Amnesty Research Articles

Torture allegations as events data

The Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project uses content analysis to measure a number of variables on more than 15,000 public allegations of government ill-treatment and torture made by Amnesty International (AI) from 1995 to 2005. The ITT specific allegation (SA) event data use the torture allegation as the unit of observation, thus permitting users to manipulate them for a wide variety of purposes. In this article, we introduce the ITT SA data. We first describe the key variables in the SA data and report a number of bivariate descriptive statistics to illustrate some of the research questions that might be usefully investigated with the data. We then discuss how we believe the ITT SA data can be used to study not only AI’s naming and shaming behavior, but also states’ (lack of) compliance with the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT). We conclude with an empirical analysis using the SA data that investigates the effect of domestic political institutions on formal complaints, investigations, and adjudication of torture allegations. We show that legislative checks are positively associated with complaints, investigations, and trials; elections and freedom of speech are positively associated with investigations and trials; and powerful judiciaries are associated only with investigations.

Respect for Human Rights has Improved Over Time: Modeling the Changing Standard of Accountability

According to indicators of political repression currently used by scholars, human rights practices have not improved over the past 35 years, despite the spread of human rights norms, better monitoring, and the increasing prevalence of electoral democracy. I argue that this empirical pattern is not an indication of stagnating human rights practices. Instead, it reflects a systematic change in the way monitors, like Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department, encounter and interpret information about abuses. The standard of accountability used to assess state behaviors becomes more stringent as monitors look harder for abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse. In this article, I present a new, theoretically informed measurement model, which generates unbiased estimates of repression using existing data. I then show that respect for human rights has improved over time and that the relationship between human rights respect and ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture is positive, which contradicts findings from existing research.

Video Games and Gender-based Violence

Gender-based violence is violence perpetrated against women, which is primarily or exclusively motivated by their sex, and includes both intimate partner abuse and physical or sexual assault by strangers. The aim of the present research was to investigate whether gender-based violence is depicted in the world of video games and whether video games contribute to the socialisation of young people in this regard. The methodology employed went beyond the administration of questionnaires to ascertain the perceptions of those who use video games or an analysis of the associated advertising, the habitual research strategies in this field. Rather, an analysis was conducted of the videogames themselves, examining their contents, dynamics and development, and the possibilities that they offer, etc., based on a “videographic analysis” of the variables explored. The results show that video games, which contain explicit incitements to violence, are widely available on the Internet, from the “anime”, with various subgenres such as eroge and hentai, to the famous GTA, one of the best-selling video games worldwide, which contains a clear incitement to violence in the sense defined by the Comprehensive Law against Gender-Based Violence. The conclusion drawn from this research leads us to ask whether, as Amnesty International claims, we are in breach of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which requires States to take steps to remove such discrimination in all its manifestations.

The Returns Directive: Possible Limits and Interpretation

This paper analyses the Returns Directive (Directive 2008/115) and its interpretation by the Court up until 01 April 2011. It may be argued that the Returns Directive has been the most controversial immigration instrument passed by the EU. The Directive was adopted by the Parliament and the Council by using the procedure formerly known as co-decision, now the ordinary legislative procedure. Once the Directive was adopted, it received a tremendous amount of criticism from other International Organisations such as the United Nations or the Council of Europe, as well as from different NGOs such as Amnesty International or ECRE. This paper looks at the four most important aspects of the Directive and analyses them with the case law of the CJEU up until 1 April 2011.

Building Blocks of Individual Biography? Non-Governmental Organizational Communication in Reflexive Modernity

In this article, we present a rhetorical analysis of organizational communication by a non-profit, social movement organization, Amnesty International Denmark (AID), to illustrate how communication by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) simultaneously serves organizational self-interest and provides a set of symbolic tools for individuals to use in the process of constructing biographical certainty. Our analysis shows how AID’s member communication constructs a view of the world centered on moral binaries and invites members to identify with the moral position that AID represents. This idealistic morality not only offers members a sense of collective identity, certainty, and order in their own lives but also serves AID by preserving the moral high ground for the organization and creating a broad basis for support.

