How Amnesty operates a double standard over single-sex spaces in Scotland and Africa – Susan Dalgety
Amnesty International has caused deep distress to many women and exposed the intellectual void at its core
Waste no tears on Amnesty International UK, the global human rights charity that is currently under fire for attacking women’s rights campaigners. After publishing a research paper entitled “A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK” that attacked groups such as For Women Scotland, policy collective MBM and Beira’s Place – a support service for female survivors of sexual violence – the organisation faces the spectre of costly lawsuits and permanent damage to its reputation.
There have been calls for its chief executive to resign and a motion in the Westminster parliament condemning the charity’s actions. One of its most famous fundraisers, Monty Python’s John Cleese, has distanced himself from it, posting on social media: “I renounce the mob who have taken over Amnesty.” A far cry from the time when Amnesty was one of the most respected and popular campaigning charities in the world.
It was set up in 1961 to fight for prisoners of conscience, and in the 1970s widened its role to champion miscarriages of justice and oppose torture. “We believe in [a] world where everyone enjoys their rights freely, is treated fairly and lives without fear,” it boasts on its website. But not it seems, women in the UK.
‘This kind of bias’
In recent years, in what can only be seen as a deliberate effort to silence women right’s campaigners, Amnesty has expended considerable effort to discredit them, including intervening unsuccessfully in last year’s Supreme Court case. Its argument appears to be that women’s demands for the protection of single-sex spaces, upheld by the Supreme Court, discriminates against the transgender community. “... this kind of bias has no place in our society,” wrote Amnesty’s gender justice director, Chiara Capraro, last year.
Except that Amnesty International, along with a host of other global human rights organisations, such as UN Women, has rightly spent the last few decades campaigning for exactly “this kind of bias” in favour of single-sex spaces for women and girls across the developing world.
Amnesty has campaigned for safe spaces in refugee camps to protect women from sexual violence, and it supports single-sex toilets in schools across sub-Saharan Africa so that girls can manage their menstrual hygiene in safety and privacy. Yet in an astonishing display of hypocrisy, Amnesty argues that Beira’s Place, established by author and women’s rights campaigner JK Rowling, is “anti-rights” because it is for women and girls only.
Right to single-sex toilets
Over the last 20 years, I have witnessed the impact of single-sex provision in schools in one of the world’s poorest countries, Malawi. And, like many other people, I have raised money to build girls’ toilets in schools that I will never visit, knowing that my few pounds will make a real difference to a girl’s health and dignity.
Only last year, a female headteacher proudly showed me the shower room that money from Scotland had made possible. “Our girls can now clean themselves in private and feel safe,” she said. It was nothing more than a single room with a tin roof, one tap and several plastic buckets, but the privacy and security it offered was priceless. Yet last year, the parents of a young girl had to go to court to protect their daughter's right to single-sex toilets in her West Lothian school.
Across the world, UN Women estimates there are 156 million girls aged ten to 19 who still lack access to basic hygiene services, so compromising their health and education. As UN Women says, “adolescent girls are less likely to participate in work, school or social activities during menstruation”, yet Amnesty would have us believe that the British women who argue for their right to single-sex services are “anti-rights”.
This double standard, where a menstruating girl in a Kenya township or a woman in a Jordan refugee camp is entitled to single-sex spaces, but her peer in Scotland or Wales is not, exposes the inconsistency in Amnesty’s approach to human rights. Surely a girl in Hawick is entitled to the same rights as a girl in Harare?
Amnesty’s climbdown
After considerable pressure, Amnesty has withdrawn its controversial briefing and issued a statement “regretting” its publication. "Its use of language does not reflect the position of Amnesty International UK which is why it was promptly removed," it said, but the damage has been done.
For more than a decade now, women have had to defend their most basic human right – that of privacy and safety – against a powerful lobby of well-funded, long-established campaign groups such as Amnesty. Women campaigning for single-sex spaces, as set out in the 2010 Equality Act, were dubbed hateful bigots, some lost their livelihoods, others lifelong friendships for the ‘crime’ of defending single-sex spaces.
The law was always on their side, and so too should have been organisations such as Amnesty, but instead it, like so many other influential groups, was in thrall to the notion that any man who claimed to be female should be treated just like any other woman.
In its statement earlier this week, Amnesty said that 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”.
Yet for years now, Amnesty has displayed an astonishing contradiction in its own understanding of human rights by singling out British women as hatemongers for standing up for their dignity and rights, while supporting women in Africa arguing for exactly the same thing.
Recent events have caused deep distress to many women defamed by Amnesty, while also exposing the intellectual void at the heart of the organisation. “We uncover the truth and hold the powerful to account,” Amnesty states on its website. Now that the truth about Amnesty is clear, let’s hope its leadership is properly held to account.
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