British Helsinki Human Rights Group - Most Controversial Aspects

Most Controversial Aspects

The media connections of some of BHHRG members (especially John Laughland, a self-avowed conspiracy theorist and passionate advocate of "national sovereignty") has enabled it to propagate its views through a number of major newspapers in Britain and the US. Yet it did not really become famous until publicly denouncing what were widely perceived as democratic movements against authoritarian former Communist rulers.

Among actions critics of the BHHRG find ill-advised:

• The BHHRG based part of a Latvia report on an interview with Alfreds Rubiks, the Communist who led the "National Salvation Committee" which would have co-ordinated repression had the coup against Gorbachev not failed in 1991.

• In March 1997, BHHRG member Anthony Daniels wrote an article for the Sunday Telegraph: "The Media Back the Communists as Usual", in which he claimed that British journalists Miranda Vickers and James Pettifer, were "supporters of the former Stalinist regime of the late Enver Hoxha", the former communist dictator of Albania. They sued the paper for libel and settled out of court, with the Telegraph paying £10,000 to each and printing an apology.

• Another leading member, Christine Stone, has also written approvingly of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.

Other statements by the BHHRG include:

• denouncing as a "coup d'état" staged by his former protégés the November 2003 "Rose Revolution" in Georgia which deposed president Eduard Shevardnadze (this is cited by them as an example of how the Western powers use and then dispose of their agents in the so-called Euro-Atlantic space).
• claiming that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia should not be prosecuting Slobodan Milošević for his alleged crimes because they find fault with its procedures and
• that NATO should be prosecuted instead for bombing Yugoslavia on behalf of Kosovo Albanian separatists.
• proving that elections in Belarus "met democratic standards", unlike the OSCE that could not back up its contrary claim, because it did not – in fact – observe the elections.
• that Latvia was not occupied by the Soviet Union but was "incorporated" into the USSR,
• that the Roma people of the Czech Republic do not suffer racism as generally reported,
• that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian authorities acted correctly in the Beslan hostage crisis.
• that concern for the massacres in the Sudan was driven by a lust for oil, and
• that the second round of the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election was "generally representative of genuine popular will" and not falsified by the authorities, so that the December rerun election was illegitimate.

John Laughland (who said that reports of mass graves in Iraq were exaggerated for political purposes) characterised some supporters of Ukraine's Viktor Yushchenko as "neo-Nazis" and many of those backing him on the streets as "druggy skinheads from Lvov" whereas principal elements of the Jewish community supported Yushchenko.

These last claims prompted the publication of well-documented articles "exposing" the BHHRG's exploits. The British weekly The Economist published "Yanukovich's friends: A human-rights group that defends dictators". (Without a byline about who wrote the story). The daily Guardian published "PR man to Europe's nastiest regimes", written by David Aaronovitch, to which John Laughland, the subject of the article, objected, saying that it was "almost identical to" an article on a web site carrying "virulently antisemitic articles about the Jewish proclivity for rape, and about how the gas chambers at Auschwitz could not have existed". The controversy attracted many comments on the internet. The BHHRG's advocates reply by quoting Aleksandr Tsinker, "Head of the Observer Mission from the Institute for East European and CIS Nations" — an organization publicly known for nothing else — as saying that the Ukrainian election "was a free expression of the voters' will".

Some of the BHHRG's statements have been favorably quoted by the isolationist right in the US, by opponents of US foreign policy, as well as governments regarded by Western authorities as authoritarian and criminal, such as that of Belarus.

Its critics have accused the BHHRG of taking a predetermined ideological line while observing elections. A British Foreign Office official quoted by Jeremy Druker said of them:

"It was very clear that they had their own agenda. They also monitored the elections in Georgia in 1995, and it would appear Almond and his people had made up their minds about the election report even before the election had taken place. People at the time were not happy with the way that they monitored the election… they didn't set out in an impartial spirit."

The BHHRG is almost always more critical of social-democratic than nationalist rulers. The Economist characterises the BHHRG's opinion as "an intense dislike of liberal internationalism." Tom Palmer of the libertarian Cato Institute summarizes their position as being that

the mass movements to unseat are nothing but stooges for the west, out to integrate those brave little authoritarian-socialist regimes into the 'New World Order,' privatize their state industries, and strip them of their assets.

The BHHRG's commentaries indeed allege that Western governments and international organisations are seeking to implement a "New World Order" in central and eastern Europe. Its supporters claim that the organisation exposes matters which Western governments and biased international organisations such as the UN and the OSCE had rather remained unknown.

For instance, it claims it denounced human rights abuses committed in Georgia while these were ignored by the OSCE and the Council of Europe. Mark Almond, who has written on Balkan matters, has criticised the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia on behalf of Albanian separatists in Kosovo as a "violation of international law" which resulted in "cultural genocide" against Serbs. As self-proclaimed monitors of Human Rights in the countries concerned, they accuse other, intergovernmental organisations of being undemocratic, unelected, unaccountable, non-transparent meddlers in their internal affairs.

The OSCE has criticized the BHHRG for letting its journalists pose as impartial election monitors while publishing partisan polemics in newspapers, and for relying on short-term observer missions with a handful of people, an approach the OSCE abandoned as open to manipulation in 1996. (The OSCE now uses large-scale long-term missions of four to six weeks with dozens of experts and hundreds of observers.) The BHHRG dismisses the OSCE's position as an attempt to stifle legitimate criticism and independent reporting.