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When a government attacks Amnesty International, you can pretty much guarantee that government has been up to no good.
Authorities have likely been committing serious human rights abuses. Amnesty has been dutifully reporting on them. Now, the government is trying to shoot the messenger. It’s both a confession of guilt and high praise for the organization’s work.
We saw an example of this yesterday, when the Russian government declared Amnesty International an “undesirable organization.”
Stemming from a draconian 2015 law, the designation “undesirable” has multiple impacts. It doesn’t just criminalize the organization’s activities and prohibit it from working openly on Russian territory. That’s essentially been the case for all human rights groups for years anyway.
The bigger issue is it sets out fines and imprisonment for Russian citizens and groups for “involvement” in the activities of “undesirable” organizations. Of course, the law doesn’t exactly specify what “involvement” means. Authorities can bend it to whatever purposes they want.
So, yesterday’s declaration won’t affect Amnesty International’s work very much at all. Indeed, in its reaction to Russia’s announcement, the group rightly pledged to, “redouble [its] efforts to expose Russia’s egregious human rights violations both at home and abroad.”
But it could impact folks in Russia.
As Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard stated: “This decision is part of the Russian government’s broader effort to silence dissent and isolate civil society.”
The announcement gives authorities yet another legal arrow in the enormous quiver they carry when hunting down critics, journalists, human rights defenders, and others.
Under the 2015 law, they’ve been prosecuting people for as little as reposting links to articles related to “undesirable” organizations.
Some 225 groups have already been declared “undesirable.” In practice, authorities can twist it to target many more.
Repression inside Russia has been increasing for years. Criticism of the government – and of Russia’s atrocity-ridden invasion of Ukraine in particular – are brutally punished.
This is an authoritarian system. It accepts no dissent. It allows no questions. And as Russian human rights champion and co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize Oleg Orlov put it last year: “The state has become all-pervasive.”
With or without yesterday’s announcement, it’s long been clear that, for Russian authorities, the very concept of human rights has become “undesirable.”
