Amnesty International

The acts of war and violence are increasingly prevalent in contemporary society. Within the last decade, the use of weapons has become more efficient and powerful resulting in devastation and loss of human life. Globally, people in affected regions usually exhibit residual effects, these effects however tend to be more pronounced in children and young adults. This paper presents concrete research on the effects of war-trauma, migration-trauma and, parental (family) distress of refugee children (RC) with the aim of understanding the deviant behavior of refugee children in reported trauma cases reviewed. This paper established the impact of war-trauma on refugee children. Children with prolonged exposure to war or violence related events stand a higher risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which could result in violent behavior throughout their life time if proper intervention is not administered. Aggravated mental stress disorder could also be experienced due to migration trauma as the RC traverse several regions enroute their new environments; which in turn leads to family distress as separation occurs as well as acculturation issues.

The latest publication of Strategic Studies appears in the series Changing Perspectives on Human Rights. The volume Can human rights bring social justice focuses on conceptual and strategic differences and similarities between social justice and human rights. What do human rights have to offer to deprived groups and protest movements that mobilize to demand social justice?

The twelve essays discuss different views on questions such as: Can human rights bring social justice? Can the human rights system speak out on political and economic structures that are seen as causing inequality? Should human rights organizations engage with political resource decisions? Would they risk being viewed as partisan if they engage with issues of redistribution or does their impartiality betray the poor and marginalized if they remain silent on system failures?

The volume contains contributions from, among others, Sara Burke (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung), Samuel Moyn (Harvard), Aryeh Neier (formerly Human Rights Watch) and current and former Directors of Amnesty International such as Widney Brown and David Petrasek.

Solidarität und Menschenrechte: Amnesty International, die Westdeutsche Linke und die argentinische Militärjunta, 1975–1983 [English title: Solidarity and Human Rights: Amnesty International, the West German Left and the Argentinean Military Junta, 1975–1983].

This chapter examines the thesis that human rights advocacy rose from the ashes of left-wing internationalism. Human rights advocacy is generally understood to be minimal demands for civil and political rights. The chapter analyzes why West German left-wing activists abandoned revolutionary rhetoric to advocate for the protection of political asylum and collaboration with liberal organizations such as Amnesty International. The chapter explains that the friendly attitude of the West German government towards military regimes in Latin America and the desolate prospects for social revolution in Latin America necessitated a turn towards a more palatable language of rights protection. The campaign on behalf of Argentinean refugees from 1975 to 1983 was one of the earliest examples where West German leftists adopted human rights talk. However, the chapter demonstrates that the shift towards human rights amongst West German leftists was fitful and incomplete. By the late 1970s-80s, many of them turned away from human rights talk and embarked upon supporting left-wing revolutionary insurgencies in Central America. Thus, this chapter rejects the historiographical claim that the 1970s witnessed a decisive breakthrough towards a liberal vision of human rights.

連帯と人権：アムネスティー・インターナショナル、西ドイツ左派、アルゼンチン軍事独裁政権の１９７５－１９８３年

本章は、左派インターナショナリズムの灰塵から人権擁護運動が生まれたという命題を検証する。一般的に人権擁護運動は市民権および政治権に限定された最小限の政治的要求と理解される。１９７０年代、なぜ西ドイツの活動家は、政治難民の保護という最小限の要求を掲げ、革命路線に基づくレトリックを放棄し、アムネスティー・インターナショナルなどのリベラル派組織と協力するに至ったのか。本章はその要因、すなわち西ドイツの活動家が政治的に受け入れられやすい人権という用語を必要とした背景に、中南米の軍事政権に対する西ドイツ政府の友好的態度、また同地域における社会変革の展望が乏しい現実があったことを指摘する。本章が扱うアルゼンチン難民擁護のための運動（１９７５―１９８３年）は、西ドイツ左派が人権という用語を用いて運動を展開した最も初期の試みであった。しかしこの運動に関わった多くの活動家は１９７０年代の後半から１９８０年代にかけて人権という用語を用いる運動の方針を転換させて、中米の左派革命勢力を支援するようになる。したがって、本章は、１９７０年代にリベラル派の人権ヴィジョンが影響力を増すうえでの大転回がみられたと主張する先行研究に異議を唱える。

On behalf of the Amnesty International's School Outreach Network Team, this presentation was delivered to Year 9 students from Mount Lawley Senior High School in 2014. This workshop outlines the fundamentals of human rights and advocates the need to end torture around the world as it is a violation of human rights.

