Amnesty International Betrays Public By Hiding Human Rights Abuses and Sexism in Sweden

Sweden seems like a progressive country to the uninformed. It has parental leave policies for both genders. While mothers have always availed themselves of such leave, fathers seemed reluctant. So the parental leave laws have changed over time to encourage fathers to take time off of work after the birth of a baby. At present, two months of the 390 leave days allocated for parents must be used by the father or they are lost.

(from Why it’s time to reimagine masculinity at work and at home. ^[1])

Consider contemporary family life in Sweden. In the past, new parents split 390 days of paid leave however they liked—monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly. Women used far more of it than men. But today, new fathers no longer rush back to work, leaving the mother to raise little Sven all by herself. The reason for the change? Smart public policy.

In 1995, Sweden passed a simple but revolutionary law: couples would lose one month of leave unless the father was the one who took it. A second use-it-or-lose-it month was added in 2002, and now more than 80 percent of Swedish fathers take four months off for the birth of a new child, up from 4 percent a decade ago. And a full 41 percent of companies now formally encourage fathers to go on parental leave, up from only 2 percent in 1993. Simply put, men are expected to work less and father more.

By altering the roles of the Swedish father and the Swedish worker, Sweden’s paternity-leave legislation has, in turn, rewritten the rules for Swedish men (and, by extension, women). “Swedish dads of my generation and younger have been raised to feel competent at child-rearing,” writes Slate’s Nathan Hegedus, an American who experienced the system firsthand. “They simply expect to do it, just as their wives and partners expect it of them.” If a man refuses time at home with the kids, he faces questions from friends, family, and, yes, other guys. Policy changes produced personal changes—and then, slowly but surely, society changed as well.

On the surface, this sounds quite progressive. The United States lacks similar leave policies and American men often feel discouraged from taking time off from work for family matters. They fear they will be looked down upon, ridiculed, or passed over for promotions if they take more than a short time away from work for a new baby.

But the reality is that Sweden’s progressiveness is merely a veneer over a solid core of the same false feminist male-bashing that predominates in the Western world. Children in Sweden, you see, are treated as property of the mother. If the mother doesn’t want to share, she simply starts making false abuse allegations. No proof is required, obviously a mad mom’s word is more reliable than all the evidence in the world. She will be quickly and easily rewarded with sole custody, marginalizing the father to no more a few days per month with the children.

Many fathers quickly see even this small amount of contacted whittled down to just a few hours of supervised visitation, supervised because obviously fathers cannot be trusted with children if the mother says so. In Sweden, as in the United States, men are guilty upon accusation and must struggle to prove themselves innocent, a task which is effectively impossible in many cases. After all, if you are a man who was accused of some crime that nobody else saw and there is no evidence of it occurring or not occurring, how are you to prove that you didn’t do it when a mom says you did? You can’t, so her lies win.

If a father fights for equal child custody, Swedes will consider him a brute. If he is beaten senseless by false accusations from a malicious mom, his life in tatters, he will suffer in many ways including by very limited contact with his children. Then Swedes will consider him a deadbeat. Being a father in Sweden is a losing proposition, the only chance of success is at the whim of a woman. But if she changes her mind, for any reason — her affair, her drug abuse problem, etc. — the father is instantly a degenerate who should be banned from seeing the children without the watchful eyes of the state closely monitoring his every move.

This is no different, really, than the United States and many other nations in which men are not even second-class citizens in all matters involving families and children. Not only is this extremely unfair, it contributes to a wide range of social problems including gender conflict, parental alienation child abuse, and harming children’s educational attainment ^[2] and mental health.

To their credit, many women understand these issues very well and fully support equal rights. Some of them are strident enough about it to actively support both the father’s rights movement and going to significant effort to ensure their own ex-partners stay involved in their children’s lives. Unfortunately, there are more than a few naysayers remaining. Some of them are quite intent on not only denying equal rights but going so far as to even any messages that advocate for changes they do not approve.

