Criticism
Criticism of Amnesty International includes claims of excessive pay for management, underprotection of overseas staff, associating with organisations with a dubious record on human rights protection, selection bias, ideological/foreign policy bias against either non-Western countries or Western-supported countries, criticism of Amnesty's policies relating to abortion, assertion that "defensive jihad" is not antithetical to human rights, and organisational continuity. Governments who have criticised Amnesty include those of Canada, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Russia and the United States, for what they assert is one-sided reporting or a failure to treat threats to security as a mitigating factor. The actions of these governments—and of other governments critical of Amnesty International—have been the subject of human rights concerns voiced by Amnesty. As of February 2011, Amnesty is engaged in a dispute with the British union Unite over Amnesty allegedly attempting to de-recognize some of its foreign-based workers' rights.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
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—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)