A superb piece by Nick Cohen on the wrong turn taken by Amnesty International:

To Khan [the general secretary of AI], the human-rights agenda is passe and maybe an example of cultural imperialism. 'Amnesty has a middle-class, Western, complacent, white image in many parts of the world,' she told the Financial Times magazine. The stereotype would be rectified by expanding the remit and campaigning against poverty. 'More children die of lack of food or water than [are] killed by torture and the death penalty,' explained a supporter.

This is true, but beside the point. Amnesty is crowding in to a crowded field. All the charities in the Make Poverty History alliance campaign manfully for access to clean water and decent food; what they're not doing is standing up for human rights. Amnesty says it will continue to do so. I hope it will; the organisation isn't in crisis yet, but ever since Khan took over, I've had an uneasy feeling that it is losing universal principles and treating the abuse of rights by the United States as worse than similar or more grotesque abuses by others. That feeling transformed into a certainty last week when Amnesty described Guantanamo Bay as the 'gulag of our times'.

By all means, Amnesty and everyone else should loudly deplore America's failure to treat prisoners of war in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. But when they've finished, they should check the figures. If they exclude the millions who died of starvation, disease and exhaustion, they will find that 776,098 prisoners were murdered in summary executions in the gulag between 1930 and 1953. At Guantanamo Bay, no one has died of starvation, disease or exhaustion and no prisoners have been executed. Not one. If Amnesty's American obsession prevents it from seeing the worst crimes of the 20th century for what they are, how will it sound the alarm about the worst of the 21st?

A barely reported exchange last week showed why the arguments against Khan matter. Journalists in Johannesburg tackled James Morris, head of the United Nations World Food Programme, who had promised hundreds of thousands of tonnes of emergency supplies to Zimbabwe. Try as they might, they couldn't get him to condemn Mugabe. According to Morris, Zimbabwe was on the edge of famine because of drought and Aids, not because of the dictatorship's destruction of agriculture and suppression of dissent. The mistake the UN made with Saddam's Iraq was to be repeated. Food would go to the regime rather than the needy and the regime would be able to use it to reward friends and punish enemies.

In April, Zimbabwe was re-elected to the UN Human Rights Commission for the third year running by satirically minded African states, so Morris may have to play the diplomat. To anyone who doesn't, it is obvious that he and Khan are wrong. Zimbabwe is on the edge of starvation because it doesn't have freedom of expression, among other human rights. The great lesson of the 20th century was that tyrannical regimes - the British Empire, Mao's China, Stalin's Russia, Mengistu's Ethiopia - presided over enormous famines. Democracies didn't.

In other words, the choice between human and economic rights isn't either/or. It's both or neither.

I used to be a member of AI, and was proud to be so. I let my membership lapse when I realised that, far from championing human rights everywhere, AI had been taken over by Western self-haters and turned into a political campaigning organisation with a distinctly anti-Western (and specifically anti-American) agenda. I applaud Nick Cohen's sentiments, but fear that it's already too late to save the AI that was.