CARE appears on ‘anti-rights’ “blacklist”

Not for the first time in our history, CARE has made it onto the naughty list. Our crime? Being an ‘anti-rights’ organisation.

Earlier this month, the UK branch of Amnesty International published a report titled “A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK”. Taking aim at 117 organisations they have identified as ‘anti-rights’, the piece frames itself as a ‘follow the money’ exercise to chart the growth and influence of those it deems a threat to human rights in the UK.

What follows is essentially a hit-job on organisations with whom Amnesty disagrees politically. It includes Christian organisations like CARE, which are placed in the ‘ultra-Conservative Christian policy and advocacy’ category, as well as gender critical groups, and organisations advocating for the rights of the unborn.

This murky underworld of ‘anti-rights’ actors are united in their commitment to ‘eroding existing [human rights] frameworks’, ‘creating alternative [human rights] frameworks’, ‘fostering moral panic’ and working transnationally to achieve their goals. The subtext is almost conspiratorial, and ironically, the moral panic barely concealed.

“These organisations form part of a wider anti-rights ecosystem—a network of groups that work on different issues but share similar goals and often support each other's efforts to roll back human rights protections.”

It is a sprawling report with unconnected assertions and assumptions hinting that everything from Brexit to government welfare and immigration policy, to crisis pregnancy centres and the 2025 Supreme Court ruling that one’s legal sex rests on their biological sex, is part of a determined attack on human rights in the UK.

It is essentially an exercise in labelling. Dismissing organisations, individuals, and political movements as ‘anti-rights’ and therefore attempting to delegitimise their arguments and work without ever engaging substantially in the substance of their arguments. After all, who wants to be branded as anti-rights?

All that’s needed is the right label and your opponents can be dismissed in one fell swoop.

Sometime ago I came across this quote from the psychologist Esther Perel which I think explains this well:

“I don’t like what you do, so I say you’re gaslighting me. You have a different opinion, and I bring in a term that makes it impossible for you to even enter into a conversation with me. Labeling enables me to not have to deal with you. But in the end, it creates more and more isolation and fragmentation. That is not necessarily a good thing for the community and for the social good.”

She’s talking about interpersonal relationships, but what’s true of our day-to-day interactions with one another can also be true on the bigger scale of public life. Have not recent years seen a plethora of labels from ‘fascist’ to ‘wokerati’ as a means of dismissing arguments and groups wholesale?

Yet interestingly, this time at least, it seems to have gained little traction in the public square. The outrage against the report has been considerable.

Sex Matters, one of the groups implicated in the report, has collated no less than 28 letters written in response to Amnesty International. An Early Day Motion expressing ‘extreme concern’ about the report has been tabled by Labour MP Antoniazzi Tonia and signed by several other MPs. And J.K. Rowling has pledged to fund legal claims made by women’s groups and gay men’s organisations that were subject to the defamation.

As such, Amnesty International has withdrawn the report from its website and self-reported itself to the Charity Commission by submitting a serious incident report.

The CEO of Premier, another organisation ‘blacklisted’, had the following to say:

“Amnesty has real questions to answer about how this report came to be created and published in the first place, and what it reveals about their true position on these matters. Withdrawing the report is a first step but should be followed by a clear statement that it does not see the organisations listed as being ‘anti-rights’.  Amnesty was founded with a mission to protect freedom of conscience and belief, it is sadly ironic that in reports like this it actually achieves the complete opposite, by making accusations against organisations and individuals seeking to thoughtfully contribute to the national debate on what are complex and contentious issues."   

Amnesty International has since claimed the report’s “use of language does not reflect the position of Amnesty International UK which is why it was promptly removed.” Nevertheless, similar reports and blogs remain on their website.

Furthermore, whilst they have since stated “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.” It remains to be seen why groups holding to gender critical, pro-life, and explicitly Christian platforms were highlighted as deserving of having their charitable status reviewed.

It seems that despite Article 18 and Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights setting out the universal right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, and the right to freedom of opinion and expression that ought not to apply to political opponents.

Likewise, one could credibly argue the pro-life cause from the UN Declaration of Human Rights with the right to life arguably the most fundamental of any ‘human right’. Nevertheless, despite the legitimacy of the unborn child’s claim to life, the advocates of life in the womb are reframed as anti-rights.

