If Amnesty denies that Navalny is a prisoner of conscience, it is Putin’s pawn
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The latest victim of cancel culture is, of all people, Alexei Navalny. Having survived Novichok poisoning and now facing hard labour in a penal colony, the Russian opposition leader has grown the thickest of skins. Even so, the decision by Amnesty International to strip him of their coveted “prisoner of conscience” status must have stung. After a smear campaign on social media organised by the Kremlin’s propaganda broadcaster RT, Amnesty’s spokesman Alexander Artemev told the BBC: “We had too many requests. We couldn’t ignore them.”
Why not? That is the question that an organisation supposedly dedicated to defending the rights of political prisoners should have asked itself before taking this disastrous step. Even by its own supposedly rigorous criteria, Navalny qualifies as a prisoner of conscience. Such prisoners must not have used or advocated violence. To cite (as Amnesty does) the example of Nelson Mandela, who was denied that status in the 1960s because of his support for the “armed struggle” against apartheid, is a red herring. Does Amnesty seriously justify its attitude in those days to Mandela, the man who brought about South Africa’s peaceful transition to majority rule, today? Surely not, but nobody should judge the charity too harshly because so much has changed in half a century.
By the same token, it is absurd to judge Navalny now on the basis of videos he made more than a decade ago, when he was involved in nationalist politics. It’s true that his language about Muslim immigrants from Central Asia at the time could be fairly defined as xenophobic or bigoted; he has since expressed regret for views that he no longer holds. But Navalny has never advocated violence, even though he, his supporters and other opposition activists have been victims of terrible brutality and even murder at the hands of the Russian state.
Yet after Amnesty’s decision to revoke his status, the head of RT, Margarita Simonyan, crowed that her outfit had demonstrated that Navalny was “a Nazi”. Quite rightly, Putin and his propagandists see this climb-down by one of the best-known Western advocates of human rights as a major coup. It is hard to believe in the naïveté of an organisation that has been dealing with dictatorships and defending dissidents since its inception. The sole raison d’être of Amnesty is to speak out on behalf of those who suffer for their beliefs — people like Navalny. As Edward Lucas points out in The Times today (behind a paywall), liberal journalists like Yevgenia Albats or Masha Gessen or Left-wing dissidents like Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova would never have endorsed Navalny if he were xenophobic, let alone a Nazi. Amnesty knows all this. One is forced to the conclusion that the organisation is running scared.
But who is Amnesty scared of? Not the Kremlin, surely. Even if Putin himself were to denounce Amnesty — which so far he has not done — that ought to be a badge of honour for a group that was never intimidated by the Russian President’s former colleagues in the KGB in Soviet times. Even if it were obliged to close its Moscow office and leave — a threat that as far as we know has not been made by the Russian authorities — it would not justify betraying Navalny and the thousands of protesters who were arrested, beaten up or imprisoned at demonstrations on his behalf.
Alas, one is forced to the conclusion that the real problem with Amnesty is the cancel culture itself. The practice of digging up online material posted many years ago by a targeted person, then editing it for social media to blacken their names, has been dubbed “offence archaeology”. It has cost people their jobs, their reputations or, in Navalny’s case, his status as a prisoner of conscience. In a few short years, cancel culture has acquired unique power — the power to have institutions renamed, statues removed and history rewritten. Now sinister and authoritarian regimes have found ways of exploiting this power to their own advantage. By allowing itself to be beholden to cancel culture, Amnesty has turned itself into Putin’s pawn.
Here in Britain, a country which was foremost in pleading the cause of dissidents in the Cold War, we cannot be indifferent to this travesty of the purposes for which Amnesty was founded here in 1961 and given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. Those who give money or other forms of support should make their displeasure known to the organisation. Baroness Stowell, chair of the Charity Commission, should summon in Amnesty’s senior management and remind them of their obligations under the law. She recently warned charities against “getting drawn into the culture wars”. For Amnesty, which first popularised the phrase “prisoner of conscience”, to deny that status to Russia’s leading prisoner of conscience is a disgrace. Its leadership may not share Navalny’s politics; they may detest his caustic yet highly effective brand of satire; they can distance their outfit from his opinions if they wish. But to deny that he is a prisoner of conscience, at the behest of an online mob orchestrated by RT, is not only damaging to Navalny. It is catastrophic for Amnesty.
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