British Helsinki Human Rights Group


The British Helsinki Human Rights Group was an Oxford-based non-governmental organization which claimed to monitor human rights in the 56 participating States of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Despite its name, the organisation was not affiliated to the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights. BHHRG was critical of what it characterized as Western interference in imposing democracy, and claimed to support the right of political independence from the west of a number of Communist and post-Communist regimes, as well as of a number of African dictators.
The group also used the name OSCEwatch, indicating that it saw part of its mission as scrutinising the activities of the OSCE. The OSCEwatch and BHHRG websites are identical, and both websites openly refer to each other.
The British Charity Commission removed the group's listing in September 2010, noting "Ceased to exist".

Membership and funding

The BHHRG was founded in 1992. It was run from the Oxford home of historian Professor Norman Stone, who on occasion took part in BHHRG activities, and was co-founded by his wife Christine Stone and fellow Oxford historian Mark Almond. Its trustees comprised Mark Almond, Anthony Daniels, John Laughland, Christine Stone and Mary Walsh. Almond, Daniels, Laughland and Stone were members of Britain's conservative intelligentsia and regular contributors to British newspapers. Chad Nagle, an American lawyer who frequently contributes to the website antiwar.com, was also associated with the group. Noel Malcolm, a historian of early modern Britain and Europe who in the 1990s and early 2000s wrote books on aspects of Balkan history, appeared on a 1994 list of founders and spoke on its behalf in 1999 but later apparently left the group.
The BHHRG was not an "official" Helsinki Committee, as it was not affiliated with the Helsinki Committees' umbrella organisation, the then International Helsinki Federation. The United Kingdom's representative in the IHF was the British Helsinki Subcommittee of the Parliamentary Human Rights Group, established in 1976. This led to the BHHRG being mistakenly labelled the British Helsinki Committee, which prompted the British Helsinki Subcommittee to ask visitors to its website to
For its part, the BHHRG website said nothing on the subject.
The membership, management and funding of the BHHRG were somewhat obscure. These aspects did not appear to be discussed at all on its website, and the details of its trustees were given only in its legally required returns to the UK's Charity Commission. Its published accounts stated that it received £417,332 in income between 1997–2003 and spent £449,086 in the same period. The organisation later appeared to fall on hard times, with its funding falling by nearly 99% after 2001. A possible reason was suggested by The Economist, which reported in 2004 that
The identity of its backers was also unclear. Still with them in 1999, Noel Malcolm explained that the group does not disclose its donors
Only a few contributors were known by name. Material that the BHHRG issued in 1992 cited the UKIP peer Lord Pearson of Rannoch and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation as donors. The BHHRG's "About Us" page stated that it "does not receive funding from any government" but, according to a Foreign Office source, it received money from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for an election observer mission in 1995.
The source said funding was cut off because they found the group prejudiced, partial and unreliable.
It subsequently received no funding from this source and its advocates said this proved the group was independent of governments.

Activities

The BHHRG website claimed that the main activities of the Group included:
The BHHRG published reports from first-hand observers, concentrating on election monitoring in central and eastern Europe, as well as publishing frequent unsigned commentaries about events in the region. A common theme in many of its publications was a critical view of Western "meddling in the internal affairs" of central and east European countries, notably the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Belarus.
Among its achievements the BHHRG's website claimed:
The media connections of some of BHHRG members enabled it to propagate its views through a number of major newspapers in Britain and the US. Yet it became famous only when it publicly denounced what were widely perceived as democratic movements against authoritarian former Communist rulers.
Among actions critics of the BHHRG find ill-advised:
Other statements by the BHHRG included:
John Laughland characterised some supporters of Ukraine's Viktor Yushchenko as "neo-Nazis" and many of those backing him on the streets as "druggy skinheads from Lvov" whereas principal elements of the Jewish community .
These last claims prompted the publication of well-documented articles "exposing" the BHHRG's exploits.
The British weekly The Economist published "Yanukovich's friends: A human-rights group that defends dictators".
The daily Guardian published "PR man to Europe's nastiest regimes", written by David Aaronovitch, to which John Laughland, the subject of the article, objected, saying that it was "almost identical to" an article on a web site carrying "virulently antisemitic articles about the Jewish proclivity for rape, and about how the gas chambers at Auschwitz could not have existed". The controversy attracted many on the . The BHHRG's advocates reply by quoting Aleksandr Tsinker, "Head of the Observer Mission from the Institute for East European and CIS Nations" — an organization publicly known for nothing else — as saying that the Ukrainian election "was a free expression of the voters' will".
Some of the BHHRG's statements were favorably quoted by the isolationist right in the US, by opponents of US foreign policy, as well as governments regarded by Western authorities as authoritarian and criminal, such as that of Belarus.
Its critics accused the BHHRG of taking a predetermined ideological line while observing elections. A British Foreign Office official quoted by Jeremy Druker said of them:
The BHHRG was almost always more critical of social-democratic than nationalist rulers.
The Economist characterises the BHHRG's opinion as "an intense dislike of liberal internationalism." Tom Palmer of the libertarian Cato Institute summarizes their position as being that
The BHHRG's commentaries indeed alleged that Western governments and international organisations were seeking to implement a "New World Order" in central and eastern Europe. Its supporters claimed that the organisation exposes matters which Western governments and biased international organisations such as the UN and the OSCE had rather remained unknown.
For instance, it claimed it denounced human rights abuses committed in Georgia while these were ignored by the OSCE and the Council of Europe. Mark Almond, who has written on Balkan matters, criticised the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia on behalf of Albanian separatists in Kosovo as a "violation of international law" which resulted in "cultural genocide" against Serbs.
As self-proclaimed monitors of Human Rights in the countries concerned, they accused other intergovernmental organisations of being undemocratic, unelected, unaccountable, non-transparent meddlers in their internal affairs.
The OSCE criticized the BHHRG for letting its journalists pose as impartial election monitors while publishing partisan polemics in newspapers, and for relying on short-term observer missions with a handful of people, an approach the OSCE abandoned as open to manipulation in 1996.
The BHHRG dismissed the OSCE's position as an attempt to stifle legitimate criticism and independent reporting.

Name issues

The BHHRG was also denounced for failing to mention that it enjoyed no recognition from the International Helsinki Federation, but was at odds with other organizations with similar names, at least since 1996.
The International Helsinki Federation felt the need to issue a disclaiming any connection with the group. The Greek National Committee of the said Federation, which has been effective throughout the Balkans, also published a to denounce what it felt was the BHHRG's impostures, while others accused it of "nam itself so as to usurp the prestige of its elder".
Monika Horaková, a Roma member of the Czech parliament, said in an open letter condemning a BHHRG's report in 1999:
Supporters of the BHHRG replied that the name "Helsinki" is not trademarked anywhere and no official imprimatur is needed for any group wishing to monitor the implementation of the Helsinki Accords. They noted that the European Commission established a "Helsinki Group on Women and Science" in Helsinki in 1999, with no connection with the monitoring of Helsinki Accords.

Links and references

Articles by the BHHRG