Evangelicals Now (en) has responded to an Amnesty International UK report – now withdrawn for review – which branded it, among others, an “anti-rights organisation”.
Some of those also labelled a “growing threat” to human rights were the Evangelical Alliance, Affinity, the Christian Institute, Christian Values in Education (CViE); the Christian Medical Fellowship; Living Out; Christians in Parliament; Lovewise; Christian Action, Research and Education (CARE); Anglican Mainstream; True Freedom Trust; and Brephos.
en’s Chair of Trustees Joel Morris said: “If being deemed an anti-rights organisation means that you hold to Biblical values on abortion, gender and marriage, then we’re doing what we should be doing as a Christian newspaper … To say that there’s a rise in an anti-rights movement in the UK is to say that Christians are now speaking up more boldly because they care about the country their children are growing up in.”
And en’s Managing Director Simon Byrne said: “At en, we seek to honour every person as made in the image of God, in keeping with the Christian values on which we were founded. Those convictions may sometimes lead us to different conclusions from Amnesty on contested issues, but we do not believe such disagreement should be characterised as hostility to human rights. We welcome the report’s withdrawal and hope any revised version will take a fairer and more careful approach.”
An Amnesty spokesperson said: “We regret that this briefing was uploaded to our website without going through the established internal review processes that are in place to ensure consistency, accuracy and alignment with [our] positions. Its use of language does not reflect [our] position which is why it was promptly removed.”
