Blaming the victim: has Amnesty gone soft on Putin?

It was a black day for a onceunimpeachable human rights organisation, said Mychailo Wynnyckyj in the Kyiv Post. Amnesty International has a long and illustrious record of standing up for the victims and the oppressed. Yet on 4 August, it published a report on Russia’s war in Ukraine which has seriously tarnished its good name.

The report is essentially an indictment of Ukrainian forces: it accuses them of putting “civilians at risk” by setting up bases in cities, of turning schools and hospitals into military targets by operating weapons systems from them. “Such tactics,” it said, “violate international humanitarian law.”

This provoked a furious backlash. Oksana Pokalchuk, the head of Amnesty’s Ukrainian team, quit in protest, saying the report had become “a tool of Russian propaganda”. President Zelensky accused Amnesty of “shift[ing] responsibility from aggressor to victim”. How could Amnesty end up blaming the victim, Ukrainians must be wondering, when Russia is so clearly the guilty party. How could it have been so one-sided?

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A ‘simple’ explanation

The explanation is simple, said Paul Taylor on Politico (Brussels). Amnesty has “relentlessly criticised Moscow’s war of aggression”, documenting assaults on civilian areas, “gathering evidence of war crimes”, denouncing Russia for blocking humanitarian assistance. But any reputable human rights group must apply “consistent standards” to all parties in a conflict; and this report – the product of weeks of research – does just that.

Amnesty hasn’t been accused of any “specific errors or distortions” in its dossier, said Ewa Siedlecka in Polityka (Warsaw), and it stood by its findings, even while acknowledging the “distress and anger” they have caused. Rightly so. Human rights groups don’t exist to publish “war propaganda”; their purpose is to establish and tell the truth – however “uncomfortable” that may be.

‘Blind’ to realities of war

Maybe so, said Yulia Latynina in Novaya Gazeta Europe (Riga), but this report is almost wilfully blind to the realities of war. Ukrainian forces are operating in towns and cities not out of disregard for civilian lives, but because those are the areas under attack. And far from “hiding behind civilians”, as Amnesty seems to suggest, Ukraine’s military has gone to great lengths to evacuate civilians from conflict zones.

This report, woefully “short of context and explanation”, does Amnesty a disservice, said Clara Ferreira Marques on Bloomberg (New York). It’s a clear “propaganda win” for Putin, but a disastrous own goal for the organisation, whose work is vital to upholding human rights and promoting justice. “All the more reason to do it right.”