Whilst the report steered clear of more forceable attempts to disenfranchise organisations like CARE from public life, this was nevertheless a concerted effort to delegitimise those with different political positions on matters such as sex, sexuality, abortion, and the role of religion in public life.

Thankfully, on this occasion there was little appetite for engaging in such tomfoolery. In large part because Amnesty International picked on some very odd targets.

Take for instance, ‘Beira’s Place’ an Edinburgh based support service for women who have suffered sexual assault. The charity, founded and funded by J.K. Rowling has been at the centre of the backlash against Amnesty International sparking widespread confusion about the nature of the list.

Ultimately, as one works their way through the hit list, what becomes clear is not so much an ‘anti-rights’ vs ‘pro-rights’ divide, but rather differing conceptions of human rights and how they play out in real life.

Whilst there is truth to Amnesty’s argument 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”, ‘human rights’ frequently come into competition and become contentious, precisely because they are not considered to apply equally to everyone, and precisely because the world is confused about the nature of humanity.

There are, after all, numerous times in the real world when different rights claims bash up against each other depending on your understanding of humanity. For instance, the transgender debate has raised numerous examples from single-sex spaces to female sport. Likewise, the abortion debate, despite being framed as pro, or anti, women is rather a debate about how the rights of the unborn child and the rights of the mother relate.

And so, we need politics. As has been written about before in these pages, politics is about the building and stewardship of communal life despite differences in opinion, belief, or religion. That is not to say that all opinions, beliefs, and religions are equally true, but it is to say that the way to approach said differences is to seek whatever is true, whatever is noble and whatever is right through debate and deliberation.

Amnesty’s fault, therefore, is less that they disagree and therefore oppose the groups on their list, but that rather than presenting arguments of good faith backed up by data, stringent research, and rigorous discussion, they have sought to frame debate in such a way as to exclude their opponents without engaging the substance of their arguments. Rather than debating human dignity and one’s understanding of what leads to human flourishing, debate is closed and opponents vilified.

As Christians, we can be confident that whatever is true, whatever is noble, and whatever is right will win out, because we follow the God who laid the foundations for the universe, whose word is true and good, and whose Lordship over all creation will one day be clear for all to see. We can therefore trust that the moral truths interwoven into the fabric of creation will chime as true in public life.

Indeed, the very backlash against Amnesty for their criticism of gender critical groups is evidence of this. Despite heated debate and several years of contentious and at times vitriolic campaigning, the Supreme Court ruled that biological sex was the basis for legal sex. Although still not universally accepted, the criticism of the Amnesty report on these grounds is evidence that politics can land on what is good and true and right through debate and through hard work.

Indeed, human rights is essentially a secular framing of the long-held Christian belief in the dignity of the human person. Without those foundations, human rights as a moral framework are helpful, but liable to get muddled as the competing claims highlighted above reveal. Human rights require a higher order to serve as a helpful tool. When rights come into competition, there must be some other conception of what is good and right and true to adjudicate the respective claims.

And this muddle can be seen in Amnesty’s work. Until now, this blog has been largely critical, yet Amnesty was founded to uphold the Declaration of Human Rights and has throughout its history been committed to opposing authoritarianism and political oppression. There is much there that a Christian can commend.

At the same time, their vehement support for abortion and transgender ideology, under the guise of human rights, is a wrong framing of rights, ultimately framing what is wrong as what is right, in opposition to what God has set out in His law.

Our human rights moral framework is a good idea all in a muddle and this really shouldn’t surprise us. After all the Bible commends both the goodness of God’s creation and the corruption of the Fall. It highlights human depravity but also common grace. And it speaks of the objective and universal truth of God’s moral order, and yet the human tendency to suppress the truth.

It would be arrogant to contend that Christians have the ability to single-handedly correct our muddled rights framework, after all, we remain flawed. Nevertheless, organisations like CARE do what we do because we believe the Bible has something of value to say in our public square, that we can work hard to uphold and promote what is true, and noble, and right, and that ultimately because of God’s common grace, we can find alignment with even those with whom we disagree in service of causes that please God.

There are of course risks, being branded ‘anti-rights’ by those that misunderstand us and have a muddled conception of rights is just one of them. But it’s a risk worth taking for God’s Word is true and His ways are good.

And incidentally, these same convictions should lead us to oppose the labelling and crass dismissing of our opponents on display here. After all, if we can trust that truth and goodness will win why would we engage in slander and deception? Surely, that would usurp the witness of our message…