Amnesty International has found itself at the centre of a remarkable controversy after publishing – and then withdrawing – a report that accused Catholic and Christian non-profits of being part of an alleged “anti-rights movement”. The episode has raised uncomfortable questions, not simply about Amnesty’s internal processes, but about the disturbing mission drift the organisation has undergone since its founding.
The founder of Amnesty International, Peter Benenson, was himself a convert to Catholicism, which had a strong, lasting influence on his life. He said he first came up with the idea for Amnesty on November 19, 1960, when he read that two Portuguese students had been sentenced to seven years in prison for allegedly “having drunk a toast to liberty” under Salazar’s dictatorship. Peter’s indignation at this gross injustice precipitated the founding of Amnesty – and gave rise to the organisation’s enduring practice of raising a “toast to freedom” to conclude its meetings. Benenson published the now-famous appeal, “The Forgotten Prisoners”, on the front page of the Observer in 1961.
The appeal generated thousands of responses; newspapers republished it internationally, and within a year similar campaigns had sprung up in more than a dozen countries. The organisation was dedicated to protecting “prisoners of conscience” – people jailed solely for their beliefs. Early campaigns investigated conditions in apartheid South Africa and supported prisoners’ families financially. Amnesty’s mandate later widened to include torture and unfair trials, and in 1977 it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work.
Over the past two decades, Amnesty’s work has taken a new direction. It has now decidedly aligned itself with the progressive Left, particularly on sexuality and reproduction. Since 2020, Amnesty’s policy has called for the full decriminalisation of abortion “regardless of reason”, including up to birth; it also opposes restricting sex-selective abortion, stating that “restricting access to safe abortion is not the answer to structural discrimination”.
In Ireland, Amnesty has had a pernicious effect in the debates surrounding the rights of the unborn child. From 2014 they advocated a repeal of the Eighth Amendment which enshrined the equal right to life of pregnant women and their children in the Irish constitution. When repealing this protection came before a referendum in 2018, Amnesty claimed that voting in favour of repeal would be “a vote for equality, for dignity, for respect and compassion”. Repeal carried the day with two-thirds of the vote.
Amnesty had begun adopting policies on sexual morality now well identified with the progressive Left in 2015. It adopted a policy for the full decriminalisation of prostitution, including the removal of laws against buying sex, solicitation and organising prostitution. As early as 1991, Amnesty extended its “prisoner of conscience” protections to those jailed solely for homosexuality – but that policy has since grown into advocacy central to the organisation’s broader work on sexual orientation and gender identity. Amnesty UK’s now-withdrawn “A Growing Threat” report, which characterised British Catholic and other Christian organisations as part of a coordinated “anti-rights ecosystem”, is the most recent and most striking expression of that drift.
Amnesty’s subsequent apology is somewhat amusing. It said: “We apologise for the publication of the briefing ‘A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK’. This document should never have been published, and full responsibility for this error rests with Amnesty International UK… We will commission an independent external review to learn from this moment.” It is indeed very sorry that you now know what it privately thought of you – granted, its policies left little mystery there. The tragic irony is that Benenson himself warned against exactly this outcome, writing in Persecution 1961 that “If [Amnesty] were ever to fall under the control of one country, ideology or creed, it will have failed in its purpose”. By its own founder’s standard, that day has come.
Catholics should recognise in this redacted briefing from Amnesty that essential separation between the city of man and the City of God. We are decidedly not working towards the same ends as our secular counterparts, even if we occasionally use similar-sounding rhetoric. Protecting public access to healthcare sounds good until you realise that what is meant by “healthcare” is in fact anything but – sterilisation of minors and the abortion of unwanted children. Likewise, “protecting human freedoms” sounds beyond reproach until you learn it means campaigning for the destigmatisation of prostitution.
It can be very challenging as a Catholic to hold your nerve in the face of such vast worldwide organisations promoting their own perverse vision of the human good. It is necessary, especially in public policy, that we adopt the habit of keeping an eternal perspective. God’s plan is not incidental to our ends, but is their antecedent and ultimate cause. The greatest harm the policies of NGOs such as Amnesty International cause is not to the bodies of our brothers and sisters, but to their souls. They imperil real human freedom, which is found only through the subjection of the human will to the divine.
We must recognise the subtle substitution of genuine human freedom for mere licence to do whatever we want. Freedom is given to man for his pursuit of the good, for relationship with God. Apart from this good, freedom degenerates into a licence to do anything, even acts contrary to our nature, which are now celebrated across the world. This is not freedom; it is the very worst kind of slavery.
The deeper irony of this story is that Amnesty has accused the Catholic Church and other Christian institutions of its own failure. Human sin has always been an act of self-harm – a severing of our hearts from Him who is our only satisfaction and the fulfilment of all desire. Indeed, they exemplify not only the growing but present threat of progressive morality – an anti-rights movement as old as Eden.
It is a tragic reality that organisations such as Amnesty were founded by men of goodwill such as Peter Benenson, who himself espoused the Catholic Faith, but who, like so many others, have watched their work become twisted. Amnesty has since become a hotbed of radical progressivism, promoting policies as contentious as its current stance on transgender ideology.