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Amnesty International Shows Its Sexist Bias

A lot of children in Sweden are upset about deprivation of access to a loving parent, generally their fathers. Four Swedish high school students, Sara Sivesson, Jerry Wallén, Sandra Atas, and Oskar Krantz, set out to expose Sweden’s human rights crimes against children and fathers to the world. They produced a video which they submitted to Amnesty International for a human rights video contest. Their video explains what happens to so many Swedish fathers who long to spend time with their children but who are prevented from doing so by the typical false feminist tool of false accusations.

The right to be a father (final) (Swedish audio, English subtitles)

The video made it to the finalist stage. The students were of course very excited by this.

But then a woman’s violence organization in Uppsala reportedly demanded that Amnesty International remove the video from the competition and its website.

Entry in Amnesty Contest stopped by the Womens Shelter in Uppsala (Sweden) ^[5]

Subject: Successful protests

Hello!

Earlier today we sent you an urgent request that you should protest against the movie “The Right To Be A Father”

Thanks to the protests, the movie never was displayed on the Festival and it was later removed from their website. We thank Amnesty for still fighting for justice!

Kind Regards,

The Womens Shelter in Uppsala

Sure enough, Amnesty International did what the sexist women in Uppsala wanted.

(from Amnesty International: Human Rights or Feminist Wrongs? ^[6])

“But our film was never shown at the festival, and the day after it also disappeared from Amnesty’s YouTube channel,” says Sara Sivesson, one of the creators. Further, the students claim they obtained an email from the Uppsala feminists bragging, “Thanks to the protests Amnesty did not show the film at the festival and they also dropped it from their website.”

The matter was publicized by blogger Joakim Ramstedt, who alleges that his government health benefits were then revoked because of his blogging and that confidential information from his own custody case (he has not seen his five-year-old daughter for over a year) was leaked and posted on the internet in an effort to smear him. Sweden prides itself on protections for privacy and civil liberties, but this may be what we can all expect when a welfare state manages our lives.

Amnesty Interational’s Coverup

Lise Bergh of Amnesty International claims there were other reasons for its removal in this form email the organization has been sending out to many people complaining about their actions:

Dear _____ ,

You have sent us an email with questions regarding a film festival, arranged by Amnesty in Sweden.

For seven consecutive years AI Sweden has arranged a film festival where young people, 16-19, have been invited to make a documentary film about human rights.

This year there were more than 60 films. Of those, 25 were chosen to be presented to a jury. One of those 25 films which reached the second stage in the competition was “The right to be a father”. It is a film about a custodial case between a father and a mother. It did, not however, make it to the final, where only seven films were chosen by the jury to be shown at the actual film festival.

This was the jury’s own choice, there was no pressure from any party. The claim that a women’s shelter in Uppsala stopped the film from the competition is false. They did not contact Amnesty or the jury before or during the film festival, but several days after the end of the festival.

All films (not only the finalists) were available on our special film festival channel on Youtube including the film “The right to be a father”.

A few days after the festival Amnesty was named by several people as being the originator and sponsor of the film “The right to be a father”. The reason for this misconception was that the filmmakers, at the end of the film thanked;

a) the father who appeared in the film
b) AI Sweden

We thought it was unfortunate that people could misinterpret Amnesty’s role, since we are neither involved in the making of any of the films nor do we sponsor any of the films. For that reason we tried to get in contact with the film-makers to ask them to remove the reference to Amnesty Sweden, but since it was a public holiday we couldn’t get in contact with the school before the weekend. We then removed the film from our Film festival Youtube channel and on the following Monday we contacted the filmmakers and explained why we had taken it off (temporarily) and said that we would put it back as soon as they took away the reference to Amnesty at the end of the film. They agreed to do so, but a few days later they changed their mind and told us that they refused to do that.

