Paul Kennedy

You may remember this tale from the New Testament (St. John's Gospel, Chapter 8): Christ is approached by the Pharisees and asked to make a judgment upon a woman caught in adultery (the man concerned in that affair does not appear); if guilty, the penalty for her is death by stoning.

Christ does not look up. Instead, he writes in the sand, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." The crowd fades away, embarrassed, and Christ tells the woman to go and live a new life.

I know, it's an awfully dramatic and a bit hackneyed way to begin a piece, but I could not help thinking about this story recently when I was looking at two separate but related news items. The first was about the death of a late 20th-century hero. The second concerned an official annual report that, to say the least, is a little hypocritical.

The hero was a British lawyer named Peter Benenson, who died at 83 in February after a long illness. With a Russian-Jewish background and a massive social conscience, he was someone who spent his entire life campaigning on behalf of political prisoners, whether in Franco's Spain, South Africa, post-1956 Hungary or the Soviet Union.

Even as a young man, he had participated in the rescue of Jewish children from Nazi Germany. But in November 1960, Benenson began to change our world, after he read a newspaper report about two Portuguese students who had been jailed for drinking a toast to liberty while dining in a Lisbon restaurant. This outrage drove him to begin a campaign that attracted the attention of others, and blossomed into the creation of the now-famous organization Amnesty International.

Incarcerating people without due trial is totally against a proud tradition that runs from the New Testament and the Magna Carta to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and yet we all know--as did Benenson then--that nasty regimes do it all the time.

They also beat up their opponents, destroy their homes and drive them off their lands. So do local drug lords, mafias and power-mongers. They need to be opposed, all the time, and it is fair to record that over the past 60 years international society has made some remarkable institutional steps (the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, for example) to advance the 1948 agenda.

But one wonders whether any of those later measures would have got anywhere without the campaigns of Amnesty International and other gadfly human-rights organizations. Today Amnesty International has almost 2 million members and a worldwide reporting system, much to the embarrassment of governments across five continents. Being located in London has not prevented it from vigorous criticisms of British policies in Northern Ireland and in regard to antiterrorist laws. It well-earned the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the same week that Benenson died, the U.S. State Department issued its annual report of violations of human rights across the globe. It covers 196 countries and runs to more than 1,000 pages. As one can imagine, it makes for depressing reading.

The report shows how far the world has to go to meet the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in spite of the institutional advances I mentioned above, and in spite of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the other organizations. The gross violations of rights in Sudan get large attention, but the U.S. State Department is also willing to criticize countries with which it wishes, for strategic or commercial reasons, to maintain good relations: China, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Russia, to cite a few examples.

While applauding such frankness, the cynical observer will note one significant omission. There is nothing about the United States' own record in 2003-04. Presumably the authors in the subdepartment that assembles this report would get fired by an irate White House if they said anything about American transgressions.

Thus, one has to go to a different source for this side of the story, and guess which source it is? Predictably, it is the Amnesty International Report 2004, covering cases in 2003. There is included a very significant section concerning the United States of America--a section that should make U.S. citizens very uncomfortable, or, perhaps, as outraged as Benenson was 45 years ago.

Let us start with what one might call the cultural oddities of the globe's most powerful nation in regard to life and death, and with its claim to exceptional treatment in international law.

The United States is now one of the very few countries in the civilized world that still carries out the death penalty (countries like Yemen and Saudi Arabia also do, but who is comfortable with that comparison?) The proud state of Texas performed 24 executions in 2003 alone. Flouting international standards, some of those executed that year were under 18 at the time their crime was committed.

Dozens and dozens being held on death row are foreigners who are being denied consular access, which is a violation of the Vienna Convention. There is a grim section in the Amnesty International report about "ill-treatment and excessive use of force by law enforcement officials," especially in Southern prisons (such as in Mississippi, Florida and Texas) that makes one shudder.

While ignoring these abuses, the U.S. government was cutting military aid to 35 poorer countries that had declined to recognize Americans' immunity to being brought before the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes. Given the brutal state of so many U.S. prisons, one might have thought that a U.S. serviceman accused of crimes against humanity might have preferred to be tried in an international court!

Behind all this lurks the mounting horror and embarrassment at the story of the enforced detentions and mistreatments in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (in the latter facility, children as young as 13 were among those being held, which makes one rub one's eyes). When the International Committee of the Red Cross, which strives scrupulously to be neutral and nonpolitical as it visits the world's prisoners, took the unusual step of criticizing what was going on at Guantanamo, you knew the abuses had to be serious.

And this is Amnesty International's report for 2003. Lord knows what it will have about the tortures in Abu Ghraib prison in its next annual statement. That, too, surely will make for uncomfortable reading.

Before American conservatives rush forward with the argument that urinating on prisoners is not as bad as Saddam Hussein's mass graves, and before the State Department protests that it is only required to detail foreign abuses, let us move to the political point:

It seems to me counterproductive and stupid--in fact, incredibly stupid--for the United States to lecture the rest of the world on what they are doing wrong and yet remain evasive and reluctant about its own defects. Like it or not (and the White House usually likes it), the United States' special power position means that all the world's media have a special focus, almost a fascination, with how Washington handles its policies. This in turn puts an additional obligation upon the United States to do things right, not just part of the time, but all of the time. As the Victorian Prime Minister William Gladstone was fond of saying, the greatest powers have the greatest responsibilities.

So it is not just because the abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were disgusting that we should be worried. It is also because all of those countries that have a dubious or appalling track record on human rights regard the State Department's annual criticism as condescending and hypocritical. And even if those regimes do nastier things to their prisoners than that which takes place in Southern prisons, are they totally wrong in their reply? I have a fancy what Benenson's comment would be.

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