Ky shkrim bëhet si reagim ndaj pretendimeve të pabaza dhe të papërgjegjshme të Milaim Zekës se unë, siç shprehet publikisht ai, e paskam kapur gazetën " Kosova Sot. " Reagimi bëhet publikisht edhe për gazetën që ta kuptoj opinioni se si e paskam " kapur ". Ndryshe, opinioni do ta krijoj bindjen se këtë gazetë tashmë e paska kapur Milaim Zeka.

In the run-up to the 1978 World Cup, the West German section of Amnesty International launched a campaign called ‘Yes to Football, No to Torture!’ which sought to raise awareness of human rights violations in Argentina by taking advantage of the popularity of the XI World
Cup. This article demonstrates that the Football Federation (Deutsches Fussball Bund) and its president Hermann Neuberger, in connivance with the West German Government, actively opposed one of the first
large-scale human rights campaigns in 1970s West Germany, but were unable to prevent its success. ‘Yes to Football, No to Torture!’ sparked a significant discussion on the relationship of sports and politics, and rallied tens of thousands of people for the cause of human rights
violations in Argentina.

2011 yılında Suriye Arap Cumhuriyeti’nde ortaya çıkan iç savaşa bağlı olarak kitleler halinde sınır ülkelere doğru bir göç akımı başlamış ve bu göçlerin artması ile mülteci krizi patlak vermiştir. Aynı yıl Türkiye’ye sınır illerden girmeye başlayan Suriyeli mültecilere karşı başından itibaren “açık kapı” politikası uygulamış ve girişlerine herhangi bir kısıtlama getirilmemiştir. Sayıları gittikçe artan mülteciler Türkiye için altından kalkması zor bir sınava dönüşmüş, uluslararası yardım talebinde bulunulmuştur. 

Bu çalışmada 2011 yılında başlayan Suriye mülteci krizinin yedinci yılına yaklaşırken gelinen son durum ve Türkiye’de sayısı 3 milyonu geçmiş olan mültecilere ait sorunlara yönelik uluslararası çözümler detaylı bir şekilde ele alınmıştır. Türkiye’ye göç ettikleri günden  itibaren genellikle birincil ve acil ihtiyaçları karşılanan mültecilerin diğer sorunlarına  da ışık tutarken, uluslararası örgütlerin öncelik verdiği konular derinlemesine incelenmiştir.

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Due to the civil war that emerged in the Syrian Arab Republic in 2011, mass migration to border countries began, resulting in the eruption of the refugee crisis. In the same year, Syrian refugees began their marches to safety from the borders into neighboring countries and in this regard, Turkey has carried out an "open door" policy with zero restrictions on refugee entry. Thus, vast numbers of refugees have fled to Turkey causing severe complications within the country. Therefore, international assistance has been requested by the Turkish government.

This study examines the recent situation stemming from the Syrian refugee crisis, which is currently approaching its seventh year. Furthermore, the study explores in detail international support for the plight of refugees, whose population now exceeds three million. This study also examines the primary topics of international organizations dealing with the crisis and focuses on other problems of refugees whose primary and urgent needs in general terms.

On the night of 2 March 1962, twenty-two people attended a meeting at the Owen Dixon Chambers on Melbourne's William Street that established Australia's first 'section' of what is now the world's best-known human rights organisation: Amnesty International. 1 The smattering of 'lawyers, social workers, women at home, businessmen, industrial workers, minister of religion and students' who attended that night had been inspired by Peter Benenson, a British lawyer, former Labour Party activist and Catholic convert, whose article 'The Forgotten Prisoners' had appeared in London's Observer newspaper ten months earlier. 2 The organisation's remit was novel: declaring itself above Cold War politics, members 'adopted' one political prisoner from each of a first-, second-and third-world nation-known as 'groups of threes'-and sought to use the power of the pen to have them released. Those first twenty-two Australians had a mix of motivations, but Wendy Nott's seems particularly instructive. Hearing news of the organisation's founding over the radio 'while standing at the sink one evening' hit Nott, a homemaker from the working-class suburb of Essendon, Melbourne, like 'a bolt from the blue'. She had been involved in the Student Christian Movement and Aboriginal rights causes at university, and saw Amnesty as representing 'the idea of the brotherhood of man', an ambition not so distant from Benenson's own hope for 'a sort of secularised religious community which would "rekindle a fire in the minds of men"'. 3 Nott's history and perceptions immediately reveal some of the contradictions that underlay Amnesty's emergence. Its novel deployment of human rights ideas and, like many organisations of the 1960s, its eschewing of binary Cold War hostilities, sat alongside a much older-indeed ancientimperative to aid those in need. In this chapter, I use Amnesty as a window into the way humanitarian action was transformed and complicated by its ever-closer relationship with human rights in the second half of the twentieth century. Historian Samuel Moyn argues that 'the slow amalgamation of humanitarian concern for suffering with human rights', sped up from the 1970s onwards, culminating in the two becoming 'fused enterprises'.

