Amnestia [Greek], “Forgetfulness”

Amnesty Has Not Just Forgotten But Betrayed its Founding Principles

Amnesty International is one of the many organizations that have strayed so far from their original principles as to be now diametrically opposed to them. It was founded in 1961 by a British lawyer named Peter Benenson. In his article “The Forgotten Prisoners”, he coined the phrase “prisoner of conscience” and asked people all over the world to write letters to demand the release of people locked up for their political or religious beliefs. Millions heeded his call. What a wonderful initiative it was.

The NGO currently using the name “Amnesty International” is another organization altogether. It not only subscribes to gender identity doctrine but seeks to elevate this set of beliefs above all other causes.

Three foundational assertions underpin the movement that is intent on imposing gender identity doctrine on society. One is “trans rights are human rights”, the second (a derivative of the first) is “trans women are women”, and the third is that there is no conflict between “trans rights” and women’s rights. All these beliefs are – though sometimes sincerely held, as are religious beliefs -- demonstrably false. They are articles of faith recited and propagated by activists whose education is saturated in a soup of ideological orthodoxy.

First: trans-identifying people have the same human rights as everyone else. Human rights are “rights inherent to all human beings,” regardless of race, sex, nationality, language, or religion. These include the right to life, liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, work, and education. They do not include, have never included, the right to be treated as a member of the opposite sex. That is simply a fiction.

Second, “trans women” are male. They are men. They may wish they weren’t men, wish everyone could see them as women, genuinely believe that they are somehow women, but they are not women. You can’t “identify” out of your sex – if you could, there would be no women left in Afghanistan. It is just another fiction.

Since gender identity activists falsely claim that “trans rights” do include the right to be treated as a member of the opposite sex, and that “trans women are women,” these claims clearly conflict with women’s sex-based rights. They also conflict with gay and lesbian rights, since homosexuality is based on sex, not self-defined “gender.”

In the UK, the indefatigable women’s rights group For Women Scotland (of whom the late YouTube genius Magdalen Berns was a founding member) achieved a significant victory against the Scottish Ministers at the UK Supreme Court. On 16 April 2025, the Court ruled that for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010 and related legislation and regulations, “sex” means (and has always meant) biological sex and that “woman” means (and has always meant) biological woman. That means that all single-sex provisions such as changing rooms and prisons must indeed be single-sex. The inclusion of any male, however he identifies, means that the provision would no longer be single-sex. (Just as it has been observed (not by the Supreme Court!) that a single peanut in a supposedly peanut-free dish is not peanut-free).

LGB Alliance and lesbian groups intervened on the side of For Women Scotland as “the lesbian interveners,” arguing that under the terms of the Equality Act, correctly understood, a “Gender Recognition Certificate” does not turn a straight man into a lesbian. The Supreme Court agreed that it does not. Another consequence of the ruling was to enshrine the rights of lesbians and gay men to their own single-sex associations. Intervening on the other side was Amnesty International UK.

Amnesty’s arguments were rejected. The law had finally been clarified. But since the large former gay rights -- now trans rights -- charity Stonewall had been training public and private sector organizations for a decade and teaching them the opposite, this ruling caused a rebellion among the genderati. Many -- including core parts of government – are still refusing to implement it to this day.

When Amnesty says, “trans rights are human rights,” it means that trans-identifying people have a “human right” to be treated in all respects as a member of the opposite sex if they so “identify.” With this false doctrine, it has pitted itself against UK law, as established by the UK Supreme Court, and against all the women’s groups and LGB rights groups that celebrated the Supreme Court’s clarification of UK law.

The tenacious resistance of women’s and LGB rights campaigners to the global drive for gender self-ID has earned the UK the epithet of “TERF Island.”

Amnesty, dismayed but undeterred by its loss at the Supreme Court, ploughed ahead, stepping up the rhetoric. It stated that the UK had taken a step backward, since legal gender recognition was a “vital human right.”

