Freedom from Amnesty!

Imprisoned by ideology

Readers, this 60^th of my Substack posts takes my adventures in Fallacyland into their third year and what better topic to announce the beginning of Year Three than an exploration of one of the latest in full blown (one might even say flamboyant) fallacies reported in recent news. There are so many of them that it is hard to choose which one to focus on at any given time, but Maggie* and I agreed that the prize for preposterous propositions must go this month to Amnesty International (UK). Yes, I’m talking about that “briefing paper” A Growing Threat: the Anti-Rights Movement in the UK, published on 8 July and de-published on 10 July following massive backlash. AI UK cited inadequate internal review as the reason and the head office of Amnesty International, also London-based, stated that they considered the withdrawal to be a wise choice.

*That’s Minerva’s Magpie for the uninitiated among you. See Post 1, 2024.

Of 117 organisations named by Amnesty as “anti-rights” in that now withdrawn report, 51 were organisations (mostly feminist ones) critical of genderist ideology. Instrumental in production of this document would be one Chiara Capraro, who holds the position of “Gender Justice Director” with Amnesty UK (one hopes for not too much longer).

This week, AI UK “referred itself” to the UK Charities Commission via an incident report and demands for a formal retraction and plans for possible lawsuits continue. The whole sorry soon-to-be saga probably qualifies for the descriptor a “hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck”, the expression originally coined and used by CNN journalist Jake Tapper to describe the presidential candidate’s debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in 2020. (Biden still won though, didn’t he. Pity the Democrats didn’t get their act better together four years later.)

Maggie’s reaction on contemplating Amnesty’s hot mess

This little Amnesty fiasco is both puzzling and predictable. Predictable because AI (the NGO not the so-called intelligence of the artificial kind) has been heading this way for a long time. Puzzling because, well, this was not what Amnesty was supposed to be about and not what its founder had in mind.

Back in the 1960s…

It was perhaps not the best of times but definitely far from the worst (yes, you spotted it: a Dickens reference). Already in the 1950s, the stirrings that would lead to the social and political upheavals and associated cultural transformations of the 1960s and early 1970s had begun: civil rights in the US, wars of independence and decolonisation, then followed in the 60s by uprisings for social justice, for women, for gay rights, moving in the 70s towards the endtimes of Western European dictatorships (Spain, Portugal, Greece), while, sadly, Eastern European ones were just getting started, involving brutal repression of popular uprisings (Hungary 1956, Prague 1968).

This flurry of protest activity was also the context in which the other two “core” UN treaties that built on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) were adopted: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR): both adopted in 1966 and both in entering into force a decade later. With the UDHR they provided the first “universal” encoding of rights by which all signatory states were technically bound. That the rights in question remain aspirational rather than a reality, even in liberal democratic states, does not detract from their symbolic weight.

The founder of AI, a British lawyer by the name of Peter Benenson, did not wait for ICCPR or ICESCR though; for him, the UDHR was more than sufficient. On 28 May 1961 he published an article “The Forgotten Prisoners” in The Observer, prompted by news of two students from the Portuguese city of Coimbra (site of its first university, founded in the 13^th century), who were reportedly imprisoned under the then Salazar dictatorship for raising a toast to freedom. Benenson cited the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and announced a campaign “Appeal for Amnesty”. Thus began the history of Amnesty International, with Benenson recruiting MPs from the three major political parties to help launch the organisation.

For Benenson, the meaning of the word “amnesty” was key, that is, “a decision by a government that allows political prisoners to go free”, or “a fixed period of time during which people are not punished for committing a particular crime” (Cambridge Dictionary online). The term comes from the Greek amnestia: “forgetfulness (especially of wrong); an amnesty” and was first used in modern Europe in the 16^th century to mean “a ruling authority’s pardon of past offences”, although the recorded history of the practice dates back to Ancient Greece (from Etymology Dictionary online).