Notes on Church-State Affairs

A number of churches and nongovernmental organizations criticized a new law that allows the government to suspend organizations that it deems to be interfering with national affairs. Amnesty International issued a statement saying that the law could cause “irreparable damage” to Algerian civil society. Jewish members of the Federal Parliament opposed a Green Party effort to end the opening of sessions with the reciting of the Lord's Prayer. They took the position that there could be more inclusive ways of opening but that the Green Party position showed a lack of understanding of Australia's religious heritage. Rajan Zed, president of the Universal Society of Hindus, said that both public and private universities should provide Hindu students with rooms of prayer. They should include popular Hindu gods, a bell, and a Shiva linga. He said it was important that the government see a connection between education and spirituality. Australia's High Court...

International Humanitarian Law and Raison D'Etat: the Balance Sheet of Kazakhstan's Ratification of the Geneva Convention on Refugees

Post-soviet countries have been eager to accede to international humanitarian law while quite reluctant to honour the resulting obligations. The home to thousands of asylum seekers from neighbouring countries, Kazakhstan ratified the Geneva Convention on refugees in 1998. However, the Kazakhstani government regularly flouts its important provisions by denying bone fide asylum seekers refugee status and by sending applicants back to countries where they may face imprisonment, torture, and execution. This article is an attempt to explain why Kazakhstan does not always honour its obligations under international humanitarian law. It argues that maintaining good relations with influential neighbours from where refugees originate takes precedence over Kazakhstan’s obligations under the Geneva Convention. Various empirical data are used to test this assumption, such as statistics on numbers of applicants extradited from Kazakhstan compiled by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and qualitative data generated through in-depth interviews with UNHCR protection officers posted in the country. The time frame examined is the period between 1999, the year Kazakhstan ratified the Geneva Convention relating the Status of Refugees, and 2012. The analysis seems to uphold the assumption that Kazakhstan’s raison d’etat and resulting foreign policy priorities undermine its obligations under international humanitarian law. http://www.kaldorcentre.unsw.edu.au/resource/international-humanitarian-law-and-raison-d%E2%80%99etat-balance-sheetkazakhstan%E2%80%99s-ratification Page 1 of 1

Standing Up to Clapper: How to Increase Transparency and Oversight of FISA Surveillance

The Supreme Court held in Clapper v. Amnesty International that a group of non-profit organizations, journalists, and attorneys representing international clients did not have standing to challenge programatic of one-end domestic communications under Section 702 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This article reviews the Court's opinion in light of subsequent disclosures about the scope of NSA surveillance and then considers recent proposals to increase transparency and oversight of the United States Intelligence Community. Finally, the article outlines three reform elements necessary to bring FISA surveillance in line with constitutional and legal principles.

NGOs, IOs, and the ICC: Diagnosing and Framing Darfur

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have become influential forces in global society. They exert their influence in part by framing issues and thereby suggesting particular courses of action. This article examines how NGOs with distinct missions represent mass violence for the case of Darfur. Content analysis of reports, speeches, and other documents from Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and Save Darfur reveals distinct patterns across organizations. In addition to the organizations' specialized fields, interventions by external actors such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court affect NGO framing, but they do so in organization‐specific ways. Against presumptions of a uniform Western position on Darfur, this analysis documents that depictions of violence by Western NGOs show field‐specific patterns and distinct responses to international political and judicial interventions.

The Aden Pivot? British Counter-Insurgency after Aden

This article argues that the Aden Insurgency was a pivotal moment in the history of British counter-insurgency. We argue that it was in Aden where the newfound strength of human rights discourse, embodied in Amnesty International, and of anti-colonial sentiment, expressed by the UN General Assembly, forced the British government to pay attention to public perceptions of colonial brutality. Using archival sources, we foreground three episodes in the history of the insurgency to support our argument and to illustrate that the changes witnessed were not the result of ‘learning’ but of a fundamental shift in the international environment.

