Amnesty International’s Position on Navalny Is Unconscionable By David Harsanyi
No matter what the organization says, Alexei Navalny is indeed a prisoner of conscience in Putin’s Russia.
A mnesty International has stripped jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny of his “prisoner of conscience” status after the organization was “bombarded” with complaints highlighting some of his unseemly rhetoric from the past.
Navalny was nearly murdered by a nerve-agent attack last year, almost surely perpetrated by the Putin regime. His life was saved only after he was airlifted to Germany. Determined to return to Russia, Navalny flew back in January, at the same time releasing an investigation into the opulent lifestyles of Putin and other corrupt Russian oligarchs. Navalny was promptly arrested for violating the terms of his parole on an earlier sentence (for a trumped-up embezzlement conviction) by not checking in with a parole officer — from his German hospital bed, where he spent weeks in a coma. Initially held in a Moscow prison, he was recently moved to what is reportedly a “penal colony.”
Almost immediately after Amnesty labeled Navalny “a prisoner of conscience,” a concerted email effort by Putin allies was directed at the organization, pointing out some of the xenophobic statements Navalny made over a decade ago. Kremlin minions were deployed across social-media platforms spreading Navalny’s remarks regarding Muslims and immigrants, as well as a number of fake ones that fooled certain media outlets.
In response, Amnesty International quickly removed the “prisoner of conscience” designation, explaining, “we are no longer going to use the phrase ‘prisoner of conscience’ in regards to [Navalny] insofar as our law and policy department, having reviewed Navalny’s remarks from the mid-2000s, came to the conclusion that they meet the level of ‘hate speech.’”
Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus then released a Zoom video of a call they made to Amnesty’s acting secretary general Julie Verhaar and two other directors, fooling them into admitting that labeling Navalny a prisoner of conscience had “done a lot of damage,” that Amnesty had undermined the opposition leader, and that the organization did not want to be seen as antagonistic to Putin. A number of commentators have pointed out that leaders who can be so easily tricked are unfit to run a major organization. But the directors of Amnesty International said all these things on their own volition. They aren’t just managerially unfit but morally unfit.
It is no secret that Navalny has long held ethno-nationalistic views, though in the last ten years he hasn’t said anything that could be considered “hate speech.” It’s simplistic to believe that anyone who opposes Putin is by default a champion of pluralistic Western-style democracy.
When it comes to Navalny’s imprisonment, however, his opinions are irrelevant. Amnesty International should be championing free expression and political freedoms, not scrutinizing past speech for thought crimes.
In 1961, British lawyer Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International, defined a “prisoner of conscience” as
any person who is physically restrained (by imprisonment or otherwise) from expressing (in any form of words or symbols) any opinion which he honestly holds and which does not advocate or condone personal violence. We also exclude those people who have conspired with a foreign government to overthrow their own.
Navalny easily meets Benenson’s standard, which does not preclude a person from being a prisoner of conscience simply because his opinions fail to align with contemporary leftist dogma or because he lacks a spotless rhetorical history.
Indeed, both Russian authoritarians and Chinese Communists have learned to effectively deploy progressive racial-grievance-speak to pressure once liberal, now leftist organizations such as Amnesty International to bend to their will. Increasingly, such organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have given up on free expression as the foundational neutral principle and prerequisite for political freedom.
While Amnesty International betrayed its founding values long ago, it also betrays its newly concocted ones. Looking at the list of prisoners of conscience, one finds numerous religious activists who peddle notions that in a truly liberal society would rightly be considered “hateful.” Amnesty International is also one of the biggest champions of Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations, which not only regularly use anti-Semitic “hate speech” but perpetrate ethnic violence, suppress open debate, and embrace theocratic rule.
Genuine liberals who supported the Russian band Pussy Riot when they ran afoul of Putin did not necessarily also support the band members’ puerile views or hackneyed punk art; they supported the idea that people should be able to peacefully challenge power without being incarcerated or prevented by authoritarian forces from speaking out. Even if Navalny were an unapologetic xenophobe today — something for which there is no evidence — he would still be a prisoner of conscience. And the cowardice of Amnesty International doesn’t change that fact.
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