Sir, – We are the two human rights lawyers your columnist Breda O'Brien cites in her efforts to paint Amnesty International Ireland's position on abortion as less than honest ("Amnesty abandons values of Seán MacBride", April 23rd).
O’Brien relies on a 2008 journal article we co-authored before we joined Amnesty International, where we pointed out that only one regional human rights treaty, the African Women’s Protocol, explicitly names abortion as a human right. She says that we were “intellectually honest enough” when we wrote this, and suggests that Amnesty International, in saying that women and girls have a human right to access safe and legal abortion, is not. This carries the added implication that we somehow abandoned our “honesty” when working with Amnesty International. We are aggrieved at both suggestions.
So let us be very clear – women and girls do have a human right to access safe and legal abortion. It is an interpreted right and not an expressly stated right in UN human rights treaties.
Just as there is no explicit “right to be free from female genital mutilation (FGM)” or “right to be free from coerced or forced sterilisation” enumerated in those treaties, both are today understood as falling within the rights to privacy and to be free from torture and other ill-treatment. The rights set out in UN treaties, drafted decades ago, were designed to be applied to specific issues arising in people’s lives.
These treaties are living instruments to be interpreted by treaty bodies, made up of experts elected by states, in light of current knowledge and understanding of the impact of states’ conduct on their people. That is how the development of international law works. It is clear that your columnist does not understand this.
And, just as Amnesty International says, the same is true for abortion – women’s and girls’ right to access safe and legal abortion is firmly grounded in decades of jurisprudence from a range of human rights bodies and experts.
What we wrote in 2008 about UN treaty bodies being a useful resource for women’s rights advocates is even truer today. Particularly in the last decade, recognition of the grave impact of denying women access to safe and legal abortion has been acknowledged by nearly every human rights body at the international and regional levels. This is in large part due to women themselves raising their voices against draconian laws such as Ireland’s.
We object to being dragged into your columnist’s attack on Amnesty International Ireland because it is not only unfounded, but distracts from the reality of what is happening to women and girls, including in Ireland.
We cannot comment on O’Brien’s accusing Amnesty International Ireland of disgracing one of its founding members by advocating for women’s rights, except to say that, having worked for the organisation, we can confirm that no one person in Amnesty International’s staff or membership gets to dictate the movement’s mandate.
Rather, the organisation draws its mandate from international human rights law, and it does so without apology.
We are proud that the world’s largest human rights organisation is standing up with women, including in Ireland. This is why we joined Amnesty International. This is laudable work that safeguards women’s health and often saves their lives. – Yours, etc,
JAIME TODD-GHER,
CHRISTINA ZAMPAS,
Amnesty International,
London.