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