Amnesty International has come to embody everything wrong with self-styled human rights organizations. Instead of defending freedom of expression and fighting prejudice, it is targeting and defaming Christians.
On July 8, Amnesty International released a report titled “A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the U.K.” The document categorized dozens of Christian charities, pro-life groups, and organizations critical of gender transitions as “anti-rights.”
The report accused 117 groups, including mainstream Christian news sites and organizations dedicated to helping abused women and children, of “targeting the rights of women and LGBT+ people.”
Amnesty called for the persecution of its targeted groups by the withdrawal of their status as tax-deductible charities. This would, deliberately, be a death sentence for many nonprofit organizations.
Their supposed offense is what the British author George Orwell, in his novel 1984, called “thoughtcrime.” The intended victims of Amnesty are crudely targeted for their beliefs, even though many are those of the broader public.
Amnesty’s report sparked outrage, both for its naked defamation and attempt to intimidate nonprofit organizations for holding views with which it disagrees. The report is a work of extreme one-sidedness and shoddy research.
Revealingly, not a single Islamic organization was listed as a “growing threat” or “anti-rights” despite Islam’s explicit condemnation and promise of suppression of the very groups about which Amnesty claims to be concerned. Christian groups were singled out. The selective targeting is conspicuous.
According to the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics, sexual assaults have steadily increased over the past decade. Thousands of young English girls have been systematically raped by “grooming gangs” composed largely of Muslim immigrants who not only failed to assimilate but too often insisted that the nation that took them in should adopt their beliefs and ways.
Within two days, Amnesty withdrew the document and announced that it would conduct an internal review. The powerful nongovernmental organization, which boasts more than 10 million members and supporters around the world, said it was sorry.
“Sorry” is an apt word to apply to the low point to which Amnesty has degraded itself. But “sorry” does not begin to be adequate as an apology.
On Tuesday, a motion was introduced in Parliament condemning Amnesty’s “listing of organizations defending the rights of women, girls, children, and gay and bisexual people as anti-rights on the basis of them being gender-critical.”
Several celebrities, most notably comedian John Cleese and author J.K. Rowling, condemned the report. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, called the document a blacklist and encouraged the groups named by Amnesty to take the organization to court. We hope it is sued into oblivion. It is not worth saving.
Beira’s Place, a women-only domestic abuse center founded by Rowling, was among the nonprofit organizations targeted by Amnesty. Lesley Johnston, its chief executive, called the report “deeply offensive to Beira’s Place staff who work day in, day out to support survivors, and to the women who need and use our service.”
Amnesty seems less interested in protecting the vulnerable than in targeting those whose views it dislikes. It is an extreme political organization, plain and simple. It has performed a remarkable betrayal of the group’s mission.
The NGO traces its founding to a 1961 campaign that introduced the phrase “prisoners of conscience” into the popular lexicon.
Journalist Peter Benenson’s effort to free Portuguese students who were imprisoned for toasting freedom in a restaurant quickly grew into something larger. That July, delegates from seven countries met to establish a “permanent international movement in defense of freedom of opinion and religion.”
In the years that followed, Amnesty highlighted the plight of dissidents and people living under totalitarian regimes. Rowling herself worked as a researcher for the organization in her 20s, an experience she called “one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life” in a 2008 speech.
But Amnesty changed. The NGO has become fringe, obsessively focusing on the world’s sole Jewish state for condemnation, offering apologetics for the Jihadis who seek its destruction. Amnesty has written numerous mendacious and misleading reports accusing Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid.”
Indeed, on Oct. 7, 2023, while Hamas and other Iranian proxies were invading Israel and carrying out the largest massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust, Amnesty’s secretary-general, Agnes Callamard, was busy attacking the Jewish state for “inciting violence” and committing “war crimes.”
Amnesty has become the very embodiment of the intolerance it was founded to fight, adept at blaming victims, silencing debate, and ignoring the dangers of totalitarian ideologies such as Islamism. Its campaign against Christians in the U.K. is only the latest lamentable example. It is unlikely to be the last if it is allowed to survive. It should not be.