Human Rights Redux

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

The Amnesty International Annual Report on human rights followed hard on the heels of the similar work by Human Rights Watch I wrote about last month.

“2016,” says Amnesty International, “saw the idea of human dignity and equality, the very notion of a human family, coming under vigorous and relentless assault from powerful narratives of blame, fear and scapegoating, propagated by those who sought to take or cling on to power at almost any cost.”

In case you spent all of 2016 prepping your appearance on “Dancing with the Stars,” as Hillary Clinton apparently did, they’re talking about places like Aleppo, “pounded to dust by air strikes and street battles;” Yemen; Myanmar; mass murder in South Sudan; Turkey; Bahrain — and the rise of hate speech in the United States, contributing to a world that in 2016 “became a darker and more unstable place.”

It takes Amnesty International’s four-hundred-nine-page report all of three paragraphs to get to the foremost cheerleader of vile vocalization.

It marks the election of Donald Trump following a campaign of frequent deeply divisive misogynistic and xenophobic statements, of promises to roll back established civil liberties and introduce policies “profoundly inimical to human rights.”

In other words, Amnesty International won’t be invited to any White House press briefings anytime soon.