Amnesty’s Chile campaign excluded economic and social rights entirely

Evidence

Despite the new centrality to which Amnesty elevated the UDHR, this taking up of human rights was distinctly partial, and emphatically did not include social and economic rights. Its 1974 report on Chile made clear that it would exclude from consideration the approximately 200,000 workers ‘who lost their employment for political reasons, many of them apparently being reduced to starvation levels’. Not only the ‘non-political’ economic consequences of the coup, but even the use of starvation as a political weapon, was relegated outside the frame of human rights, giving credence to Klein’s account of human rights as ‘blinders’. … In striking contrast to the economic concerns that animated Allende’s government, and anticolonial human rights activism of the previous decade, poverty and economic inequality were not of concern in their own right. They entered the frame only insofar as they affected advocacy against torture, and the cultivation of sympathy for its victims. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 346

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages the debate on the ‘neoliberalization of human rights’ and the ethics-of-markets literature; connects to the reader’s Austerity/Neoliberalism track. — connects to: Amnesty’s Chile reports depoliticized the coup by refusing to examine its causes. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 345