Why Won’t Amnesty International Call Alexey Navalny a Prisoner of Conscience?

On Tuesday, Russian media reported that Amnesty International will no longer consider the jailed Russian politician Alexey Navalny a prisoner of conscience. “Western Human-Rights Activists Have Changed Their View of the Blogger” one headline read. “Amnesty International Has Revoked Its Decision to Consider Navalny a Prisoner of Conscience,” another said. A fact check might rate these headlines “somewhat true.” Similar headlines in the Western media followed. This turn of events appears to be about a pressure campaign on Amnesty that got the organization trapped in its own scruples.

Navalny was arrested last month at a Moscow airport, immediately upon his return from a five-month stay in Germany, where he had been recuperating from an attempted assassination by nerve-agent poisoning. Navalny has been sentenced to two and a half years in a prison colony, for ostensibly violating the terms of his parole by travelling to Germany. (He was in a coma when he travelled.) The original case for which Navalny was on parole has been set aside by the European Court of Human Rights, which deemed the case politically motivated. Decisions from the E.C.H.R.—technically, the highest appellate court for Russians—are nominally binding for Russia, but the country has ignored the ruling. “Navalny is in prison having committed no crime, purely as a means of trying to stop him from speaking out,” Denis Krivosheev, the deputy director of Amnesty’s Europe and Central Asia office, told me over the phone, from London. “And that is what a prisoner of conscience is.”

Amnesty International called Navalny a prisoner of conscience as soon as he was arrested last month. Krivosheev told me that, almost immediately, chapters of the organization around the world received identical e-mails, asking two questions: Was Amnesty aware of xenophobic statements that Navalny had made in the past, and, if it was willing to consider Navalny a prisoner of conscience, why hadn’t it included a number of other people on its list? Krivosheev told me that this mode of e-mail inquiry was unusual. “Normally, if you want to get something from Amnesty International, you’d write once, to a local chapter, and they’d refer you to the international secretariat,” he said. But this was different, he noted. “This was someone who wanted to get someone to say something that could be used. The nature of the e-mail wasn’t friendly.” It was a gotcha e-mail.

Amnesty International held a series of internal discussions, reviewed Navalny’s public record, and concluded that statements he had made more than a decade ago reached “the threshold of advocacy of hatred.” (I recently wrote about Navalny’s record and his political evolution in detail.) The organization also found that, although Navalny has not retracted his past statements, he has not made any xenophobic remarks in years, and that the Russian government is persecuting him solely for his opposition to Vladimir Putin’s regime. At the end of the discussions, Amnesty decided to continue actively campaigning for Navalny’s release—collecting, for example, more than two hundred thousand signatures on a letter that was delivered to the Russian government last week—but to refrain from referring to him as a prisoner of conscience. This policy was almost certainly too nuanced to convey publicly, but it wasn’t meant for public consumption: it was internal guidance. But it leaked.

On Monday, Aaron Maté, a Canadian-American journalist, tweeted a screenshot of an e-mail summarizing the Amnesty decision. Maté is affiliated with the Grayzone, a Web site that bills itself as a vehicle for “investigative journalism and analysis on politics and empire.” Its most recent investigation claims that the BBC, Reuters, and Bellingcat—the investigative-journalism organization that identified Navalny’s would-be killers—“participated in covert UK Foreign Office-funded programs to ‘weaken Russia.’ ” The screenshotted e-mail appears to have been written by someone at Amnesty, but Maté redacted the name; as he explained to me, in a Twitter exchange, he was trying to protect the letter writer from the ire of Navalny’s supporters. More than a hundred Russian media outlets reported on Amnesty’s decision. This was exactly the gotcha moment that the person or people who had been e-mailing Amnesty appeared to have been seeking. (I asked Maté how he came to be corresponding with someone at Amnesty about this, and he told me, in an e-mail, that he had been tipped off to the discussion by an Amnesty supporter.)

“When we recognize someone as a prisoner of conscience, there is the erroneous impression that this is a judgment on someone’s values,” Krivosheev said. “It’s not. It’s a judgment on what the authorities did to him.” The misperception is built into the structures and culture of international aid to victims of political persecution. Decisions of supranational organizations such as the E.C.H.R. and the International Criminal Court, or sanctions imposed by countries individually or collectively, are rarely effective against political persecution: they are slow to take effect and are usually too weak to change a regime’s behavior. Extreme sanctions, conversely, can isolate countries, often making life more difficult for opponents of regimes. In the absence of effective systemic response, human-rights organizations such as Amnesty, pen International, and others focus on individual cases. They work by mobilizing international public opinion. Their focus is, indeed, the victim rather than the regime, and this approach makes it easy to undermine their efforts by smearing the victim.

The Russian regime has used both its vast media infrastructure and its judicial system to vilify its opponents. An army of Kremlin trolls appears to be working to keep Navalny’s old xenophobic statements in circulation, and on occasion it seems to have manufactured new ones (I am not repeating the fake here). Perhaps the most egregious example of smearing a political opponent is the case of the memory activist Yuri Dmitriev, who has been convicted of sexually abusing his adopted daughter. There is little doubt that the persecution of Dmitriev is political, but the charge is so heinous that I, for one, have refrained from writing about the case. Amnesty hasn’t named Dmitriev a prisoner of conscience, either. As the Kremlin continues to crack down on the opposition, I would expect many more opposition activists to be revealed to be indefensible, as though only morally impeccable people had the right to be free of political persecution.

Masha Gessen, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of eleven books, including “Surviving Autocracy” and “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017.