Chiara Capraro, Gender Justice Programme Director, Amnesty International UK

In 2025, Amnesty UK tried out a new term of abuse for those who argue for women’s and LGB sex-based rights. In a bizarre rhetorical flourish, it started calling them “anti-rights.” The writer behind a series of documents and interviews making these accusations is Chiara Capraro, a British-Italian Amnesty UK staff member with the title “Gender Justice Programme Director.” This new terminology brands everyone who fights for women’s, lesbians’ and gay men’s sex-based rights “anti-rights.” As if the supposed right of trans-identifying people to be treated as the sex they want is the only right worth defending. To create confusion and to cement this weird notion in the public mind, Capraro lumps gender-critical campaigners together with anti-abortion Evangelical groups funded from the US. Worse still, she calls all those -- including groups of therapists and clinicians – who oppose the medical “transitioning” of children “anti-rights.” Because children have “bodily autonomy,” don’t you know…

Well. Capraro carried on like this for quite a while, issuing another report in January 2026, condemning the phrase “sex-based rights,” which she says “do not exist in human rights law.” This is of course incorrect, since the rights and protections enshrined in the Convention on the Elimination of All Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) are explicitly based on sex. She discussed her report in a podcast in the Bellingcat series, in an episode entitled “Mapping the Anti-Rights Movement From the US to the UK with Amnesty International UK.”

Of course there were sporadic protests against the offensive characterization of people campaigning for their sex-based rights as part of an “anti-rights” movement, but it was not until July 2026, when Capraro crossed a line that could be seen from outer space, that Amnesty UK’s position attracted widespread outrage and calls for retractions and apologies in the media. I am trying to imagine how Capraro thought it made sense to include the support service for female rape survivors Beira’s Place, set up and fully funded by JK Rowling, on a list of organizations comprising the UK’s “anti-rights” movement. Nor can I fathom what she was thinking when she included groups of feminist lawyers on her blacklist. Nor how she thought it was compatible with Amnesty UK’s charitable status to suggest that the Charity Commission review the charitable status of the groups concerned. We’ve been there before. It was a mad, bad plan.

The ensuing storm propelled Chiara Capraro to the kind of notoriety everyone dreads and she soon exited social media. It also placed Amnesty UK in a glaring spotlight, prompting it to remove the report from its website. Too late, though -- it had been downloaded, disseminated, and quoted hundreds of times. The crisis deepened as scores of protest letters flooded in to Amnesty UK. To cap it all, the parent organization Amnesty International disowned the report — although, to be honest, it would be hard to identify its precise points of disagreement.

Amnesty’s unconscionable “anti-rights” rhetoric does not stand alone. A group described as “UN Experts” had also responded to the Supreme Court ruling with concern that “transgender women” might be excluded from single-sex spaces. Aside from UN Special Representative for Violence Against Women and Girls Reem Alsalem, no major international observer praised the clarification of the legal rights of women, lesbians and gay men in the UK. Shockingly, virtually every organization that once stood for the promotion of universal human rights – or civil liberties, such as the American organization ACLU – now acts as if the most important “human right” to be defended is that of being treated as a member of the opposite sex – if that’s how you “identify.”

On the role of women in the promotion of gender identity doctrine: the writer of the “anti-rights” reports attacking women’s and LGB rights groups and those promoting child safeguarding is Chiara Capraro. The Chief Executive of Amnesty UK is Kerry Moscogiuri. The chief executive officer of Amnesty International – which, despite its opportunistic disavowal of Capraro’s latest antics, is fully on board with the “anti-rights’ narrative -- is Dr Agnès Callamard. All women.

Depressing, isn’t it.

In response to the complaints it received from the groups named on its blacklist – many seeking detailed explanations for the report’s false conclusions – Amnesty UK ignored their questions and concerns and sent them all the same boilerplate email, with the concluding line:

“Human rights protections are strongest when they apply equally to everyone and no community should be singled out for unfair treatment or denied their dignity and rights.”

Well I’m sure we all agree with that, don’t we? The only problem is that Amnesty apparently takes it for granted that it is a “human right” to be treated as a member of the opposite sex, if that is how you “identify.” And as I have pointed out, that is not true. It is not a right at all, but a demand, which infringes on the rights of others.

Hubris? Confinement to a bubble that is insulated from the developments in the UK in the past seven years, perhaps seeing the Supreme Court ruling as a temporary aberration? Who knows.

Anyway, on Wednesday 15 July, Amnesty UK received what can only be described as a devastating letter before action from solicitors acting for Beira’s Place. The letter explains with icy indignation why Beira’s Place was founded and what it does – the women it supports. It concludes with a series of demands that Amnesty UK must fulfil if it wishes to avoid court action. These include not just a retraction but a public apology to all the groups Amnesty UK had described as “anti-rights” and the commissioning of an external investigation.

Amnesty UK clearly had not consulted lawyers before publishing its defamatory report, nor before sending its contemptuous reply to those it had defamed.

I think we can safely assume they are consulting lawyers now.