Amnesty International at 60: Are they staying the course or has mission creep led them astray from their founder?

 We remember

On the 28th of May 1961 an article appeared in The Observer that captured the imagination of people around the world. This text was taken from an Amnesty statement on the 50th anniversary and adapted for the 60th.

Written by London lawyer Peter Benenson, The Forgotten Prisoners called for an international campaign for the release of thousands of people who had been jailed because of their political or religious beliefs. They were given the name ‘prisoners of conscience.’That call for justice a six decades ago was the birth of Amnesty International, a human rights group which has since grown into a global organization with over three million supporters in 150 countries. In recognition of their human rights campaigning, in 1977 they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

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Peter Benenson said that the impetus for The Forgotten Prisoners was a newspaper article he read about two students jailed for seven years in dictator Antonio Salazar’s Portugal simply for raising their glasses and toasting freedom. At the time he said he wanted to “mobilise world opinion” about the human rights abuses being committed by governments around the world against those citizens whose opinions differed to theirs.

Amnesty International's first meeting where it came into existence in London in July 1961 with Peter Benenson and six other men that included a Conservative, a Liberal, and a Labour Member of Parliament. It was an initiative that had a broad consensus, but that has changed over the past six decades.

The Left's take over of human rights discourse over the past decades to advance its own agenda has benefited it but at the expense of the pre-existing international human rights consensus. For example, Amnesty International's campaign beginning in 2007 to conflate the right to an abortion with its worldwide campaign to stop violence against women alienated many Catholic supporters, and has been described as anti-Catholic. 

Catholic bishops, who had been members of Amnesty International, resigned over the abortion issue because the human rights group had become an abortion lobby group. Catholics generally have been encouraged to boycott the organization. Independent Catholic News reported:

Cardinal Martino, who served as the Holy See's permanent observer at the United Nations, says that this change of position is part of the "pro-death" agenda in modern culture. The cardinal said that Amnesty International's decision means Catholics and Catholic organizations should no longer financially support the group. "The promotion of abortion opens the door to the slippery slope of evil and death, where human rights are taken away from the most innocent and vulnerable children of God," he said. "I believe that, if in fact Amnesty International persists in this course of action, individuals and Catholic organizations must withdraw their support."

Furthermore Article Three of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the right to life, and this is not accidental. This is because this human rights document drafted and signed on December 10, 1948 was not a compromise between liberalism and socialism but lobbied for and drafted by Christian Democrats with the active support of the Catholic Church and all the world's great faith traditions.

Jacques Maritain

Catholic roots of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Pope John Paul II recalled the Roman Catholic Church's role in 1991 in the Papal Encyclical Centesimus Annus published on the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum:

...[A]fter the Second World War, and in reaction to its horrors, there arose a more lively sense of human rights, which found recognition in a number of International Documents⁵² and, one might say, in the drawing up of a new "right of nations", to which the Holy See has constantly contributed. The focal point of this evolution has been the United Nations Organization.

One of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was Jacques Maritain, a French philosopher who was a profound Catholic and anti-modernist inspired by Christian humanism:

There is but one solution for the history of the world, I mean in a Christian regime, however it may be otherwise. It is that the creature be truly respected in its connection with God and because receiving everything from Him: humanism but theocentric humanism, rooted where man has his roots, integral humanism, humanism of the incarnation.

The formation of the United Nations was an opportunity for Latin Americans to push for international human rights standards. The American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man was the first international human rights instrument signed into existence in Bogota, Colombia on May 2, 1948 eight months prior to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December of 1948 where Latin Americans played a major and crucial role, among them the Cuban delegation. The first draft of the Declaration was fashioned from various models collected by the UN Secretariat among them "a model based on a Cuban-sponsored proposal at the San Francisco conference, a proposed first draft offered by the Chilean delegation, and the earlier Panamanian draft."

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is heavily informed and influenced by Catholic social doctrine found in the 1891 Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII. The Catholic Church in its social teaching rejects both liberalism and communism embracing a defense of the dignity of human beings grounded in its own metaphysical vision of personhood that began to be formulated in the Middle Ages, and developed into a universal concept in the 1500s.

Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas

The holistic approach to human rights that embraces both civil/political and social/economic rights was not found in a compromise between the liberal Anglosphere and the socialist Soviet sphere but was the initiative of Catholic thinkers, states and the Holy See that shaped this important document that was embraced by the major faiths around the world that shared its common truths achieving a unanimous human rights consensus with that document.

This is all the more ironic because the founder of Amnesty, Peter Benenson, "in 1958, he underwent a conversion to Roman Catholicism, and his new faith became a dominant influence in his life. He ceased to look to politics for a solution to the world's problems, and concluded that the answers lay in individual regeneration", reported The Guardian on his passing in February 2005.