> Amnesty says its bank accounts have been frozen and it's been forced to lay off staff in the country, and suspend all its campaign and research work.
A good chunk of the reported charges by the organization revolve around access to funds and the use of the banking system.
It's probably no coincidence that the Indian government has been relentless in its attempts to force the country to abandon banknotes and move to electronic payments routed through the banking system.
Doing so gives the government the practical ability to bring organizations working against it to heel.
This is a pattern that will play out over an over around the world as governments force their countries to abandon physical cash.
Organizations?! individuals can now be ruined with a click! plus if you want to force buying you can always go to negative rates and people have little choice in it.
then we can get into all the privacy issues. the promises of privacy are always undone by some law, both those they let you know about and those you don't know about, and what is legal today may not be legal tomorrow.
I never understood the fascination with individuals wanting to go to a digital currency only world. the people just don't have enough oversight on their own governments to permit it.
> The third, was to broaden the definition of the “government servant” category to include “public servants” among the people who cannot receive foreign funds.
So, till now public servants were able to receive foreign funding?
> Greenpeace has been involved in shady work in many places in India, including religious conversion and paid protests in remote villages.
Source, please? This is an extraordinary claim.
> Foreign fund is NOT needed to raise political objections in a democratic system.
This article just shows how the government has forced a fairly well-regarded NGO to close down its efforts in the country. How could you possibly call that democratic? How are nonprofits supposed to operate in a country if they should only be funded from domestic sources?
The government has not done its due diligence on finding if the NGO(s) are involved in this practice. Instead, they ask the NGO(s) to prove that they are not involved. How does this even make sense?
> Instead, they ask the NGO(s) to prove that they are not involved.
WARNING: I'm applying western principles to India, which may not be correct.
To the best of my understanding, signing an affidavit affirming that you're not engaged in an activity does not come with a burden of proof, but it does come with the penalty of perjury.
Think of it like a warrant canary. If you haven't been served a warrant, you can state you haven't been served a warrant. If you have been served a warrant, you either have to lie, or say nothing at all.
Let's put your vague hand-waving under the lens. The list of countries with whom Amnesty International are "in trouble" on that page: DRC, PRC, Russia, Sri Lanka, USA (regarding Guantanamo Bay), Vatican (regarding a neutral stance on abortion), Israel, Syria, Iran.
>” Russian dissident Pavel Litvinov has said of AI's criticism of the US: "[B]y using hyperbole and muddling the difference between repressive regimes and the imperfections of democracy, Amnesty's spokesmen put its authority at risk. U.S. human rights violations seem almost trifling in comparison with those committed by Cuba, North Korea, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia”
That’s from a Russian dissident, i.e. someone suffering under a regime known for heavy handedness.
Me too ... but the problem is a perception that the _standard_ is the same. If the worst regimes can get away with framing the democratic systems of the US as equal to theirs it impedes progress and the effectiveness of criticism of those regimes. That doesn't mean we shouldn't find fault in the (many) issues with the US and other western democratic practices, but it does make it harder when we can just be dismissed as hypocrites.
They may well be doing their jobs, but it's important to acknowledge that India's accusation of "interference in domestic political debates by entities funded by foreign donations" is substantially correct. They are indeed aiming to do that, and while it may well be good that they are, India's not the first country to be unhappy about it.
Let them be unhappy about it. With everything I've heard about their moves to stifle internal dissent, it's going to take every voice possible to push back against them.
None of those countries seem to be particularly democratic at this time, which means that Amnesty International is doing it's job fighting for people's rights.
That's trouble that human rights organizations should always be in, until the government's stop abusing their own people.
How would you differentiate here between liberal democracy, illiberal democracy, straight-up undemocratic systems, and AI or similar NGOs simply liking the substantive outcomes of a particular government?
For instance, I am by no means a fan of the Republican Party, but it's hard to believe that the United States of America was in 2005 a dictatorship or other authoritarian system: we lived through Bush peacefully transferring power to the Obama Administration, which was drawn from the opposite political party. It seems much more plausible that Amnesty simply didn't like how America was conducting the Iraq War, a substantive policy disagreement (and one I agree with Amnesty on).
Problem is, that sort of demolishes the case that anyone Amnesty criticizes must, ipso facto, be an undemocratic authoritarian regime -- which I don't even recall Amnesty themselves claiming.
Hey, I just wanted to point out that I've said this to another commenter in this thread but it also seems to apply to you as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629640. I am not a moderator but I've seen enough moderation to guess that you would also be breaking the guidelines.
