a reputed specialist on the World Bank and NGOs, the other chair of the Board of Amnesty International USA, new rights advocacy is “advocacy on social, economic, or development policy, at local, national, or international levels, which makes explicit reference to internationally recognized human rights standards. It features explicit appeals to these standards, it promotes both civil and political human rights and economic and social human rights, and it targets a broad range of actors” (p. 19). At the center of the book's focus are three developments: (i) the increasing promotion of economic, social and cultural rights by NGOs originally primarily concerned with civil and political human rights; (ii) a turn to human rights-based approaches by development, environmental and labor NGOs; and (iii) the growth of new movements, campaigns and networks involving both development and human rights NGOs. The term “new rights advocacy” is also intended to refer to claims to “new” rights such as the right to water.

Geographical Information Systems Technology as a Tool for Genocide Prevention: The Case of Darfur

This article evaluates potential uses of geographical information systems (GIS) technology and virtual globes, such as Google Earth, for stimulating more effective responses to emerging threats of genocide and mass atrocities. The essay discusses two projects that utilise commercial satellite imagery to document the destruction of villages and deter future attacks in the Darfur region of Sudan: the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Crisis in Darfur and Amnesty International USA's Eyes on Darfur. It argues that GIS technology has great potential as an instrument for building public awareness about contemporary threats of genocide and mass atrocities. However, the essay concludes that GIS-based early warning systems may have the greatest value not for public advocacy movements, but rather for policy practitioners charged with designing and implementing responses to emerging threats. Such technology also has the potential to help endangered populations in conflict zones to organise timely and effective defensive action against threats of atrocities.

Linking Experiential and Classroom Education: Lessons Learned from The American University-Amnesty International USA Summer Institute on Human Rights

How can internships and other forms of experiential or service learning be designed to best accomplish academic goals? This article explores the benefits and pitfalls of experiential education by looking at the relevant scholarly literature and at students' and faculty members' experience with the American University–Amnesty International USA Summer Institute on Human Rights. Overall, faculty and students report that internships, when integrated with traditional classroom learning, greatly enhance learning overall. The article suggests strategies for structuring internships to enrich students' learning.

Designing a user‐centered conference for user‐centered information professionals: The story of InfoCamp Seattle

Designing a user‐centered conference for user‐centered information professionals: The story of InfoCamp Seattle

Linking Experiential and Classroom Education: Lessons Learned from The American University-Amnesty International USA Summer Institute on Human Rights

How can internships and other forms of experiential or service learning be designed to best accomplish academic goals? This article explores the benefits and pitfalls of experiential education by looking at the relevant scholarly literature and at students’ and faculty members’ experience with the American University–Amnesty International USA Summer Institute on Human Rights. Overall, faculty and students report that internships, when integrated with traditional classroom learning, greatly enhance learning overall. The article suggests strategies for structuring internships to enrich students’ learning.

In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All (review)

A few years ago William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, was describing current human rights crises around the world for Knoxville's National Public Radio station. The talk show host asked him: "But what does all of this have to do with a person in East Tennessee?" 1 This was the first time this sort of question had ever been posed to Schulz, and it inspired his new book, In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All. Meant as a guide for those who ask--or are asked--"why should we care?" it marks the first time a human rights advocate has so publicly struggled with the lack of a U.S. domestic constituency for human rights. [End Page 312]