Two years ago Amnesty International lost thousands of supporters when it said it would adopt a new policy supporting abortion. Now, an Irish journalist has written that “Amnesty International has gone in recent years from being an organisation devoted to the rights of prisoners-of-conscience in foreign jurisdictions to a lobby group concentrating selectively on ideological issues within the immediate jurisdictions in which it operates.”

Writing in the Irish Times, John Waters said: “I often wonder what its founders would have thought about this. I wonder, too, if people who stuff cash into the boxes of Amnesty’s street collectors are aware of the implications of what has occurred.”

“Twenty years ago, the idea of Amnesty lecturing the Irish Government in partisan terms on a matter on which there is democratic controversy would have been inconceivable,” he continued. “The old-style Amnesty considered human rights too vital to be mixed up with everyday political argumentation within democratic societies.”

Mr Waters was reacting to Amnesty Ireland’s call for homosexual adoption rights, but his comments could just as easily apply to Amnesty’s ideological shift in favour of abortion.

“It’s simply wrong and contradictory for Amnesty to work for human rights and support abortion,” said Íde Nic Mhathúna of Youth Defence. “Instead of protecting the weak and the vulnerable Amnesty are attacking those who are utterly defenceless and whose lives are most at risk, while ignoring the fact that the abortion industry abuses women for profit.”

This week Amnesty issued a report attacking Nicaragua’s pro-life laws, a move Youth Defence described as a “wholly unwarranted interference”.