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Diplomacy of Conscience: Amnesty International and Changing Human Rights Norms. By Ann Marie Clark. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. 183p. $39.50 cloth, $16.95 paper.
The claim is often made by political activists that the international human rights system is dependent upon nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Ann Marie Clark documents this claim with respect to Amnesty International's achievements. The core of the book is a set of three case studies: the development of the Convention against Torture; the creation of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, along with the unfinished story of attempts to produce a convention against disappearances; and the creation of the Special Rapporteur on Summary or Arbitrary Executions, followed by the drafting of a UN "Manual" on prevention and investigation of extrajudicial executions. These case studies are not simply presented as empirical accounts of the diplomatic history. They are structured by portraying each as a four-stage political process, in which Amnesty International collated information on the nature of human rights abuses, built consensus around the principle that the pattern of behavior was morally unacceptable, constructed international norms to express this principle as standards of behavior, and then sought to have application of the norms monitored at both the domestic and the international level.
It is an extraordinary comment on the state of political science that it has taken 40 years since their foundation for the first academic book on Amnesty International to be written. The reason is that its activities do not fit into the orthodox study of either comparative government or international relations. Merely...