How Amnesty got it wrong
How it wrote its withdrawn report on 'anti-rights' groups
How did Amnesty UK end up publishing a report it quickly withdrew after a backlash from women’s rights groups and LGB rights groups, who said the report defamed them? It seems to have emerged by combining two previous publications; one criticising conservative Christian groups and one criticising gender critical groups.
First, in June 2025, Amnesty UK published an analysis called ‘The Anti-Rights Movement’. It listed what it described as a network of sixty-five ‘anti-rights’ groups operating across the UK. It referred overwhelmingly to conservative Christian groups who opposed abortion and LGBT rights. It did not refer to any groups based on other religions, or secular groups.
Second, in May 2026, Amnesty UK published a briefing called ‘Like a Snowball: the Growth and Impact of the Gender Critical Movement in the UK’. This referred back to the 2025 analysis, and said: ‘this briefing examines the nature and role of gender critical actors’. It said their starting point on gender is different from conservative Christian groups, but their objectives are similar.
Finally, in July 2026, Amnesty UK published a report called ‘A Growing Threat: the Anti-Rights Movement in the UK.’ This merged the Christian groups from the first document with fifty gender critical groups from the second, and described them all collectively as ‘an organised anti-rights movement targeting the rights of women and LGBT+ people.’
That seems to be the sequence of events that led to the withdrawn report being published: first an analysis describing conservative Christian groups as ‘an anti-rights movement’; then a briefing criticising gender critical groups while noting the difference in worldviews between them and Christian groups; then a merging of the two sets of groups together under the single label of ‘an anti-rights movement.’
I accept the authors sincerely believed they were doing good. They were mistaken. Amnesty UK says the final briefing was uploaded without going through its internal review processes, and its language does not reflect its position. But that does not explain how the underlying analysis developed through the two earlier publications. Here are the problems with that analysis.
Problems with Amnesty’s underlying analysis
It is simplistic for Amnesty UK to frame Christian anti-abortion groups simply as ‘anti-rights’. For context, I actively campaign for the right of any woman to have an abortion based on her own conscience. National and human rights law increasingly protects this right. And we as campaigners, including Amnesty, should criticise campaigns that would restrict women’s access to abortion.
But we should also be fair to those who sincerely disagree with us. Opposition to abortion is a protected religious or philosophical belief under human rights law. If Christians sincerely believe that abortion kills unborn children, and that the creator of the universe forbids it, many will feel morally obliged to campaign against it. Our job as secular liberal campaigners is to persuade legislators why women’s rights should prevail. And we are doing this successfully.
It is unreasonable for Amnesty UK to label women’s rights groups, LGB rights groups, and women-only rape crisis centres as not only ‘anti-rights’ but part of ‘an anti-rights movement’. And this report does this by simply listing them, without analysing their aims, showing that they share an ‘anti-rights’ strategy, or examining their positions on equal civil rights for transgender people.
Nor can Amnesty UK act as if human rights and equality law have already settled these questions in its favoured direction. In Goodwin v United Kingdom, the European Court found Member States must provide a system of gender recognition. It also recognised that States retain a margin of appreciation over how that system operates.
In the UK, Forstater v CGD Europe has held that gender-critical beliefs are protected under the Equality Act, and For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers has held that the words ‘sex’, ‘woman’ and ‘man’ in the Act refer to biological sex. These judgments do not resolve every disagreement. But they show that Amnesty’s preferred interpretation is not the settled legal position.
Amnesty is a human rights organisation. It should protect equally the human rights of conservative religious and liberal secular people, including women, LGB people, transgender people, and children. And it should lobby governments to legally balance competing rights claims in a fair way, consistently with human rights principles.
It should not simply decide which competing rights it prefers, and label groups advancing other rights as ‘anti-rights.’
The June 2025 report on Christian groups
In June 2025, Amnesty UK published the findings of an analysis called ‘The Anti-Rights Movement’.
I can’t find the report itself online, but the Amnesty webpage announcing the report says that ‘a powerful anti-rights movement is growing in the UK, threatening to roll back our hard-won freedoms and rewrite the rules on whose rights, bodies and lives deserve protection.’
It also says there is a network of sixty-five anti-rights groups operating across the UK. This includes anti-abortion organisations, groups promoting so-called ‘conversion therapy’, UK branches of powerful US-based organisations, and ultra-conservative Christian groups. It does not address people of religions other than Christianity who promote conservative beliefs about social issues.
It says these groups collectively spent £106 million from 2019 to 2023. 25 anti-abortion organisations, including thirteen so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centres’, pretend to offer impartial advice, but actually actively discourage abortion. Twelve groups promote the harmful and abusive practice of so-called ‘conversion therapy’.
The May 2026 report on gender critical groups
In May 2026, Amnesty UK published a briefing called ‘Like a Snowball: the Growth and Impact of the Gender Critical Movement in the UK’.
The introduction refers back to the June 2025 study, then says: ‘This briefing examines the nature and role of gender critical (GC) actors. Even though their starting point on issues of gender is different from those of actors such as ADF and other ultra conservative Christian groups, their objectives in relation to trans people are remarkably similar.’
It recognises the following differences in worldviews:
‘Ultra conservative Christian actors, such as the ADF, seek a society where women and men have different and rigid roles, based on what is ‘natural’ and ‘traditional’. In their view, the concept of ‘gender’, which means that women’s and men’s roles are socially constructed, and therefore can change, is a threat that must be rejected.
GC actors instead consider ‘gender identity’, the intimate sense someone has of their gender, that may be different from their sex assigned at birth, as reinforcing damaging stereotypes. In their view, so-called ‘gender ideology’ pushes gender non-conforming young people, in particular masculine lesbians, to think that they are men and should transition.’
The July 2026 report merging both sets of groups
In July 2026, Amnesty UK published a report ‘A Growing Threat: the Anti-Rights Movement in the UK’. This is the report that they have subsequently withdrawn.
This report seems to broadly merge the conservative Christian groups and gender critical groups from the two earlier documents. It now describes them collectively as ‘an organised anti-rights movement targeting the rights of women and LGBT+ people.’
It does not make the distinction, that the second report did, between the worldviews of Christian groups and secular gender critical groups. Instead it simply says:
‘Amnesty International UK defines anti-rights actors as formal and informal groups, individuals, private and state actors whose aim is to restrict human rights by undermining human rights protections in law and practice.’
It then lists various groups by name, and recommends that the Charity Commission should review the awarding of charitable status, the NHS should not signpost patients to crisis pregnancy centres, and institutional donors and grant-makers should strengthen due diligence to reduce the risk of funding them, and fund the ongoing monitoring of them.