Saturday, September 22, 2007

Scottish schools join Amnesty International exodus

IT SEEMS THAT every day another country announces the closure of Amnesty International groups in schools as a result of the organisation's pro-abortion policy.

Catholic schools in Scotland are the latest to join the exodus from AI. According to the Scottish Catholic Observer, one of these schools, Glasgow's Holyrood Secondary, is the largest high school in Europe and has had an active AI group for more than 20 years.

The newspaper quotes a Holyrood teacher explaining his school's decision to disband its AI group: “I felt we had to withdraw not just because of the policy, but because of the way it’s presented, which was one-sided and unwilling to account for the pro-life viewpoint," he said.

The director of the Scottish Catholic Education Service Michael McGrath said he did not expect any Catholic schools to continue their support of AI and encouraged schools to campaign for human rights and justice and peace through other organisations. “While many Catholic schools have been generally supportive of Amnesty International in the past,” he said, “rather than having hard ties to the groups I think that support will now go down.”

Mr McGrath also said that schools would also be encouraged to question AI on why it had adopted the new abortion stance.A spokesman for AI in Scotland said that he would welcome an opportunity to discuss the situation with the Catholic authorities directly. Unfortunately, the point is that AI has not listened to its members in the past - many people have emailed this blog suggesting that AI did not respond to their letters. The decisions of the school boards should not be of any surprise to AI as they had been cautioned of the consequences of their decision.

The consultation process that AI conducted in the run-up to the adoption of the policy has been widely discredited and AI has yet to explain why Amnesty International UK continued to tell members the consultation was ongoing long after a decision had been reached.

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