Human Rights: Amnesty International and the United Nations

The units of analysis of this comparative article are Amnesty International (AI) and the United Nations (UN). The purpose of comparison is to analyse the complementarity of IGOs and NGOs in the issue-area of human rights on the three dimensions of norm-generation, monitoring, and enforcement. The UN is a general-purpose IGO; AI is a single-purpose NGO. The international moral code is embodied in the UN Charter. Human rights is an outgrowth of Western liberalism; the United Nations is a meeting ground for all the world's civilizations. Human rights puts the welfare of individuals first; the UN puts the interests of member-states first. AI is of, by, and for individuals; the United Nations is of, by, and for governments. Arising from these differences, I argue that the United Nations as the world's preeminent IGO and Amnesty International as the world's most prominent human rights NGO play complementary roles. Specifically, the UN is more authoritative in a standard-setting and norm-generating role, but weak in monitoring and enforcement of state behaviour. Amnesty International, because of Western origins, narrowness of interest, and representational and accountability deficiencies, is not able to function as an authoritative expositor of universal human rights values. But its freedom from governments enables it to be an effective watchdog against human rights violations. The intergovernmental nature of the UN makes it an authoritative archive of formal reports from memberstates on human rights progress in their countries; the nongovernmental nature of Amnesty International gives greater objectivity to its reports on state practices in human rights. The article also challenges us to theorize NGOs: their roles, the implications for the state-based realist edifice of International Relations scholarship, and the inviolability of sovereign territory behind which human rights can be abused with impunity.