Human Rights For All

• Statement From Bennie Bunsee

  12 March

  I absolutely support Gita Sahgal’s position re Amnesty and the Taliban sympathizers. She has courageously taken a stand against an organisation that has a great international reputation, and one that is known to uphold the struggle for human rights wherever injustices exist in the world, and bring succour to desperate people. The demise of Amnesty will be a great loss to the struggle for democratic and human rights in the world. Therefore Gita Sahgal’s position is of importance to the international struggle for justice. For if Amnesty pursues the path it is taking in supporting a known Taliban sympathiser it will tarnish its great reputation, and probably reduce the great weight it carries in the councils of the world where its voice on behalf of the exploited and oppressed is heard and respected. Therefore her stand will ultimately benefit Amnesty, and Amnesty must not lightly dismiss it.

• Negotiating Scylla and Charybdis – Human rights and terrorism

  5 March
  In 1993, at the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, a group of feminist advocates held a now famous tribunal on Violence against Women. And in that moving event which reflected the experiences of thousands of women across the world, a challenge was posed to governments and to the leadership of the formal human rights movement. It was not a challenge to abandon the principles of human rights, or to dilute them. It was a challenge to embrace them more fully by accounting for the (...)

• Letter from a Swiss Feminist

  4 March

  Traditionally, Amnesty International has been defending the victims of state violence. It took years to A.I. authorities to understand that violence against women committed by states was less extensive than violence committed by other social constituencies. Thanks to internationalist feminists, A.I. came to understand this issue and this is why positions have been created within A.I. that address women’s rights.

  It is precisely one of these women who has just been suspended in London, for daring remind A.I. that if Muslim fundamentalists are victims of the state, they are also perpetrators of violations of other persons, and often of women.

• Radio Interview on NPR: Is Amnesty International Supporting a Jihadist?

  28 February

  Amnesty International defends the rights of detainees around the world — including those in Guantanamo Bay. Now the organization is defending itself from the reputations of some of those those same prisoners. Host Guy Raz speaks with Gita Sahgal, a senior official with Amnesty who was suspended after publicly criticizing the group’s affiliation with one former Guantanamo detainee. He also talks with Amnesty’s Widney Brown about the tension between protecting the rights of terror suspects and promoting their views.

• Amnesty International Off the Piste

  28 February

  Amnesty International seems to be going downhill as fast as they do in Vancouver. If the crisis over Amnesty’s support for Moazzam Beg, ex-Guantanamo Bay internee and alleged Taleban supporter, is not dealt with by Amnesty quickly coming to its senses Amnesty will have lost its credibility — and a good number of its supporters — for a long time. (Beg’s defence is that his post-release visit to Afghanistan was to visit his family.)

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