You do know your comment history is public, right? Your comments have been fairly clustered on one topic, and this isn't the only one you've largely copy-pasted. Now, I'm fairly open to the possibility that you are just someone who is not acquainted with the rules and has an interest in those subjects, but in general engaging in conversations about only one fairly political topic and making repetitive (read: low effort and easy to spam) makes your contributions seem very hard to distinguish from someone who is trying to wage ideological battle on the site.
Except for two comments, I'm replying to other people comments or adding more resources to my previous comments.
I'm a developer, I'm don't belong to BJP IT-cell, like the other guy is mentioning.
I have just seen that, my country is being depicted badly for wrong reasons, despite evidence against Amnesty.
As a citizen of this country, I felt responsible to educate and put forward, whatever I know.
I have started commenting from around 4:30PM IST, while traveling.
I didn't provide any sources for claims I have made previously, so I was indeed visiting each and every comment of my own and adding references, and replying to others.
Edit:
If you want proof, except for two comments, which I have copy pasted.
All other were responses to other comments.
I can share a screenshot, on telegram or gmail, my username is same across all platforms.
The "other guy" seems to have either deleted their comment or had it removed–for the better, as it wasn't particularly constructive. Again, I want to make it clear that I don't think you're some sort of political troll or shill; in fact I believe such accounts on Hacker News are fairly rare (and are banned quickly); most of the ones that might appear to be one are in fact just run by people who are passionate about a particular topic that they care about and unintentionally use them in ways that are against the guidelines and also very similar to how a troll would operate. I just wanted to let you know about it so you could get an opportunity to change your commenting style; perhaps expand into other topics and consider that the other commenters here are not out to "get" your country (many may live there themselves, or not have any reason to care about India specifically), but may be concerned about reports of authoritarianism around the world (which are by no means isolated–there's another post about ISPs interfering with HTTPS traffic on the front page right now). Additional information and insight is always welcome, but again, Hacker News is generally not very indulgent of sources it thinks are partisan or designed to stir up an emotional response for a particular side.
Again, this isn't anything personal against you or your viewpoint on this issue, nor am I any sort of authority on what is or is not acceptable on the site; I'm just pointing out that your comments have felt like they could be confused as to be coming from someone with much worse intentions and you likely do not want to be in that place.
I’ve just noticed you’ve been copy/pasting your comments from another thread about this topic here–please don’t do that. It increases noise and really makes it seem like you’re trying to bury the discussion and use your account for ideological purposes, which is against the rules. I’m sure you didn’t do this on purpose but your actions are hard to distinguish from a bad actor so please try to not do that, thanks.
Wow, so I'm not sure if it's because it's aimed at an audience slightly different than me, so the triggers fall flat, or if it's just really clumsily done, but I've honestly never seen something that is so obviously a hit piece and reaching for anything it can find.
E.g. Amnesty is bad because their higher ups are mean people. Amnesty is bad because they said stuff in twitter that we want to interpret as attacking cows. Amnesty is bad because they work with a Muslim in guantanamo bay about prisoner rights that says stuff about middle east fighters.
Edit: To clarify, I'm not taking a stance on whether AI is in the right or wrong, or the Indian government is right or wrong, since I don't really know, but this piece is obviously designed to make AI look bad through techniques that aren't useful, such as guilt through association (because it's much easier to color the associate when people are less familiar with them), providing little context but plenty of assumptions about intent for short bits of speech, etc.
Portraying those that disagree with your methods as enemies and part of the opposition is a common way to discredit them and discount their objections. Being common doesn't mean it's excusable.
That you accept any tactic against an organization you disagree with, and discount any criticism of those tactics and color the people doing so as unable to look at the situation rationally only exposes you yourself to the same criticism.
I am not Indian. I do not know a lot of the details about Amnesty International and India. I can also easily spot many instances in the linked article where they are using techniques often used to present half-truths and sway opinion through purposeful misinterpretation and misrepresentation. I don't need to know more about the overall situation because I am not commenting on the overall situation, I'm noting what I see as blatant attempts to sway opinion not through fact and rational discourse, but propaganda. That's worth calling out whenever encountered, regardless of whether you agree with the goals of the people in question or not.
Speculation as I don’t think this is actually fully the case. Does this cause a survivorship bias in civil right reporting where more reports come from more open countries. I doubt if true this would effect the extremes but probably the bulk in between nuance would be lost as it’s harder to tell due to less reporting.