Opinion: Back on the agenda

OPINION ❐ BUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS IUF, which was confined to some very specific peripheral issues). Despite this, Ruggie’s initial efforts held out significant promise. Although not regarded as perfect by the NGOs, Ruggie’s initial papers and his subsequent Protect, Respect, Remedy Framework were nonetheless lauded for flagging up some of the main problems and for effectively setting out a useful perspective on the then existing legal situation. But by 2009 as Ruggie sought to ‘operationalise’ his Framework, in a series of manoeuvres that would result in the ‘Guiding Principles’ paper, many NGO observers became increasingly disillusioned . A major drift into voluntarism was the main problem. But there was also a deliberate shying away from the really tricky legal barriers (not well understood by anyone lacking quite specific legal expertise). Amnesty and Human Rights Watch both issued statements sounding alarm. It was only during these later stages that trade unions became involved, even then mostly in an informal series of meetings rather than in a formal consultation process. Shortly thereafter the whole thing was signed off and constructive engagement with an unsatisfactory set of principles was the sensible position then adopted by most NGOs and by the labour movement. Having bought into the process at a late stage the Global Unions Council would later privately acknowledge that they had, to some extent, been sold a pup, although in public pronouncements the unions continue keenly to endorse the Guiding Principles. The latest developments On 19 June 2014 a group of Latin American countries and a very significant African ally convened to upset what had seemed like a solidly embedded new status quo. Ecuador tabled a resolution (signed also by Bolivia, Cuba, South Africa and Venezuela) to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, calling for a drastic re-framing of the business and human rights paradigm, and the creation of a legally binding treaty. To the consternation of the EU and USA the proposal won the support of twenty countries when it was approved on 26 June (contrasted with fourteen votes against, and thirteen abstentions). Those voting in favour were: Algeria; Benin; Burkina Faso; China; Congo; Cote d’Ivoire; Cuba; Ethiopia; India; Indonesia; Kazakhstan; Kenya; Morocco; Namibia; Pakistan; the Philippines; Russia; South Africa; Venezuela and Vietnam. The resolution was opposed by: Austria; Czech Republic; Estonia; France; Germany; Ireland; Italy; Japan; Montenegro; South Korea; Romania; Macedonia; UK; and USA. The radical Ecuadorian proposal, however, was not the only one tabled at the Human Rights Council meeting. Norway had tabled an earlier Back on the agenda Ecuador’s radical proposal for a binding treaty has been sniffed at by the US and EU as though it were an amateurish interruption INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 24 Volume 21 Issue 3 2014 DANIEL BLACKBURN, is a qualified UK lawyer and Director of ICTUR in London Daniel was awarded a distinction grade and a prestigious academic prize for his masters thesis on the history of business and human rights T he idea of an international treaty that would establish a real framework of corporate human rights accountability seemed to be put to bed in an unsatisfactory - but rather final – manner back in 2011, with the adoption of the UN’s Guiding Principles. Once that deal was done, many assumed future debate was effectively settled . But, rather surprisingly, the idea of a more radical treatment was mooted in late 2013 and in June 2014 received an energetic boost. So much so that the fundamentals of the whole debate are once again back on the UN agenda. In fact, at no point before did the previous proposal for a legally binding treaty make it this far up the agenda. Unions now have a chance to play a much more active role. An essential starting point for doing so is the imperative to send lawyers and other technical staff for in depth briefings with Amnesty International’s lawyers, who fully understand the complexities of what is, after all, a very technical set of legal problems. The Ruggie work: a re-cap In 2003 the UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights (a technical body) adopted an impressive set of ‘Draft Norms’ that were intended as a precursor to a...

Amnesty International Canada and British Columbia Civil Liberties Association v. Chief of Defence Staff for the Canadian Forces and Others

311Jurisdiction — Extraterritorial jurisdiction — Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms — Whether having extraterritorial application — Whether Charter applying during armed conflict in Afghanistan to detention of non-Canadians by Canadian Forces or their transfer to Afghan authorities — Section 32(1) of Charter — Interpretation of jurisdictional reach by courts — Judgments of Supreme Court — Hape — Khadr (No 1) — Whether Canada having effective control of detention facilities — Whether Afghanistan consenting to application or enforcement of Canadian law — Afghan compact — Applicable law — International law — International humanitarian law — Whether Charter applying if detainees at substantial risk of torture if transferred to Afghan authorities — General rule against extraterritorial application of Charter — Whether fundamental human rights exception to general rule — Concepts of territoriality and comity — Relevance of all circumstancesHuman rights — Freedom from torture — Non-Canadian nationals detained by Canadian Forces in Afghanistan during armed conflict — Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms — Whether applicable if detainees at substantial risk of torture if transferred to Afghan authorities — General rule against extraterritorial application of Charter — Whether fundamental human rights exception to general rule — Whether detainees having rights under Charter — Applicable law — International humanitarian law — Afghan ConstitutionTerritory — Territorial sovereignty — Armed conflict in Afghanistan — Detention of non-Canadians by Canadian Forces — Whether Canadian Forces’ authorities having effective control of detention facilities — Banković — Canadian Forces in Afghanistan at request of Afghan Government — Whether Afghanistan consenting to extension of Canadian law over non-Canadian nationals — Afghan Compact — Whether Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms having extraterritorial applicationWar and armed conflict — Armed conflict in Afghanistan — Detention of non-Canadians by Canadian Forces — Law applicable to detainees — Whether Afghanistan consenting to extension of Canadian law over non-Canadian nationals — Whether Canadian Forces occupying force — Whether Canadian Forces’ authorities having effective control of detention facilities — Banković — Afghan Compact — International humanitarian law — Applicability of Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms — The law of Canada

