by Robbie Dinwoodie

In 2005 her first campaigning work for Amnesty involved violence against women and she soon came across the pitfalls of working for a Scottish outpost of a London organisation

NAOMI McAuliffe, project director in Scotland of the human rights organisation Amnesty International, is a glass half-full kind of woman, which in the era of Brexit, Trump and Covid-19 is probably just as well.

Amnesty is organised into different sections in countries all over the world and, like the television quiz show Pointless, defines a country as a sovereign state recognised by the United Nations. Thus, there is an Amnesty International UK based in London, of which Scotland has a branch office. “During the independence referendum, like a lot of organisations, we had to do scenario planning on what would happen and came to the conclusion that we would be a separate section of Amnesty International were Scotland to become independent,” said McAuliffe.

Would she welcome the chance to be director of Amnesty International Scotland? After a burst of laughter she replies: “Yes. This question comes up quite a bit internally, what direction are we going in? I’ve learned over the past four or more years that you can’t predict anything. I come back to the question, what is our work right now? I would say that we are in effect working as if, as in many respects we are, an independent country. The Scottish Government is dressing for the job it wants rather than the job it has. If they are doing that, we are going to respond in order to use that as a lever to achieve human rights change.

“Whether Scotland is independent or not, if they have, as they do, offices in China, throughout the European Union or North America, we want to use those channels to do that. Whether we in Amnesty become a separate section, how that will change what we do as an office, who knows? I’ll probably have a lot more admin to do. In terms of how we create our strategy and what we do to interact with the Government I would hope we would still be reacting to the reality on the ground rather than how we are legally defined within the UK.”

When McAuliffe arrived in Edinburgh to embark on a politics degree in 1998 it was the first time she had stepped foot in Scotland. She was born in South London and grew up in the Irish community there. Both her parents came from Dublin and her mother had family in Kilkenny so all her childhood holidays were spent over the Irish Sea. Choosing a university at which to study politics, she was looking for “somewhere that wouldn’t infuriate me too much” (hint, not Oxford or Cambridge) so she opted for Edinburgh and fell in love with the city at a time when New Labour seemed to offer a fresh politics and devolution was on its way. “It was also interesting what was going on politically in Scotland at that time, so in coming here I definitely made the right choice.”