Thread by @ichbinilya

I just spoke with a senior employee from Amnesty International.

Their sum-up: “It’s a dark moment for the movement, there’s no other way to put it.”

Also: "We threw a party the Russian state was eager to attend for its own political purposes.”

More in this (long) thread 👇

If you’re just joining us, at issue is this report just issued by @amnesty that criticizes the Ukrainian military for basing themselves in civilian areas. It’s been met with a firestorm of criticism from Ukrainians and specialists in the law of war.

amnesty.org/en/latest/news…

Amnesty's Ukrainian chapter has disavowed the report, saying they did everything they could to prevent its publication. Their head, @OPokalchuk, has just resigned. The Ukrainian gov't has also witheringly criticized the report — here's a good summary. theguardian.com/world/2022/aug…

So what does this look like on the inside?

“People are upset,” said the employee I spoke with.

“There are lots of people within the movement who are deeply frustrated with the report — who don’t think it was constructive for human rights in Ukraine or the movement.”

First, from this employee, a partial defense: A lot of the criticism is “clearly in bad faith,” they say.

It might be a persuasive argument that Ukraine, a country defending itself against brutal aggression, shouldn't be criticized — but not for a human rights organization.

“It’s not the mandate of a human rights org to self-censor,” they said. “It would be a disservice to those Ukrainians who shared their stories with us — who were asking the Ukrainian military to move away from their homes. What would we say to them if we censored our findings?”

Also, the senior @amensty employee points out, “the Ukrainian government had the opportunity to challenge the facts, or to say the facts are correct but are not a violation. They didn’t do that either [prior to the report’s publication]."

After offering this partial defense, the employee told me what they thought was most troubling about the report.

First was its vagueness: “This stuff is technical and international law is hard, but it’s our responsibility to do this well,” they said.

“[In the report] we don’t accuse Ukraine of committing war crimes, [which are] a specific subset of crimes against international humanitarian law that are criminally actionable."

"We also don’t, nor could we, accuse the Ukrainian military of using human shields — this is a specific category in international human rights law that has a high evidentiary threshold.”

“That requires intentionality. We don’t make that claim.”

But, they said, “We were not forceful [in the report] of teasing out these distinctions or being clear in what we were saying.”

Most of all, the employee said, the problem was messaging and framing.

“How we share information matters — and this was deeply problematic, the way we went about it.”

They specifically mentioned this tweet by Amnesty Sec Gen @AgnesCallamard as “incredibly inflammatory, not constructive in the least. It's helped cause a number of folks within the movement to really lose confidence in her leadership in this crisis.”

https://twitter.com/AgnesCallamard/status/1555234095982149632?s=20&t=mgscWajl5cmZf49qn2W96A

More broadly, this employee said, when releasing this report, Amnesty did not take the opportunity to highlight all the reporting they had done about Russia, as a way of framing the extent of the alleged Ukrainian violations in a proper context.

“Something that’s been missed — our office has been shuttered in Russia. We were one of the last international NGOs operating there. Our office was closed on account of our public facing comments and documents about Russia’s invasion."

"We termed the invasion a crime of aggression, and our policy is to call for legal accountability for Russian officials. So this idea that we've been squeamish about calling out Russia is ridiculous.”

“But to issue this report separately…” they trailed off. “It tries to do it [set the context], but it feels like it’s waving…”

Finally, the report as fodder for Russian propaganda.

“When you have a party,” they said, “You’re responsible for who gets in the door and whether you kick them out. Unfortunately, we threw a party the Russian state was very eager to attend for its own political purposes.”

“One way to do this is to have a plan to forcefully rebut attempts to take bits of truth and move them through the disinfo machine … We didn’t have a plan to do that organizationally, to pre-rebut what we knew the Russian media machine would do with our findings.”

They also said: “We work with colleagues at Amnesty Ukraine, we care about Ukraine, we’ve travelled there. We can all intellectually understand how difficult a moment this is for them. They’re a country at war, where people are literally fighting for their lives. It's painful.”

That’s it. I think it’s an interesting and not simplistic window into a big, complicated organization. (If anyone else at @Amnesty wants to talk, I’m here.)