Campaigners tap celebrity network to support the coolest cause around

Arguably the main lesson that has been learned over the past five decades of the Universal Declaration is that human rights do not simply exist: they have to be fought for. That battle is often a dirty and dangerous struggle waged against enemies that have no scruples and, sometimes, no public face.

More than 1,000 organisations, most with roots in the West, have developed to meet that challenge. But easily the largest are Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Amnesty has one million members, can count on celebrity support from rock stars and film actors, and is active in most of the countries of the world. Human Rights Watch, which has headquarters in the United States, is less well known in these parts but its influence on American foreign policy and the behaviour of big business has been considerable.

The challenge facing the defenders of human rights is set out in Amnesty's report, an annual catalogue of misdeeds across the globe. Last year, for example, unlawful executions were carried out in 55 countries, people were "disappeared" in 31 countries, and torture was reported in 117 countries. Forty states used the death penalty and 87 detained prisoners of conscience.

The resources available to fight such injustice are limited, but in their own way Amnesty and HRW have become multinationals of a sort. Amnesty's international secretariat in London employs 300 staff and 95 volunteers. The annual budget up to last March was over £17 million.

HRW's donor list includes the Ford Foundation, the Lillian Hellman Fund, the billionaire financier, Mr George Soros, the rock star, Sting, and Ms Katharine Graham of the Washington Post.

Amnesty's Irish section is one of its most active: witness the campaign to gather one million signatures to mark the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration. When Ms Mary Lawlor, Amnesty's Irish chief, wants a high-profile name to launch a campaign, she can pick up the phone and ring Bono, or Ronnie Drew, or any number of Irish celebrities. Prominent bankers and business leaders are among Amnesty's most enthusiastic - and generous - backers.

In short, human rights are cool. And they have remained so, even when environmental organisations such as Greenpeace fell out of fashion and went through the doldrums.

Part of Amnesty's popularity in Ireland is explained by the central role the former Minister for External Affairs, Sean MacBride, played in setting up the organisation in the 1960s.

However, MacBride's contribution finds no mention in the organisation's website (www.amnesty.org), which recalls that Peter Benenson, a lawyer in London, started a campaign to free prisoners of conscience in 1961. The idea came after he read an article about a group of students in Portugal who were arrested and jailed for raising a toast to "freedom" in a restaurant.

The campaign grew quickly and from it Amnesty International was born. Its earliest activity was individual letter-writing to and on behalf of prisoners. This work continues today, but it has been joined by campaigns targeted on specific issues or countries. Last year, for example, Amnesty organised an international campaign to raise consciousness about refugee issues.

HRW was founded in 1978 as Helsinki Watch, in response to appeals for help from local human rights groups in the Soviet Bloc which were monitoring compliance with the Helsinki accords. A few years later, Americas Watch was started after Ronald Reagan argued that human rights abuse by rightwing government in Central America were more tolerable than those of left-wing regimes. The regional organisations were subsumed into HRW in 1987.

Both organisations work in the same way, by interviewing victims and witnesses of human rights abuses, and talking to government officials, opposition leaders, journalists, lawyers, doctors and so on.

Amnesty's rule that members would only work on cases outside their own countries was introduced in the late 1960s, following a number of mistakes and bad publicity. Local observers tended to bring their own prejudices with them, and either assumed an allegation was true without checking or dismissed it out of hand, again without verifying it.

The rule works well in most cases - without it Amnesty would never have been able to cover the conflict in Northern Ireland with any degree of credibility - but it gives rise to new problems. How can you monitor human rights abuses in a country when you do not have a permanent presence there? Is there not a danger of bias or skewed thinking when the strongest parts of the organisation are in the West and many of the problems areas lie in the Third World?

Rwanda provides a perfect illustration of these problems. Amnesty has clashed several times with African Rights, a much smaller outfit that has chronicled the atrocities of the 1994 genocide, over its monitoring of human rights abuses. In 1996, it issued an "urgent action" letter on behalf of Joseph Ruyenzi after he was arrested and accused of involvement in the genocide.

For Amnesty, Ruyenzi was a journalist and the subject of government victimisation and unfair procedures. To African Rights, he was a former Hutu extremist who hunted his victims down with dogs during the genocide. To Ms Donatilla Mujawimana, a poor Hutu peasant married to a Tutsi in Kayenzi, he was the man who raped and sexually mutilated her in April, 1994.

The case illustrates the need for accurate local knowledge. Ruyenzi was actually a newsreader, not a journalist. He was implicated in the genocide. Under pressure from African Rights, Amnesty eventually took his name off their bulletins.

Then, last year, Amnesty expressed its concern after a number of genocide suspects were sentenced to death. Its objections were couched in classic Western terms: the trials were too short, the defendants had inadequate representation, and the judges were ill-trained.

The travel writer, Dervla Murphy, reacted thus: "Reading this unrealistic rubbish, I felt angry. Demands such as Amnesty's are, in effect, attempts to protect genocidal criminals from the only form of justice (rough) now available in Rwanda. And the criminals are quick to seize on gullible allies and use their misplaced concern to the full. What right do outsiders have to meddle thus?" You only have to look at the high-maintenance, low-output version of justice being dispensed by the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, the UN's effort to deal with the genocide, to understand Murphy's point.