Gita Sahgal was suspended from her post as head of the gender unit of Amnesty International consequent to a Sunday Times article published in 7 February 2010. In this article Sahgal expressed her discomfort with the Amnesty International's collaboration with Moazzam Beg, a former inmate at Guantanomo Bay, in Amnesty's "Counter Terror With Justice" campaign. She is quoted to have said that for Amnesty "to be appearing on platforms with Britain's most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment."
On the same day Sahgal issued a statement where she spelt out the essential basis of her discomfort: "The issue is a fundamental one about the importance of the human rights movement maintaining an objective distance from groups and ideas that are committed to systematic discrimination and fundamentally undermine the universality of human rights."
Like most controversies things have now moved down a degenerative communication spiral where the words of participants from the different viewpoints have led to the magnification of the other. There is a Facebook group "Amnesty International You Bloody Hypocrites Reinstate Gita Sahgal" (which I signed up to despite my reservations with the intemperate language in the name of the group). There is Salman Rushdie, from whom I agree temperance is a fond hope, who sees in Amnesty "a moral bankruptcy" and that the organization "deserve[s] our contempt." There have been some anguished individuals who in their messages have threatened withdrawing of support to Amnesty. Gita Sahgal on her part continues to maintain her dignified opposition to Amnesty's continued association with Moazzam Beg, holding that it will be something that Amnesty will regret in the future.
With the power of hindsight, it is clear that Amnesty's knee-jerk reaction to suspend Gita Sahgal, on full pay pending an independent enquiry on whether she violated her employment contract, has contributed to the snowballing of this issue. The interim Secretary General of Amnesty International, Claudio Cordone's waffling in the CBC Radio interview on how Moazzam Beg's appreciation of the Taliban government does not contradict Amnesty's documentation of the rights abuses perpetuated by the regime, does not do justice to the immensely important global role that has fallen on Amnesty and its commendable history of practice.