Drug Wars Collateral Damage: US Counternarcotic Aid and Human Rights in the Americas

Existing case-study research suggests that the recent increase in human rights violations in Latin America is attributed to the US-funded drug war. This narrative, which is referred to as the collateral damage perspective, stands in contrast to US human rights law, which makes governments' respect for human rights a precondition to receive aid. The apparent endogeneity between aid and human rights introduces bias that casts serious doubts on the validity of the collateral damage narrative. In addressing endoge- neity, this article presents a simultaneous instrumental variable analysis of the human rights effects of US counternarcotic aid in the Americas. The results show that while counternarcotic aid to regimes increases overall violations of human rights, this effect is greater among democracies than autocracies. And with the exception of torture, this fi nding is consistent when disappearances, political imprisonment, and extrajudicial killings are also considered. The implication of this research suggests that policy makers in Washington risk losing regional support for US drug control policies if US laws that govern the allocation of aid are not effectively implemented. The impact of US counternarcotic aid in facilitating the escalation of drug- related violence and human rights violations in Latin America is highly contested. Recent reports of the bodies of mutilated and decapitated victims of the drug war have grabbed the attention of the media, human rights groups, and policy think tanks (Amnesty International 2008; Molzahn, Rios, and Shirk 2012). Human rights groups claim that the escalation of drug-related violence, especially in Mexico and Colombia, and extrajudicial killings of citizens at the hands of their governments in the execution of the drug war are in large part a function of collateral damage by US fi nancial sponsorship of drug enforcement in the region (Amnesty Interna- tional and Fellowship of Reconciliation 2008). A burgeoning academic literature has found support for this collateral damage narrative. Recent empirical research shows that US drug enforcement policies and sponsorship of the drug war in Central America and the Caribbean produced the unintended effect of increasing levels of property crime and violent crime (Bartilow and Eom 2009a). Case studies show how US counternarcotic aid to democratic governments in Latin America has also produced the unintended effect of increasing human rights violations. In other words, the narrative that emerges is that as US counternarcotic aid interacts with the democratic institutional characteristics of recipient governments that are engaged in the execution of the drug war, it degrades respect for human rights (Youngers 2005; Bagley 1992; Crandall 2008; Craig 1980). This narrative, however, stands in direct contradiction to US human rights law. The Leahy Amendment (or Leahy's Law), passed by Congress in 1997, prohibits

How naming and shaming affects human rights perceptions in the shamed country

Although individual citizens perceive the human rights conditions in their country differently, existing research on human rights and public opinion has tended to ignore the possible impact from international sources of information. This article builds upon previous research on human rights, public opinion, and international organizations by arguing that citizens will perceive the human rights conditions in their country more negatively when their country is shamed by the international community for human rights violations. This hypothesis is tested using both observational and experimental methods. I use multilevel modeling and survey responses from both the Gallup International Millennium Survey and the World Values Survey to show that individual human rights perceptions are negatively related to the adoption of resolutions by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights shaming a survey respondent’s government for human rights abuses, as well as the number of human rights-focused international nongovernmental organizations with members or volunteers living within the survey respondent’s country. These results are supplemented by an original, web-based experiment on human rights perceptions in the United States and India in which survey respondents are exposed to an experimental manipulation modeled on press statements from Amnesty International shaming the survey respondent’s country for human rights abuses.

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.

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.

Second Class Rights: How Amnesty International & Human Rights Watch Fail Women in the Middle East

The 2011 “Arab Spring” sparked optimism that there would be profound democratic change in the Middle East, a region dominated by autocratic and oppressive regimes. The lack of rights and fundamental freedom for women in the region was one of the most egregious manifestations of these abusive governments. While women’s rights should be a primary focus of the most prominent human rights NGOs, specifically Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW), these organizations have not directed sustained attention to women’s rights in this area of the world. HRW and Amnesty have allowed ideology and politics to prevail at the expense of true freedom for women.

Another Article About Standing

This Essay, prepared for a roundtable conference of administrative law scholars, considers the implications of the Supreme Court’s most recent standing decision, Clapper v. Amnesty International, for claims alleging risk-based, or “probabilistic,” injury. Three years before Clapper, in Geertson Seed Farms v. Monsanto, the Court seemed to open the door to such claims by testing the plaintiff’s claim of imminent injury against a test that required the plaintiff to show a “substantial risk” of injury. By contrast, Clapper applied a tougher-sounding test, requiring the plaintiffs in that case to show that their injury was “certainly impending.” Nevertheless, the Court conceded that in the recent past it had applied the “substantial risk” test.The ambiguity caused by Clapper matters because modern regulatory styles – shorthanded here as “New Governance” – often aim at reducing risks of harm to the public. Indeed, such regulation often attempts to attain that goal not through command-and-control regulation, but instead by incentivizing parties to act in ways that mitigate such risks. Both of these characteristics of New Governance regulation make it more likely that regulatory beneficiaries complaining of government mis-regulation will assert probabilistic injury claims. Clapper, by casting at least some doubt on the viability of such claims, thus threatens the availability of judicial review to hold government to account when it commits such errors.This Essay argues that Clapper leaves standing doctrine at least theoretically receptive to these types of injury claims. First, the Court expressly conceded that it has applied the “substantial risk” test in the past – it did not reject that precedent. Second, its explanation of why the plaintiffs before it lacked imminent injury leaves the door open for Congress and administrative agencies to create rights that take the form of increased probabilities for good regulatory outcomes. In turn, the deprivation of such probability-based rights constitutes Article III injury. The Essay notes that, twenty years ago, Justice Kennedy wrote an influential concurring opinion in a major standing case, Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, in which he recognized congressional power both to create innovative causes of action and to articulate chains of causation that courts might not otherwise recognize. If the Court remains faithful to Justice Kennedy’s statement – which has significant force given his status as the fifth vote for the standing analysis in Defenders – it should be receptive to probabilistic injury claims when Congress or administrative agencies regulate in a New Governance style.

The ironic spectator: solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism

This path-breaking book explores how solidarity towards vulnerable others is performed in our media environment. It argues that stories where famine is described through our own experience of dieting or or where solidarity with Africa translates into wearing a cool armband tell us about much more than the cause that they attempt to communicate. They tell us something about the ways in which we imagine the world outside ourselves. By showing historical change in Amnesty International and Oxfam appeals, in the Live Aid and Live 8 concerts, in the advocacy of Audrey Hepburn and Angelina Jolie as well as in earthquake news on the BBC, this far-reaching book shows how solidarity has today come to be not about conviction but choice, not vision but lifestyle, not others but ourselves – turning us into the ironic spectators of other people’s suffering.

Establishment and Application for a Mobile Learning Communities System over Cloud Network: A Case Study of Digital Archives Resource into Outdoor Environmental Education

In novel learning environments, learning systems not only are able to get environmental information through sensing technology to provide adaptive learning resources and information to students, but also help students to conduct interactions with learning communities. In this study, the development potential of digital archives resource into outdoor environmental education is focused with mobile learning-based educational theory. In this study, we adopt Kelly Repertory Grid as the tool for constructing the learners' knowledge mind maps and build the mobile learning system over cloud network to supply the learners to observe the others' learning results. At the same time, Natural Theory, Cone of Experience Theory and Hierarchy Map of Outdoor Education are also introduced to help students complete their learning programs of digital archives of environmental education. And then the learners' beneficial results of consciousness, attitude, and participation are gathered from the system. It makes the learners learn the essence of environmental education, in order to appreciate the valuable resources of nature paid to understand the sustainable ecological coexistence, thus protect the human treasure of natural resources. To verify the feasibility of our approach, the grade five students were invited to participate in the cooperative learning activity. The experimental results show that the effect of mobile community interactive learning is better than the general outdoor learning methods and the cooperative learning theory can improve the efficiency of learners' knowledge effectively. These results interpret the effectiveness of the proposed learning mode and could be referred to other teaching activities in the future.