To prove that it was not using human rights to advance a particular political agenda, each Amnesty chapter was instructed to simultaneously “adopt” three prisoners of conscience, one each “from communist, Western, and Third World countries.”13 Amnesty’s position, emblematic of the human rights movement as a whole at that time, was that since human rights violations were a universal evil, wrong in and of themselves, it was not necessary to determine why abuses were taking place but to document them as meticulously and credibly as possible.
