Amnesty Senior Leader Under Fire for Muslim Brotherhood Ties

Media is reporting that Amnesty International’s Director of Faith and Human Rights  Yasmin Hussein is facing public scrutiny for close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood:

A senior employee of Amnesty International has undeclared private links to men alleged to be key players in a secretive network of global Islamists, The Times can reveal. The charity was unaware that the husband of its director of faith and human rights featured in documents released after a criminal trial at which connections were revealed between British supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and Arab Islamists accused of plotting to overthrow a Gulf state.

Hussein’s husband Wael Musabbeh’s name appeared among documents submitted during the 2013 U.A.E. trial against suspect Muslim Brotherhood conspirators reportedly engaged in fomenting revolution against the Emirates. Those arrests would kick off a series of confrontations between the U.A.E. and Egypt on the one hand, and Qatar, which backs the Muslim Brotherhood on the other. Subsequently, the U.A.E designated the Brotherhood, and a host of its international affiliates, including those in the United States, as terrorist organizations. Amnesty International weighed in against the U.A.E, repeatedly condemning it for its prosecution of Muslim Brotherhood-linked figures. Amnesty now claims it was unaware Hussein’s husband had a tie to the case because it didn’t know the two were married.  Musabbeh is the director of the Human Relief Foundation (HRF), a UK-based charity and member of the Hamas finance network known as the Union of the Good. Steve Merly in a NEFA Foundation report indicated how HRF had multiple donor organizations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S., Ireland, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

But Amnesty ought to have known that Hussein was formerly employed with Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW), itself an Islamic charity with known ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. As the Center for Security Policy has previously reported:

In 1999, the IRW accepted a $50,000 check from Osama Bin Laden. In 2006, Israel arrested its project coordinator in its Gaza office, Iyaz Ali, for funneling money to Hamas. In November 2012, the British Bank UBS closed the IRW’s account and blocked its customers from donating to the charity. In June 2014, Israel officially declared the organization to be illegal and banned it from operating in Israel and the Palestinian territories due to its financing of Hamas. In November 2014, the United Arab Emirates declared the IRW to be a terrorist group.

Amnesty International’s slant towards Pro-Muslim Brotherhood, Pro-Hamas, and even pro-Taliban positions has become increasingly apparent over the years. If the organization hopes to have any chance of restoring credibility it will need to take drastic action to terminate any employees found to be close to the Muslim Brotherhood, and to conduct an audit and review of all of the materials which they wrote or oversaw during their tenure for evidence of bias.

But the organization’s track record of resistance to outside scrutiny suggests that’s unlikely to happen.