Amnesty International has culture of white privilege, report finds
Amnesty International has a culture of white privilege with incidents of overt racism including senior staff using the N-word and micro-aggressive behaviour such as the touching of black colleagues’ hair, according to an internal review into its secretariat.
It came as eight current and former employees of Amnesty International UK (AIUK) described their own experiences of racial discrimination and issued a statement calling on senior figures to stand down.
One of the whistleblowers, Katherine Odukoya, said: “We joined Amnesty hoping to campaign against human rights abuses but were instead let down through realising that the organisation actually helped perpetuate them.”
Representatives of both arms of the UK-based human rights organisation apologised and pledged to make changes, with the director of AIUK citing “the uncomfortable fact that we have not been good enough”.
The internal review at Amnesty’s international secretariat, commissioned following the Black Lives Matter movement, recorded multiple examples of workers reporting alleged racism including:
Senior staff using the N-word and P-word, with colleagues labelled over-sensitive if they complained
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