In her preface to its 2024 annual report on human rights throughout the world published today, the Secretary General of Amnesty International, Agnés Callamard, refers to new threats to “freedom of expression.”
Lest you start to think that she may have been mostly referring to existing totalitarian and authoritarian regimes denial of the right to express one’s opinion, or even to the moves by some democratic states to curtail such rights of expression under the rubric of “hate crime,” do not get too excited. For it would seem that the baddies in all of this are not states imposing restrictions, but rather “Big Tech” (you know who she means) “enabling spreading misinformation and curtailing freedoms of expression.”
Think on that, because what Callamard is complaining about is not actually state repression of freedom of expression, but “Big Tech” not suppressing freedom of expression and specifically not suppressing views that are contrary to the ideological position of Amnesty International and the left liberal advocacy NGOs and their related political partners.
How do I know what that ideological position is? Well, because Callamard refers to “inequality” as a metric against which to judge a state’s human rights record. Thus, the ludicrous selection of Britain and Hungary and India as dreadful offenders because allegedly in those jurisdictions “defenders of economic and social rights were among the activists most widely targeted” and “climate activists were branded “terrorists” for denouncing governments expanding fossil fuel production and investment.”
Did this lead to widespread state repression of said activists, or even their being targeted for violence by the state? Or lead to political parties and movements associated with such activists being banned, or being prevented from standing in elections or denied the right to publish and publicise their views?
No, it did not. Among the egregious current examples of “violations” by Hungary referenced by Amnesty in this report are that “Asylum seekers were refused access to protection,” and that “the government’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fell short of the EU targets.” (p.192.)
That is not an objective appraisal of Hungary’s human rights record. It is something that would be more appropriate to the political manifesto of a Hungarian left political formation.
Likewise, Callamard regards attempts to roll back “abortion rights” in some states of the United States and in Poland as violations of human rights. One wonders what one of the founders of Amnesty International, Seán MacBride, who was a strong supporter of the right to life of the unborn, would have made of this Orwellian distortion of the very concept of human rights.
The same line is evident in the section devoted to human rights in the Irish state. There is not one mention of the proposed “hate speech” legislation even though that is now recognised by growing sections of the Irish public as the main issue pertaining to freedom of expression here.
Why is that? Well, to put it bluntly because Amnesty and the other left liberal advocacy NGOs and the left liberal parties; Sinn Féin, Labour, and Social Democrats, were generally supportive of the Government proposals, as was clear from Amnesty Ireland’s own submission on the legislation.
In fact, the only other reference apart from “Big Tech” to freedom of expression is Amnesty Ireland’s complaint that “No progress was made in addressing restrictions imposed by the Electoral Act 1997 (as amended in 2001) on the freedom of civil society organizations to access funding for campaigning purposes.” (p211.)
Which is basically Amnesty Ireland whinging on its own behalf, and on behalf of other NGOs, that they may be restricted in taking funding to campaign in election campaigns, or what are effectively electoral campaigns, which is presumably why even the NGO malleable Irish state is somewhat cagey and reticent in this respect. Irony and these people are distant cousins it would seem.
The first line of the section on Ireland states: “The crisis in housing availability worsened, including for asylum seekers.” (p.210.) One of the solutions to this apparently would be for the state to hold a constitutional referendum to enshrine the right to housing. It then goes back to how the “worsening housing crisis continued to seriously impact the availability and quality of accommodation for asylum seekers.”
This is a good example of what you might term a lack of “joined-up thinking.” Nay, a clear case of not seeing the wood for the trees even, or not understanding a simple case of cause and effect. For it hardly requires the mathematical genius of a Niels Bohr or Pascal to comprehend that if a country has a large and increasing number of people entering the country who are in need of housing that this will lead to increased demand for housing.
It also stands to reason that if a large proportion of such persons are not coming here to work and will be for an unquantifiable period of time dependent on state provision, including accommodation, that this will particularly impact on both the social housing sector and on state support for persons moving into private accommodation but supported through the Housing Assistance Payments (HAP).
The other pressing human rights issue identified by Amnesty in Ireland – one in keeping with the overall pro-abortion bias of the organisation globally – is that a report on the abortion regime here “acknowledged the negative impact of conscience-based refusal by medical professionals to provide abortion care and recommended removing criminal liability for healthcare professionals.”
So not content with having contributed, on the spurious basis that abortion is a “human right”, to achieving probably the greatest victory of the Irish liberal left in having abortion on demand legalised, Amnesty and the rest now wish to remove the right of persons working in the health sector to not to take part in “abortion care” for reasons for conscience.
No further comment is required other than that if there was a single salient founding principle of Amnesty in 1961, it was to do with the defence of what one of MacBride’s co-founders Peter Benenson described as “prisoners of conscience.” These were people, largely subjects of the Soviet Union and other socialist states, who were imprisoned and persecuted on the grounds of “dissenting” from what their rulers had decided were uncontested “truths.”
In the wake of the collapse of the fallacies of Marxian socialism, abortion has replaced those verities as among the uncontested axiomatic “truths” of the left. Therefore no-one, including doctors and nurses, has the right to dissent. Not even, it would appear in the eyes of an organisation that was established to defend that right to dissent from state imposed “truths.”