Amnesty International United Kingdom apologized after it published a report detailing the rise of anti-trans, anti-queer, and anti-woman civil society groups in the country, and identified over 100 of them by name. Now J.K. Rowling is threatening to fund lawsuits against Amnesty from those very groups.
This comes after a number of the named groups threatened Amnesty International United Kingdom with defamation lawsuits if it did not remove the report. Amnesty took it down within hours of it being published.
A spokeswoman for Amnesty told the Scottish paper The Herald that "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 Amnesty International UK's positions. Its use of language does not reflect the position of Amnesty International UK which is why it was promptly removed."
Their statement does not specify what language is inaccurate, or what would have to be changed to make it accurate.
Amnesty’s actions make sense in light of the UK’s notoriously loose defamation laws “which penalize statements that could damage someone’s public image among “right-thinking members of society””, according to Politico. This standard for defamation lawsuits is lower than that in most democracies.
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This is why Holocaust Denier and former children’s author J.K. Rowling is offering to personally fund lawsuits against Amnesty on behalf of the organizations listed as an “Anti-rights group” in the report. Her fortune, combined with the UK’s favorable laws, make such suits far more likely to succeed.
One such organization, founded with Rowling’s money, is Beira’s Place, a women’s shelter founded for the purpose of excluding trans women from runaway shelters.
Another group that has been hinting at its interest in such a lawsuit is For Women Scotland (FWS), the group whose case led to the UK government only recognizing a person’s sex assigned at birth for most legal purposes. This then led to the UK floating guidance that would bar trans people from public bathrooms, a change which FWS supports.
Their letter to amnesty reads, “We now ask that you apologise to FWS for the malicious characterisation of our organisation in your report”, and threatens that “further measures” would be taken if Amnesty did not comply.
One key takeaway of the Amnesty report was how such groups have an order of magnitude more funding than they had a few years ago. Over the period the report covers, 2019 to 2024, the funding of anti-rights groups in general rose 47%, while the funding of groups primarily focused on opposing trans rights rose by 1,958%, an increase ten times greater than that of any other category.
Another takeaway is that the biggest source of funding for anti-rights groups in the UK are similar groups from the United States, rather than UK-based groups.
The report makes no mention of J.K. Rowling or her fund, since there is no hard data on how much she is contributing. It is possible that the report is under-counting the total funding as a result.
As such, the full scope and scale of anti-trans funding, as detailed by the report, is much larger than just J.K. Rowling. It is a campaign waged by dozens of organizations.
To read the full report, you can do so below, or click this link:
