Human Rights Watch (HRW) is a nonprofitwatchdog group headquartered in New York City.[3]
The organization was founded in 1978 asHelsinki Watch, whose purpose was to monitor theSoviet Union's compliance with the 1975Helsinki Accords. Its separate global divisions merged into Human Rights Watch in 1988.
Asia Watch (1985), Africa Watch (1988), and Middle East Watch (1989) were added to what was known as "The Watch Committees". In 1988, these committees united under one umbrella to form Human Rights Watch.[8]
In August 2020, the Chinese governmentsanctioned HRW executive director Kenneth Roth—along with the heads of four other U.S.-based democracy and human rights organizations and six U.S. Republican lawmakers—for supporting the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement in the2019–20 Hong Kong protests. The five organizations' leaders saw the sanctioning, whose details were unspecified, as a tit-for-tat measure in response to the earlier U.S. sanctioning of 11 Hong Kong officials. The latter step, in turn, had been a reaction to the enactment of theHong Kong National Security Law in June.[10] In October 2021,The New York Times reported that HRW left Hong Kong as a result of the Chinese sanctions, with the situation in Hong Kong henceforth to be monitored by HRW's China team. The decision to leave came amid a wider crackdown on civil society groups in Hong Kong.[11]
Each year, Human Rights Watch presents theHuman Rights Defenders Award to activists who demonstrate leadership and courage in defending human rights. The award winners work closely with HRW to investigate and expose human rights abuses.[13]
HRW's former executive director isKenneth Roth, who held the position from 1993 to 2022. Roth conducted investigations on abuses inPoland after martial law was declared in 1981. He later focused onHaiti, which had just emerged from theDuvalier dictatorship but remained plagued by problems. Roth's awareness of the importance of human rights began with stories his father had told about escapingNazi Germany in 1938. He graduated fromYale Law School andBrown University.[15]
Tirana Hassan was the group's executive director from 2023[16] to February 2025.[17]
Human Rights Watch andAmnesty International are both international non-governmental organizations headquartered in the North AtlanticAnglosphere that report on global human rights violations.[13] The major differences lie in the groups' structures and methods for promoting change.
Amnesty International is a mass-membership organization. Mobilization of those members is the organization's central advocacy tool. Human Rights Watch's main products are its crisis-driven research and lengthy reports, whereas Amnesty International lobbies and writes detailed reports, and also focuses on mass letter-writing campaigns, adopting individuals as "prisoners of conscience" and lobbying for their release. HRW openly lobbies for specific actions for other governments to take against human rights offenders, including naming specific individuals for arrest, orsanctions to be levied against certain countries, such as calling for punitive sanctions against the top leaders inSudan who oversaw a killing campaign inDarfur. The group also called for human rights activists who had been detained in Sudan to be released.[18]
HRW's documentation of human rights abuses often includes extensive analyses of conflicts' political and historical backgrounds, some of which have been published in academic journals. AI's reports, on the other hand, tend to contain less analysis and instead focus on specific rights abuses.[19]
In 2010,Jonathan Foreman wrote that HRW had "all but eclipsed" Amnesty International. According to Foreman, instead of being supported by a mass membership, as AI is, HRW depends on wealthy donors who like to see the organization's reports make headlines. For this reason, according to Foreman, it may be that organizations like HRW "concentrate too much on places that the media already cares about," especially Israel.[20]
In 2010, financierGeorge Soros of theOpen Society Foundations announced his intention to grant $100 million to HRW over ten years to help it expand its efforts internationally.[21] The donation, the largest in HRW's history, increased its operating staff of 300 by 120 people.[22]
In 2020, HRW's board of directors discovered that HRW accepted a $470,000 donation from Saudi real estate magnateMohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber, owner of a company HRW "had previously identified as complicit in labor rights abuse", under the condition that the donation not be used to support LGBT advocacy in the Middle East and North Africa. AfterThe Intercept reported the donation, it was returned, and HRW issued a statement that accepting it was "deeply regrettable".[23]
In the summer of 2004, theRare Book and Manuscript Library atColumbia University in New York became the depository institution for the Human Rights Watch Archive, an active collection that documents decades of human rights investigations around the world. The archive was transferred from the Norlin Library at theUniversity of Colorado, Boulder. It includes administrative files, public relations documents, and case and country files. With some exceptions for security considerations, the Columbia University community and the public have access to field notes, taped and transcribed interviews with alleged victims of human rights violations, video and audiotapes, and other materials documenting HRW's activities since its founding in 1978 as Helsinki Watch.[30] Some parts of the HRW archive are not open to researchers or to the public, including the records of the meetings of the board of directors, the executive committee, and the various subcommittees, limiting historians' ability to understand the organization's internal decision-making.[31]
HRW has been the subject of criticism from a number of observers. Critics of HRW include the national governments it has investigated, the media, and its former chairmanRobert L. Bernstein. The criticism generally falls into the category of allegedbias, frequently in response to critical HRW reports.[32][33][34] Some sources allege HRW is biased against Israel in its coverage of theIsrael–Palestine conflict.[4][35][36][37] In 2026, HRW's Israel and Palestine director resigned after HRW blocked a report that argued that Israel's denial of thePalestinian right of return is a "crime against humanity".[38]
HRW has been retaliated against by governments upset by its reporting, including Russia, which effectively banned the organisation from operating in the country in 2025.[40]
^Historical Dictionary of Human Rights and Humanitarian Organizations; Edited by Thomas E. Doyle, Robert F. Gorman, Edward S. Mihalkanin; Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; Pg. 137-138
^Colum Lynch (September 12, 2010)."With $100 million Soros gift, Human Rights Watch looks to expand global reach".Washington Post.Archived from the original on October 18, 2017. RetrievedAugust 31, 2017.The donation, the largest single gift ever from the Hungarian-born investor and philanthropist, is premised on the belief that U.S. leadership on human rights has been diminished by a decade of harsh policies in the war on terrorism.
^Davis, Stuart (2023).Sanctions as War: Anti-Imperialist Perspectives on American Geo-Economic Strategy. Haymarket Books. p. 94.ISBN978-1-64259-812-4.OCLC1345216431.
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