This research assesses the extent to which Canadian economic and political self-interest can be seen to have motivated the complicity of successive Canadian governments in the East Timor near-genocide perpetrated by the government of Indonesia. The research considers ways in which Canada facilitated and legitimized Indonesia’s occupation vis-à-vis diplomatic actions at the UN, pro-Indonesian foreign policy, direct investment in Indonesia, bilateral aid, and authorization of military export permits, thus in effect “aiding and abetting” the near-genocide. The research is intended to encourage debate concerning the relationship between the political and economic policies of Western nations and the state of human rights elsewhere in the world.

Amnesty International estimated in 1977 that between 600,000 and 750,000 Indonesians had been or were still imprisoned as a result of the Army-led anti-communist violence in Indonesia in the mid-1960s. This article charts the relationship between members of Amnesty International and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) with a political prisoner on death row in East Java, Gatot Lestario, a former leader of the Indonesian Communist Party. This article draws on the letters he wrote over a period of three years before his execution in 1985 and interviews with his pen pals. It traces the ways in which he encouraged his pen pals to advocate for human rights in Indonesia and their responses, as well as his own involvement in political prisoner advocacy. This case study illustrates the disappearance of Indonesia's previously close and solidary relationship with the socialist world and its replacement at the people-to-people level with human rights activism involving Western activists. This is particularly evident in the increasingly important role played by members of Amnesty International, the Quakers and other overseas organizations concerned with Indonesia. Finally, the article assesses Gatot Lestario's impact, after his execution, on the development of a long-term advocacy network for Indonesia's political prisoners.

This genealogy of the “right to truth” explores the ambivalence of this new concept in international legal discourse. It argues that although various distinct mobilizations have coalesced around the idea of a “right to truth” as a resource to reform international law, the competition around its parameters has
also acted as a constraint for certain truth activists.
Given the diversity of interests at play, the institutionalization process of the “right to truth” before various bodies reveals strategies of alignment and misalignment among truth entrepreneurs that may reinforce or undermine each other’s cause. Although all these visions of the “right to truth” are presently celebrated as “complementary”, the advent of this multifaceted legal category thus conceals a range of conflicts around conceptions of justice and more generally, the social and political priorities given to the treatment of mass atrocities.

It is one thing to consider what human rights have been and another to inquire into what they could be. In this essay, I present a history of human rights vis-à-vis decolonization. I follow the scholarship of Samuel Moyn to suggest that human rights presented a “moral alternative” to political utopias. The question remains how to politicize the moral energy around human rights today. I argue that defending what Édouard Glissant calls a “right to opacity” could politicize the ethical energy around human rights today. Glissant’s right to opacity outlines a blueprint for the praxis of human rights to shift from a “functional model” to a “critical model,” to use Enrique Dussel’s distinction. My ultimate aim is to show how social movements around human rights and decolonization could converge today.

Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dj1b25s

On April, 17 th 2019 the EU parliament decided to expand the resources of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, the so called Frontex, up to 10.000 permanent corps until 2027. Together with this increase in human resources, they will expand their budget from 330 million up to 1,6 billion euros until 2021. That is an increase of more than 500%. Currently, there are approximately 1,500 employees working at Frontex. To fulfill the aim of 5,000 permanent workers until 2021, there has to be an increase of more than 250% just in the section of human resources and just in two years. But on which costs?

Amnistía Internacional (AI) ha pasado de limitarse a defender a ciertas personas de la violencia a proponer nuevas leyes que ayudan a defender de la violencia a unas personas pero implican solicitar violencia (legal) para otras. AI a menudo justifica las propuestas legales que realiza. Al hacerlo, incurre en riesgo de justificar violencia (legal) engañosamente. En este ensayo muestro que AI (1) propone, en algunos casos, justificaciones engañosas de la violencia y (2) ha hecho una propuesta contraria a la Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos (DUDH). Finalmente, ofrezco una reflexión sobre el origen del odio a los diferentes y sobre cuál podría ser una respuesta racional ante él.

