As the granddaughter of Sean MacBride, Amnesty’s late co-founder and international chairman, Iseult White feels the human-rights charity is part of her DNA. In the Seventies and Eighties, the pre-Christmas period at home was always spent writing to various prisoners of conscience around the world, and supporters of Amnesty’s work were always in and out of her grandparents’ house.
An Irish Republican, MacBride, who died in 1988, had spent time in prison, as had his firebrand mother, Maud Gonne, who set up the Women Prisoners’ Defence League. Years after Amnesty was founded in London in 1961, initially to fight for prisoners of conscience, MacBride widened its remit in the 1970s to champion miscarriages of justice and oppose torture. A fundamental principle of the organisation was that human rights were universal.
So when, in 2020, White saw that Amnesty International Ireland had signed a letter from the lobby group Transgender Equality Network of Ireland, effectively calling for the silencing of free speech on trans issues, she saw red. The letter demanded that the media and politicians “no longer provide legitimate representation” for people described as sharing “bigoted beliefs”.
“The whole letter was batshit crazy, and I couldn’t believe that Amnesty had signed,” says White, a psychotherapist. “And then I saw the CEO of Amnesty on Twitter claiming it was only British feminists who had any sort of issue around self-ID.”
The Irish Amnesty had effectively waded into what had become known as the gender wars, which saw many feminists and gay men coming out against the idea that society should unquestioningly treat a biological man as a woman if they identify as the opposite sex.
But attempting to silence those who held an opposing view seemed like “authoritarian behaviour”, which is what Amnesty was established to campaign against. “I was shocked,” says White, who describes herself as same-sex attracted. “I felt hurt. So I put myself out there, I wrote a letter saying that by signing such a document, Amnesty was seeking to deny legitimate representation to people of conscience.”
White soon discovered what happens if you speak out against the trans lobby. She got death threats and was warned by her bosses to stay off social media. It became such a storm that she felt she had to take some time off work.
But at the same time she started to look at Amnesty with clearer eyes, and some of the projects it was involved in – from working with pimps to legalise prostitution to working with a British group since accused of having an “Islamist orientation and views” – shocked her, all the more because the organisation’s reputation relies on the good work done by her grandfather and others. The Amnesty International building in Dublin is named after MacBride, who served as Amnesty’s international chairman until 1975 and helped shape it into a global human-rights NGO.
All worth it to get pimps labeled “sex workers” amirite?
White was one of the earlier figures to start raising the alarm about Amnesty’s recent approach. This week, though, a spotlight was shone on the body’s approach to trans issues – and women – when its UK arm published a report called A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK, written by Chiara Capraro, a programme director at Amnesty International UK. It warned that an “anti-rights ecosystem” was threatening “the safety of women and LGBT+ people in the UK”. It identified 117 of these supposedly dangerous organisations, which ranged from British feminist and lesbian and gay organisations to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, to American Christian groups. Perhaps most shockingly it listed Beira’s Place – JK Rowling’s charity for female rape survivors – among the alleged offenders, for which it is now facing legal action from the Harry Potter author.
She wants to be incloooosive of darling Amnesty UK.
Amnesty UK hastened to explain “We didn’t see it, we were asleep at that time, our feet hurt, we were busy, we had just gone out for a sandwich, we had an itch, it was raining hard, our car wouldn’t start, a stoat came down the chimney, our clothes were missing, all the doors were locked.”
But the broad rhetoric from the report fitted into a pattern of criticism of gender-critical groups that remains on Amnesty’s website.
Charlotte Cadden, a former police officer who leads the PoliceSeenUK campaign for sex-based rights, warned Amnesty that “by misattributing the threat of violent protest, hate crime, criminal damage and assault to groups fighting for their sex-based rights, you risk fuelling further violence towards women and anyone who holds sex-realist views in society”.
But they’re very willing to take that risk, because quite frankly they detest women who hold sex-realist views.
It has also led to fury from some of the charity’s best-known supporters. The actor John Cleese, who helped organise and perform fundraisers for the charity in the 1970s, wrote on X: “I was once a major fund-raiser for Amnesty. But in those days, it was about preventing torture. Not about sexual identity. I disown them.”
Global treasure, that man.
[I]n recent years the organisation has increasingly waded into controversy. In 2010, Amnesty drew criticism for collaborating with Cage, an advocacy group that was campaigning for “victims of the war on terror”, to campaign against Guantanamo Bay detentions and torture. The relationship led to the departure of Gita Sahgal, the head of Amnesty’s gender unit, who wrote an internal email condemning Cage, which in 2024 was described in Parliament by Michael Gove as giving “rise to concern for their Islamist orientation and views”. Amnesty distanced itself from Cage after the 2010 row, but Sahgal later described an “atmosphere of terror” and “deep misogyny” at her former workplace where, she said, staff were cowed into accepting the prevailing line.
She’s been a hero of mine ever since.
In 2015, Amnesty sparked anger from feminists when it issued a report as part of a push to persuade countries to decriminalise the sex trade. One key group quoted in the report was the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, even though its vice president, Alejandra Gil, had been jailed for 15 years for sex trafficking.
Ah yes the campaign to call the prostitution of women “sex work” – so progressive.
In 2019, an independent report commissioned after the suicide of two Amnesty International staff members found a “toxic” working culture at the organisation, including widespread bullying, public humiliation, sexism, racism and abuse of power by management.
And then there’s the Hamas angle but this is long enough, I’ll spare you.
