On February 7, 2010, Gita Sahgal was suspended from her post at Amnesty International. WAF is publishing this statement in support of Gita. If you would like more information, please go to the website of Human Rights For All, where you can sign the Global Petition to Amnesty International: Restoring the Integrity of Human Rights.
We are concerned at the way in which Amnesty International has sought to address Gita Sahgal’s criticism of its involvement with Moazzam Begg. Surely Amnesty International should be able to tolerate questioning from one of its senior officials about its associations? Amnesty International’s equation of Gita Sahgal’s legitimate concerns with the demonisation of Guantanamo inmates as the ‘other’ by the neoconservatives and their allies in the West, in our view, amounts to a denial of internal and external accountability. What we need is a proper debate, not a closing down of debate of these important issues.
We admire and respect the work of Amnesty International to place women’s human rights on the agenda, and more generally we support Amnesty International’s campaign to highlight the plight of those who have been tortured, detained without trial and denied due process. However, we believe that it is right that Amnesty International’s stance is questioned in order to ensure that the debate on the War on Terror and religious fundamentalism is not reduced to the logic of ‘either you are with us or you are against us’. Woman Against Fundamentalism & Southall Black Sisters have sought to avoid such dead ends which fail to illuminate how and why human rights violations are perpetrated either by states or by religious fundamentalist movements.
We have fought against considerable odds to ensure that women’s human rights and those of other marginalised groups and minorities are universally accepted and addressed, especially in the face of violence and persecution by non-state actors, including all religious right wing forces who masquerade as anti-imperialist, development, human rights and anti-racist movements. Failure to acknowledge concerns that Gita Sahgal and others have raised about those who sympathise with, or have connections with, anti-democratic religious right forces in all religions, raises a concern that Amnesty International is not sufficiently committed to the rights of women and sexual minorities or freedom of expression.
When governments and individuals advocate ‘engagement’ with the Taliban – perhaps necessary to achieve peace – why are they not challenged on the authoritarian social and political agenda of the Taliban? We know from experience around the world, including post war Iraq, that women’s rights are the first to be traded in these political settlements.
If human rights are universal and indivisible – a view which we believe we share with Amnesty International – then it becomes all the more incumbent upon us all to double check who we take on as our partners. If, like us, Amnesty International accepts that the question should not be about whether some are more deserving of human rights than others, then it should urgently review its collaboration with those who sympathise with religious fundamentalist forces however difficult this may be. The time has come for all liberals working within the human rights arena to engage their critical faculties, not suspend or leave them behind for fear of being labelled Islamaphobic, anti-Semitic or racist. There is another way of looking at human rights – one which does not trade women’s rights or those of other vulnerable minorities - for either the right to security or for the right to manifest religious identity.
Women Against Fundamentalism