A common complaint about pacifism says that it is utopian, in a pejorative sense. The worry can take various forms and directions, but when it is couched in terms of Just War theory it usually includes accusations of pacifism’s immorality, inconsistency and impracticality. Contemporary defenders of pacifism have responded to this complaint by delineating a highly sophisticated, empirically informed account of pacifism that foregrounds its real-world effectiveness. This paper takes a different route towards vindicating pacifism: via a more nuanced picture of what is specifically utopian about it. I propose that peace, in at least some of its guises, can be described as a minor, grounded utopia; a desire for an alternative future without war and violence, whose pursuit blurs the boundaries between thought and action. Reconstructing both prefiguration and testimony as practical modes of this kind of pacifism, the paper maintains that minor, grounded utopias are sites rife with conflict and contestation.

La capacidad de discriminación y la discriminación son hechos universales en la biosfera, tanto a lo largo y ancho de la diversidad de especies y de la superficie del planeta como a lo largo de la evolución y la historia humana. Sin embargo, la palabra discriminación ha adquirido de forma relativamente rápida una connotación muy negativa, y ello se aprovecha con frecuencia para engañar, por ejemplo para justificar violencia engañosamente. En este escrito analizo algunos modos en que las alegaciones de discriminación favorecen la violencia, algunos de los engaños relacionados con las alegaciones de discriminación, y algunas de las debilidades psíquicas que favorecen el éxito de dichos engaños. Por vivir en España, conozco mejor y ofrezco en este escrito una mayor cantidad de datos referentes al que creo que es el «grupo víctima» más importante en España en la actualidad, que es el de las mujeres.
Índice
1 Introducción: situación inicial y general
2 Las compensaciones a los grupos víctima
3 Modos en que el victimismo grupal exitoso puede favorecer la violencia
3.1 Aumento de la permisividad hacia la violencia ilegal ejercida por personas incluidas en los grupos víctima
3.2 Aumento de la violencia legal hacia las personas incluidas en «grupos agresores» mediante el endurecimiento de los castigos estipulados y la creación de nuevos tipos penales
3.3 Aumento de la violencia legal hacia las personas incluidas en «grupos agresores» mediante la disminución de la presunción de inocencia
3.4 Aumento de la violencia y la amenaza de violencia legales necesarias para satisfacer el aumento de derechos y otros beneficios concedido a las personas incluidas en los grupos víctima
4 Engaños relacionados con alegaciones de discriminación
4.1Yo y mi grupo somos muy víctimas, y otros no lo son
4.2 Además, somos víctimas de agresión o de discriminación solo por lo que somos
4.3 Se puede ser víctima de discriminación sin que nadie discrimine: las desigualdades y desproporciones que no nos convienen son discriminaciones
4.4 Si una persona «pertenece» a un grupo víctima es víctima, y si «pertenece» a un grupo agresor es agresora
4.5 La discriminación a las personas que «pertenecen» a grupos agresores está justificada
4.6 La discriminación que nos favorece no es discriminación
4.7 Nadie (o casi nadie) nos defiende
4.8 Quienes no están de acuerdo con nosotros son racistas, machistas o malas personas
4.9 Lo dice la ciencia
5 Explotación de debilidades psicológicas
Referencias

In the early 1980s, when Amnesty International began addressing new human rights violations in El Salvador, the organization naturally turned to the issue of US arms to the Salvadoran junta. Like other human rights NGOs, AI maintained that the Salvadoran junta and military were responsible for the lion’s share of human rights violations in the country, and that the United States should therefore withhold arms shipments to El Salvador until the government improved its human rights reputation. However, activists in Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) would find themselves in conflict not just with the Reagan administration, but also with their own organization, over the issue. This article examines the conflict within Amnesty International over the issue of US arms to the Salvadoran junta in the 1980s due to the NGO’s nonpartisan mandate.

En este ensayo presento un caso de justificación engañosa de violencia (legal), por medio de la justificación engañosa de un artículo de una ley, por el Tribunal Constitucional español. También informo de la sorprendente conducta de AI ante una ley que, aparentemente, es contraria a la Constitución Española y a la Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos.

