A review into workplace culture has discovered there is a toxic working environment at the human rights champion Amnesty International. Reports of bullying, humiliation and other abuses of power appear widespread.
An US v THEM culture is reported to exist, with lack of trust in senior management.
The declared vision of Amnesty international is ‘A world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards’.
So you have a profound contradiction at play, between the intent of Amnesty, and the reality of the internal culture.
The purpose of The Beacon Light is to provide guidance, to make sure that you are on the right path, making decisions that match who you say you are. And the highest attainment of the Beacon is uncorruptibility, whereby your values and what you stand for can’t be compromised. But it doesn’t happen automatically. It has to be worked for. It’s testing if you ares serious about living up to who you say you are.
Amnesty are champions of human rights. Yet the abuses which they fight, appear to have become inveigled inside their own systems.
Maybe the leadership have become so outward focused that they failed to recognise that human rights begin at home, beginning with their own staff, how they are treated and made to feel.
When the Beacon light is active, its continued surveillance picks up those things which don’t feel right. It raises them as concerns before they gain a foothold as established behaviours.
But someone in the organisation has to uphold the Beacon light role and be the champion of living up to who we say we are. Upholding the motto of ‘Who we are on the outside, begins on the inside’.
When you are passionately fighting the wrongs of this world, you have to make sure that you don’t become the very thing you are standing against. Amnesty appear to have lost sight of this.