President’s Page: The Travesty of Amnesty International Betraying One’s Own Principles

Back in the eighties, when I emerged from the darkness that was China’s one-child policy, I approached Amnesty International (AI). The organization had done much good work over the years advocating for political prisoners, protesting all forms of torture, demanding fair trials, and generally asserting the universality of human rights across cultures and peoples. I was hoping that AI could he convinced to strongly condemn the forced abortions and coerced sterilizations I had witnessed.

It proved very hard to get Amnesty’s attention. It was not that they dismissed my evidence out of hand. Nor did they resort to the typical left-wing dodge, which I heard from — among other groups — the National Organization of Women: “We are personally opposed to forced abortion but China does have a population problem.” Still, it wasn’t until 1986 when, faced with overwhelming evidence of the inhumanity of China’s program, Amnesty finally spoke. It began including passing references to these crimes in its annual report, and in the years following even published a short report or two on the one-child policy.

The Problem Solved

The problem, I realized later, was that Amnesty had decided — in one of those unwritten consensuses that govern organizational behavior — that all abortion questions were off-limits. Its leadership had agreed to take no position, one way or the other, on a woman’s “right” to abortion of an unborn child’s tight to lite.

As we recount in our cover story, that former consensus is now history. Amnesty International, under the rubric of protecting “sexual and reproductive rights” and “decriminalizing” abortion, is now vigorously promoting a “right” to an abortion. In so doing, they have betrayed the very cause of universal and absolute human rights that they were originally established to defend.

The Unborn Victim

Following the lead of other radical leftist groups, they have defined one part of humanity to be unworthy of the rights enjoyed by all the others. For Hitler and the National Socialists, it was Jews, gypsies and the handicapped; for Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, it was landlords and capitalists, for Amnesty International, it is the unborn.

Amnesty may prattle on, as it does on its web site, about its “vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards,” but its actions belie its words. The unborn are not only excluded from personhood; their very survival is made contingent on the whims of others. To say that this is not in the spirit of the Declaration is an understatement. Its preamble asserts that the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” (italics added) Article 3 is even more explicit, stating that “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”1

Needless to say, nowhere in these documents is there mention of a “right” to exterminate the unborn. Given that the organization has now effectively abandoned any absolute standard of human rights, how does Amnesty now propose to ascertain what a human right is? Here is Kate Gilmore, Amnesty’s deputy general secretary: “Ours is a movement dedicated to upholding human rights, not specific theologies. Our purpose invokes the law and the state, not God.”

Yes, well, the Beijing regime is careful to invoke the law and the state every time it ratchets up the one-child policy, or carries out another forced abortion campaign. Such instruments as the law and the state, unconstrained by moral absolutes, can be used to justify virtually any barbaric behavior. Neither is it necessary to have recourse to theological arguments in order to defend the right to life of the unborn, Any high school biology textbook can provide the evidentiary basis of a rational argument for the humanity of our preborn brothers and sisters.

Despite everything, Amnesty continues to claim that it “takes no position as to when life begins.” “But how can a human-rights organization take no position on who is a human being?” scoffed Ryan T. Anderson of First Things.

Loss of Credibility

The abortion decision marks the end of Amnesty International’s credibility as a human rights organization, but it did not come about overnight. Rather, it is arguably the outgrowth of the Stop Violence Against Women initiative that Amnesty launched several years ago, When you start segregating human rights offenses by gender, rather than by type or country, it is a sure bet that the star of the radical feminists is on the rise. Recent hires within the organization — one executive cut her teeth at the abortion-promoting Human Rights Watch, for example — have cemented the change.

More generally, Amnesty International has allowed itself to evolve into a typical left-wing organization — possessing all the perverse views of that genre. One need not look beyond its three “global campaigns” to see that this is so. Besides “Stop Violence Against Women,” its first featured campaign, AI is going all-out in two other areas: “Stop Torture and Ill-Treatment in the ‘War on Terror,’” and “Control Arms.”

The focus of the “Stop Torture and Ill-Treatment” campaign is the United States which, as everyone on the Left knows, is responsible for most of the torture and ill-treatment going on in the world today. In its annual report, AI devotes page after page to what it calls the “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment of prisoners of war by the U.S., while saving little about human rights in North Korea and Cuba, which get one page each, and nothing at all about Al Qaeda. The real terrorists, in other words, get off scot-free.

Catholics Dropping Out

Influential Catholics, no longer able to abide the organization’s anti-life tilt, have been resigning from the organization. The latest to go to is Cardinal Keith O’Brien, head of the Catholic Church in Scotland.

He will not be the last.