Somewhat over a year ago I wrote here about how progress in strengthening international law was going to depend on fostering respect for law in the global arena, and I referred in that connection to attitudes of cynicism towards international law from those ready to treat it as a mere convenience - appealing to it only when it suited their political purposes to do so. Such instrumentalizing of international law and the rights it seeks to protect can be seen in more than one quarter. Consider, for example, those who, in the context of US politics, have been willing to argue that the practice of waterboarding is not torture, or, more generally, to argue for the use on terrorist suspects of so-called harsh or enhanced interrogation techniques, but who would take it as an elementary truth that American democracy is superior to tyranny and totalitarianism because it respects human rights and civil liberties whereas they do not. Or consider, alternatively, those in the democracies of the West who are vociferous in their condemnation of torture and extraordinary rendition as used in the war on terror, but are willing to make excuses for terrorism itself, to find mitigating considerations for it, root causes and the rest. (To forestall all possibility of misunderstanding, it is not the vociferous condemnation that's the problem; that is entirely appropriate. It is its skewed distribution.)
'One-sidedness' of the above sort may well be spread more or less evenly across the political spectrum. But from one point of view it is more worrying when it occurs in liberal and left circles than it is coming from conservatives: this is because of the larger overlap between a left-liberal milieu and the global human rights community. That Amnesty International should now have placed itself in the company of an enthusiast for the Taliban does indeed damage its integrity, and highlights this more general danger.