These days Amnesty International seems to be coming in for a great deal of criticism. I believe all of this criticism is justified because Amnesty International is a disgraceful institution that violates fundamental principles of international human rights. It is racist, bigoted, driven by left-wing bias and blind to its own horrible behavior.
I am not a new convert to this anti-Amnesty International position. When Amnesty was opening an office in San Francisco in 1972, roughly 10 years after the organization began, I was asked for funding. I took a very strong position against the behavior of the organization up to that point.
In the first decade AI was designed so that people in many countries wrote letters and put pressure on a single other country to release prisoners for issues that related to AI's values. It was clear to me that the country under attack was always excluded from the campaigns because the people in that country did not have the same political values that AI had in that instance.
The example I gave at the time was that many criminal labor leaders in prison in the United States were being pressured for release by Amnesty in other countries because they did not agree with the American views of labor. Labor in the United States was rife with criminal activity that foreigners didn't believe was true. That is why Americans were not allowed to be aware of the campaign going on against American prisons and policies that put these criminal labor leaders in prison.
It was clear to me at the time that there is no international standard and there never will be an international standard of what a political prisoner is. There can't be.
Because Amnesty International was founded and operated on a fallacious premise it was obvious to me that the future of AI would be negative.
As time went on I encountered two other serious drawbacks to confirm my view. A very close friend in California who founded the prison reform movements herself was not treated with respect by visiting AI personnel when they were exploring California prison issues. The final report of the AI prison study in California was completely wrong, Marxist line opinions with no facts whatsoever. She was furious.
Another time I became close friends witha member of the international board and stayed at his house for a few days. As I pursued more issues with him on this subject I began to detect his discomfort with AI's anti-Jewish anti-Israel policies. He recognized AI was becoming increasingly a Jew hate organization in the early 1990s. He soon resigned from the international board after futile protests.
Amnesty international is a disgraceful organization supported by preposterous left-wing ideas. It will survive a long time as a disgusting disrupting harmful force like many other NGOs on the international scene.