Human Rights and Amnesty International

Abstract

This is a descriptive, analytical treatment of international human-rights nongovernmental organizations. A typology of human-rights groups is developed. Threats to human and political rights are analyzed. Following a brief description of Amnesty International as a new type of noneconomic interest group in world politics, the article focuses explicitly on three practical political— yet, also, social—scientific—problems: (1) the legitimacy of human-rights organizations; (2) the selection of targets and of tactics, including prepolitical resource-generating tactics; and, especially, (3) the problems entailed in evaluating the impact, if any, of interest group activities. The last, which questions the efficiency of translation of activity into access and then influence, opens up another discrete question: whether and how the group evaluates its own goals, structure and tactics. This evaluation suggests that Amnesty International has meas urable impact on the defense of human and political rights.

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