Frederick Alexander wonders “what the hell happened to Amnesty International”?
I’m firmly in middle age, and the signs are all there. I can’t have a lie-in any more; I just wake up early, feeling unrested, and have to mainline caffeine for the first hour before I can get anything done. My lower back aches constantly and now works like a barometer, the pain increasing with an approaching cold front. And I’m old enough to remember when Amnesty International was an admirable organisation that defended the oppressed – back when that word described people suffering in the real world rather than grievances the sociology department workshopped into existence. Such are some of the complaints of a middle-aged Englishman, but it’s the third that vexes me most today.
Amnesty really was something special once. It stood for dissidents and prisoners of conscience: the Chinese journalist tortured for saying something that embarrassed the CCP; writers like Václav Havel, imprisoned by communist Czechoslovakia before later becoming the country’s president. I loved The Secret Policeman’s Ball, the Amnesty benefit shows associated with John Cleese. My record collection was full of Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman and the like, who helped carry the cause into stadiums around the world. Who could not admire an organisation devoted to freedom – that most contested of political ideals, and the one closest to my heart?
Today Amnesty International is a case study in everything that has gone wrong with our institutions.
Consider the latest episode, one entry in a long and growing list of absurdities. In July, Amnesty International UK published a list of organisations it said belonged to an “anti-rights ecosystem”, including Beira’s Place, the female-only support service for victims of sexual violence founded by JK Rowling. Other names among the 117 supposedly malign bodies were For Women Scotland and Sex Matters – whose great offence is essentially to insist that women exist as a biological category.
Compiling lists of ideological offenders is a bit … what’s the word? Totalitarian? Fascistic? The organisation that once existed to defend prisoners of conscience decided it would be a good idea to draw up a register of thought-criminals, a rape-crisis centre among them. I can’t imagine Tracy Chapman strumming a guitar for that. I don’t know what Peter Gabriel makes of it either. If either of them is still sane (I’m too afraid to check), they’ll likely frown on the direction of travel.
Rowling, who once worked for Amnesty back when it defended people with the “wrong” beliefs rather than compiling lists of them, threatened legal action and offered to help other organisations on the list do the same. Amnesty first expressed regret – the standard move while they work out how much trouble they’re in – and then issued an apology when they realised she was not mucking about, saying the briefing should never have been published.
Amnesty said, “We regret that this briefing was uploaded to our website without going through the established internal review processes”, which is the institutional equivalent of “the dog ate the homework”. But I’ve worked in this kind of outfit. Things like this don’t go up by accident. This wasn’t a pocket tweet. Reports go through layer after layer of review before sign-off – after which everyone holds a little drinks party to congratulate themselves on a job well done, and someone gives a small speech while another has a bit of a cry.
