It is a unique blessing of the free world that its people can express a wide variety of opinions and choose how to live peacefully without being persecuted by their own governments. These are examples of real, universal human rights that need to be defended and brought to the dark corners of the world. This is why we need human rights organizations that can recognize the difference between sporadic crime in the free world and regimen genocide where the press doesn’t exist to report it. This is the problem with much of the human rights movement today. Its leadership does not have the moral absoluteness to put into context the difference between self-correcting democracies and self-anointed dictatorships.

This is especially apparent in the foreword of Amnesty International’s 2005 report on human rights abuses. Secretary General Irene Khan relates to her readers a trip to Sudan, where the government has sponsored the genocide of hundreds of thousands of people. In the same breath, “Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times,” and the United States has become the leader in human rights abuses worldwide. Comparing Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of terrorists are fed and allowed to practice their faith, to the Soviet gulags, where millions of prisoners of conscience were forced into slave labor before being brutally murdered, is the kind of moral equivalence that fractures and makes ineffective the current human rights movement.

In this sense, our unique blessing becomes a faultline that needs filling. The free world needs to address its faults, which it does on a constant basis, while retaining solidarity against truly unjust governments. Maintaining a faux relativity when comparing ourselves to the malevolent dictator in Uzbekistan or Iran is what allows the real gulags to be erected in the first place.

Amnesty International’s problem is not a lack of goodwill, it is a lack of vision. There was a time when they helped the world see the evil for what the former Soviet Union was. That was up to fifteen years ago, and now, that vision has become compromised in politics and so-called “tolerance.” Here is the excerpt from AI’s About page:

AI is independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it support or oppose the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect. It is concerned solely with the impartial protection of human rights.

Impartiality is the problem. The human rights movement can never make headway if its leaders can no longer say that democracies are good and dictatorships are bad. That in the former, human rights abuses are an anomaly, and in the latter a rule. It is this same impartiality that allows the aforementioned Sudan to have a chair at the UN Commission on Human Rights alongside China and Zimbabwe.

Amnesty International, along with like-minded organizations, need to do some soul searching. Documentation and investigation of human rights abuses is a valuable contribution to the free world, but over time it has become a mere repetition of motions when it should be an energetic campaign against real tyranny. Likewise, this is not just a simple condemnation. It is a suggestion for progress, so that the cause of human rights can begin moving forward in the world where it needs to be going.