Since then we have received numerous emails accusing AI Sweden of censorship and false allegations that we stopped the film from competing at the festival. This is absolutely incorrect.The film was not censored, it competed on exactly the same terms as all the other films in the festival. Our only wish, after the festival, was to have the reference to Amnesty removed or re-phrased at the end of the film.

We hope that this explains the circumstances and the misconceptions surrounding this issue.

Yours sincerely,

Lise Bergh

It sounds somewhat plausible. But when you look at the credits at the end of the film, it seems overreactive. Notice the single word “Amnesty” in the lower right corner with “Tack Till” (thanks to) above it.

Further eroding Amnesty’s credibility, some of the people getting this email checked into Lise Bergh’s background and found that she works with extreme feminists, the sort who would be associated with the Uppsala women who apparently think sexist dogma is good policy.

(from Abolishing Prostitution: The Swedish Solution
An Interview with Gunilla Ekberg
by the Rain and Thunder Collective)

Gunilla Ekberg is a long-time radical feminist activist and lawyer. She is a former special advisor on issues regarding prostitution and trafficking in women and children to the Swedish government. She is currently the Co-Executive Director of the nongovernmental international organization Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, which works to combat sexual exploitation of women and children in all its forms.

R&T: If you could start by giving a little background on your work against prostitution and trafficking, particularly your experience as a special advisor on issues regarding prostitution and trafficking for the Swedish government?

Gunilla Ekberg (GE): My whole life has been about ending male violence against women. In 2001, I was asked by the Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Margareta Winberg to come to Sweden to create and implement a program on prostitution and trafficking in human beings, starting with a Nordic Baltic Campaign Against Trafficking in Women in 2002, during which I coordinated activities in the eight countries. I was given a lot of possibilities to implement quite radical feminist policies, thanks to the women who I worked with – the Deputy Prime Minister, the State Secretary, Lise Bergh, and Marianne Laxén, who was the Director for the Division on Gender Equality in the government. They were very supportive. In fact, the Swedish government at the time made the work to prevent and combat prostitution and trafficking one of their most important political priorities.

So Lise Bergh’s story looks far more suspect given her associations.

Every father I know supports equal rights for women. While I’m sure there must be some exceptions to this with billions of people on the planet, I cannot imagine how any responsible parent could advocate for anything other than equal rights for both genders. To do otherwise would be a great disservice to both present and future generations. Yet somehow dishonest organizations like Amnesty International can spout “human rights” out of one side of their mouths while denying that half the world’s population should enjoy the same rights as the other half.

(from Amnesty International Yanked Pro-Father Film from its Festival ^[7])

What Baskerville notices is that, by backing these astonishing expansions of state power at the expense of individuals, AI has become its own evil twin. When it comes to DV, the organization that won its spurs by standing up to despots now sides with them against that most humble of figures – the man who wants only to be a father to his child. The use of disinformation about DV to expand state power is nothing new. What is new is its embrace by an organization that supposedly champions individuals.

While nobody outside Amnesty International may ever know the full truth of what they did, it strongly appears that the organization has betrayed its principals and has sided with extremists who believe that men are sub-human, fathers should have no rights, and nobody should care about the children who are hurt by this.

Further Reading

Male Domestic Violence Victims Suffer from Wrongful Gender Bias ^[8]

Stopping Parental Alienation Requires Family Court Reforms ^[9]

Moms Discredit Themselves by Denying Parental Alienation ^[10]

Cole Stuart’s Review of Baskerville’s “Taken Into Custody” ^[11]

Gender Polarization Impedes Family Law Reform ^[12]

Abusive Women “Acceptable” By Double Standards ^[13]

False Feminists and Abusive and Murderous Women ^[14]

Amnesty International Yanked Pro-Father Film from its Festival ^[7]

Amnesty International censors video highlighting issue of fatherlessness ^[15]

Amnesty International: Human Rights or Feminist Wrongs? ^[6]

Entry in Amnesty Contest stopped by the Womens Shelter in Uppsala (Sweden) ^[5]

Feminism: The Birthplace of Sexist Hypocrisy ^[16]