Benenson subsequently published an extended version of his article in the April, 1962 edition of New Blackfriars, an academic journal that is formally linked with the Dominican religious order. (Yes, really.) In that article (which is unfortunately not available in open access), he wrote that

political imprisonment is the most important social evil which civilization has as yet failed to tackle …

‘Appeal for Amnesty’ is an attempt to persuade civilized opinion throughout the world that there is an obligation on us all to prevent the persecution of people on account of their opinions. Like World Refugee Year the idea of this Appeal originated in Britain. It was launched by a small group of lawyers and writers on Trinity Sunday, 1961; since then it has found an echo in every continent. Significantly, much of the answering support has come from active Christians… (Benenson 1962, pp 81–2)

Yes readers, Benenson was a Christian. Born Jewish but converted to Roman Catholicism; one wonders why. Putting aside the god-bothering, however, Benenson did write some damn good things in his article, which AI UK might do well to heed. Such as:

‘Appeal for Amnesty’ is an endeavour to illustrate the dangerous potentialities of a situation in which public opinion has come to accept any law passed by a properly constituted legislature as automatically valid. Put in another way, ‘Appeal for Amnesty’ represents a call for a return to the principles of ‘natural justice’ as evolved by Aquinas. It takes as its central proposition the only existing universally-accepted body of ‘natural law,’ the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And it concentrates in particular on Articles 18 and 19, which guarantee to every human being freedom of speech, of opinion and of religion. It is an appeal to civilized opinion all over the world to bring pressure on legislators to insure [sic] that these articles are effectively guaranteed in international and in municipal law. (Benenson 1962, p. 83)

The principle of natural justice ostensibly continues to inform legal proceedings in democracies (it goes by other names outside the Anglosphere but the principle is the same), that is, absence of bias and the right to a fair hearing. Sometimes—often, even, particularly as concerns women’s rights—it appears to be missing in action but the principles exist, encoded in constitutions, bodies of common law and case law, as what we should aspire to. Courts of appeal, constitutional courts, international human rights courts and other higher courts exist precisely to ensure that natural justice is applied where a lower court may have fallen down on the job. Does it work well in practice? Sometimes. Does it work better for men than for women? Almost always.

To return to the above-cited paragraph of Benenson: just because a law is passed by a “properly constituted” legislature does not mean the law is just. And when the law and legal processes do not respect freedom of speech, opinion, conscience and assembly, then “natural justice” is not served and Articles 18 and 19 of the UDHR are breached.

In short, Benenson’s focus was explicitly and unambiguously on prisoners of conscience, and on the state as the entity responsible for such imprisonment. Non-state actors may kidnap and sequester individuals or groups of individuals, but those individuals are not “prisoners of conscience” as understood by Benenson or their release understood as an “amnesty”. In cases where non-state actors do not kidnap and imprison people or otherwise commit acts of violence against them, they have the right, made explicit in the UDHR and subsequently in the ICCPR and ICESCR, to freedom of expression, opinion, conscience and assembly.

Word-salading amnesty

Anyone can make a word salad. Postmodernist academics are expert at it; so, on a less sophisticated but equally salady level, is Donald Trump. Managementspeak is also rife with word salad items, I am sure you can think of a few.

In order to properly salad words, one should pre-weasel them. That is, suck out their substantive content leaving an empty shell into which one can inject whatever goop one pleases. Once weaselled, the words can then be tossed to make whatever concoction one likes and then dressed up to look pretty—a bit like presenting the Québecois goop of poutine (hot chips, gravy and cheese) as fine cuisine. This has, unfortunately, happened: not too long ago I spotted a poutine restaurant in Paris’s hip 11^th arrondissement. Imagine a fashionable London restaurant proposing fried Mars Bars as dessert and you can understand the shock to the sensibilities. It has also apparently been served at state dinners in Canada and the US. Go figure… (For the record, in case anyone finds me guilty of anti-francophone bias, even my Québecois friends find this cultural elevation of poutine bizarre.

Amnesty International has been developing its “rights” word-salad-with-poutine-dressing for some time now, starting with its drift—or rather, decisive steering—away from the original meaning of the term “amnesty” and the original raison d’être of the organisation. For many years, its focus has no longer been exclusively on prisoners of conscience but has broadened to non-state actors and is based on its own pre-weaselled definition of “human rights”. In Australia, for example, it has partnered with ACON, an organisation notorious for pushing genderist ideology à la Stonewall (complete with its Australian Workplace Equality Index) and reproduces almost word-for-word ACON’s framing of sex, gender and gender identity (see for example its manual “How to Be an LGBTQIA+ ally”, which is typical of the genre).

As for the hastily de-published UK document, it is but one of a growing number in which AI (in the UK as well as elsewhere) takes aim at groups defending women’s sex-based rights and most of those other documents are still online. Assaults on women’s sex-based rights are reframed as “defence of rights” and organisations advocating for women’s rights and providing services for women having suffered male violence are targeted as opposed to those rights. See for example Like a Snowball, published in May this year; among other things this document provides some information on funds received and spent by some of these organisations, with a particular focus on registered charities FiLiA, Sex Matters and LGB Alliance (also targeted in the depublished document: see below). The document suggests that the organisations all work together in some sort of concerted way (conspiracy theory, anyone?) and immediately follows this section on their finances with a section claiming “hate crimes” against transgender people have increased. The apposition is telling. AI UK goes further, however, in the withdrawn document: these organisations are now branded “hate groups” and the document called for their defunding and for supporters of Amnesty to refrain from donating to them. The document made no distinction between these organisations defending women’s rights and providing much-needed women-only services and, for example, anti-abortion lobbies.

The groups named as “hate groups” include, among many others, Women’s Liberation organisation FiLiA, which is involved in a number of advocacy initiatives for women and holds Europe’s largest annual or biennial feminist conference; Beira’s Place in Edinburgh, a women-only referral service for women victims of sexual assault, set up and entirely funded by J.K. Rowling (their lawyers’ letter to Amnesty demands a public retraction and apology and an external investigation); women’s sex-based rights organisation Sex Matters (co-founded by Maya Forstater, previously sacked for having and expressing an opinion on sex and gender); feminist policy analysts Murray Blackburn Mackenzie (which provides an overview of the situation and links to a number of letters sent to Amnesty); LGB Alliance; For Women Scotland, who took the Scottish government to court over women’s sex-based rights, which resulted in the Supreme Court reaffirming sex-based rights as defined in the Equality Act.

Amnesty UK made a grave mistake messing with so many organisations devoted to the defence of women’s sex-based rights and resistance to male violence, especially in the wake of the April, 2025 Supreme Court decision reaffirming those sex-based rights. It made a particularly grave mistake messing with the likes of Joanne Rowling, who has not only the courage but also the public standing and the money to take them on without hesitation. Not only are AI UK now open to multiple lawsuits and an investigation by the Charities Commissioner in the UK, they are being internationally condemned for overreach, vindictiveness and just plain stupidity.

Even the Nine media daily The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), the most widely read in the country, but not previously known for its support of women’s sex- based rights defenders, published an opinion piece by Europe correspondent David Crowe which came firmly down on JKR’s side. The title says it all: “Amnesty picked a fight with JK Rowling over trans rights. It backfired”.¹

Would you like some poutine with that?

The new misogyny? Nope, same old same old

Amnesty has, however, been moving in this misogynist direction for a while. Take its position on prostitution, for example. The global leadership has supported prostitution for the last decade, including complete decriminalisation of pimps and brothel owners. It even took advice from the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, an organisation formerly run by a woman who was jailed for 15 years for sex trafficking (as reported by Kat Banyard in The Guardian). Amnesty’s move in support of prostitution and pimping met with ferocious opposition at the time but has not changed. One asks: whose rights, exactly, are being defended here? As Katherine Shats of the Georgetown Law O’Neill Institute wrote in 2015, as AI was developing its policy on “sex work”:

Amnesty’s policy only applies to consensual adult sex work “that does not involve coercion, exploitation or abuse”. They seem to be talking about a situation where only fully empowered, consenting women freely choose to sell their bodies for money. The problem is, this nice libertarian ideal of individual choice completely ignores the power dynamics that drive the commercial sex industry. Things like race, poverty, childhood sexual abuse, coercion by pimps and the vast power imbalances between men and women in almost every society. …

Unfortunately, the dismal statistics don’t get better in the type of legal, regulated market that Amnesty is fighting for. In countries such as the Netherlands and Germany, sex work has been legalized and regulated since 2000 and pimps are treated as any other businessmen who have the same rights to engage in politics and lobbying.

In the Netherlands, legalization has actually led to an increase in illegal prostitution and trafficking by these same ‘businessmen’.

Shats also cites the so-called Nordic model developed in Sweden, which, “though not a perfect model”, has resulted in a decrease in trafficking and prostitution.

Yet Amnesty tells us that “the decriminalization of consensual sex work, including those laws that prohibit associated activities—such as bans on buying, solicitation and general organization of sex work” will make women safer “while addressing the very real issue of exploitation”.

Maggie is not impressed.

1. For non-subscribers, the article is archived here: https://archive.is/EaLqi.