Will the amnesty not amount to injustice on the side of those whose loves ones have been killed and whose lives have been wrecked by the insurgency?

In war there are casualties and it is the job of government to ensure that appropriate mitigating initiatives are available to address any grievances that emerge from the process. I believe it is important to highlight that Boko Haram emerged out of frustration and despair with authorities.

Both side lost loved ones and it is all about ensuring that there is an avenue for proper healing and psychological support to cope with the death of loved ones. People lost loved ones in the ancient communal conflict of Ife/Modakeke, Biafra and even Niger Delta; we all learnt to forgive and forget – we need peace in North East Nigeria thus the need for Amnesty

A series of articles have appeared recently in several media outlets about the lack of representation from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SC/ST) in the Indian Institutes of Management. This is surely not an isolated occurrence and is highly likely to be the case in most national institutions. While numerous explanations are given for this, ranging from the boring 'lack of merit' to 'no one is applying', the end outcome is predictably the same.

This pattern of non-representation of SC/ST also resonates in large international NGOs such as Amnesty India, which I recently worked in and resigned from.Amnesty, as with the IIM's, has an astonishing preponderance of people from dominant caste groups particularly at senior management levels, ranging anywhere between 97 – 99%, in spite of their stated goal being 'equality and diversity'!

The incarceration of leftists in Indonesia under the army-dominated Suharto regime from 1965 to the late 1990s led to advocacy campaigns on their behalf by Amnesty International and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Campaigns such as these included the involvement of members writing letters to political prisoners and gave rise in some instances to long-term epistolary friendships between some prisoners and their international pen pals. Friendships, such as the one between English writer Patricia Cleveland-Peck and a former schoolteacher serving a 15-year sentence, Pudji Aswati, reveal how letter-writing fostered human rights activism, and led to the establishment of a long-term fundraising scheme-the Pudji Fund to support former political prisoners in many parts of the world. The deep emotional bonds developed between correspondents over several years led to the formation of strong networks of activism spanning several countries.

The experience of war and violence have often resulted in various cascade of negative life events including loss of loved ones, displacement, lack of educational structure, and drastic changes in daily routine and community values. Unfortunately, very often times, war-affected children suffer psychological problems such as post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD), depression, anger, aggressiveness and long-term problems in coping with future stressful situations. Children that have been exposed to violence in multiple forms frequently develop traumatic stress reactions, therefore utilizing the concept of social, emotional and cognitive developmental patterns, the response of affected children to stress and violence related circumstances can be understood. Children with prolonged exposure to war or violence related events stand a higher risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which could result in violent behavior throughout their life time if proper intervention is not administered. Introduction:

Come sostiene il poeta ceco Vaclav Havel "il rispetto per i diritti umani è la condizione fondamentale e la sola, genuina garanzia della vera pace". Questo legame storicamente discontinuo verrà qui indagato a partire dal secondo dopoguerra soffermandosi sulla Dichiarazione universale dei diritti umani del 1948, soffermandosi poi su alcuni punti specifici: la ripresa dell'attivismo per i diritti umani nel contesto della guerra del Vietnam; la fondazione del tribunale Russell, e gli sviluppi degli anni Settanta riguardanti i dissidenti sovietici. A guisa di conclusione ci saranno considerazioni sugli effetti all'epoca non previsti degli accordi di Helsinki.

“La revolución de los derechos humanos” o “la última utopía” son algunos de los términos con los que la historiografía reciente se ha referido al boom de los derechos humanos que se produjo en los años setenta. Tal boom estuvo vinculado a la proliferación de movimientos y asociaciones especializados en denunciar la violación de derechos políticos fundamentales por parte de tanto regímenes dictatoriales como gobiernos democráticos, y se tradujo en un desarrollo creciente de los instrumentos jurídicos internacionales de protección de los derechos humanos, así como en una presencia cada vez más habitual de estos derechos en la retórica de la política internacional. Este boom se produjo en paralelo con el fin del franquismo en España, un régimen que, desde los albores de los movimientos por los derechos humanos en la Postguerra mundial, había sido denunciado por su violación sistemática de tales derechos. Esta comunicación propone explorar las conexiones entre el boom de los derechos humanos, una de las formas de sociabilización internacional más características de los años setenta, y el fin de la dictadura en España a través de un estudio de caso concreto: el de Amnistía Internacional.