Amnesty should ‘mind the gap’ in its stance on human rights

THEY say that when you point one finger there are five pointing back at you.

Amnesty International Ireland’s call to the Government to mind the gap “between the commitments it has made under international human rights law and its implementation in national policies” has left the organisation wide open to the charge that there lies an even bigger gap at the heart of its own operations.

It is the credibility gap between Amnesty’s own commitments to promoting human rights and its implementation of these same commitments. In its own words, Amnesty International (Ireland) claims to be committed to “ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity” (see www.amnesty.ie). Yet, the organisation has undertaken, paradoxically, to promote the most fundamental abuse of those same rights. If that situation wasn’t bad enough, what makes it worse is that these rights belong to the most vulnerable of all individuals: unborn children.

Without the right to life, there is clearly no “freedom of conscience”, no “freedom of expression” and no “freedom from discrimination” (quoting again from the Amnesty website).

But, when confronted with this point at last month’s Céifin conference in Ennis, Seán Love, executive director of Amnesty International (Ireland), completely failed to address the issue.

Later in the month, Amnesty’s credibility gap was even revealed in the arts. The sanitised depiction of the death penalty as a medical procedure in the Gaiety Theatre’s excellent operatic production of Dead Man Walking was widely praised, and the proceeds of the opera went to Amnesty.

Speaking on RTÉ radio, Sr Helen Prejean, the anti-death penalty campaigner, said of the production “everything’s white … clinical … antiseptic … banal (but) this (the death penalty) is not a medical procedure”.

How true. And yet how many times is abortion also falsely represented in this way as a health issue?

But while no disease is ever cured by taking human life — let alone by taking the life of the innocent — recent research has again shown that killing the innocent does in fact cause disease.

Putting women at risk in this way surely also constitutes what Amnesty calls “grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity”.

This is the season of Advent, the time, more than any other, when unborn life is welcomed as a sign of hope.

Now more than ever, Amnesty cannot continue trying to straddle its own credibility gap. It’s a case of Amnesty ignoring “the infant in the womb”.

Dónal O’Sullivan-Latchford

19 Alma Road

Monkstown

Co Dublin