Amnesty International’s neutralist human-rights model and LSF’s Cold War advocacy differed sharply.

Evidence

This moralised human rights discourse, expressed in the claim to be concerned with ‘man’ and ‘human realities’ rather than messianic, utopian ideologies, was shared by many human rights activists at the time. But LSF’s human rights campaign differed from the moral ‘anti-politics’ of human rights epitomised by Amnesty International. While the latter NGO shared both LSF’s antipathy to politics and its focus on civil and political rights, it attempted to avoid Cold War polarisation by focusing on the ‘suffering simply because they are suffering’, and adopting prisoners of conscience on either side of the Iron Curtain. LSF fiercely rejected such even-handedness; its leadership joined the Cold War fray, prosecuting an argument for the superiority of liberalism and campaigning against both neutralism and pacifism, which its introductory materials depicted as attempts to ‘disarm the democracies and prevent them from defending themselves’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 385

Categorization

• XREF: Contrast between even-handed moral anti-politics (Amnesty) and partisan advocacy prefigures current debates over neutrality in human-rights NGOs.