The International Human Rights Movement by Neier Aryeh

Author:Neier, Aryeh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

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Human Rights Watch

THOUGH HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH HAS BECOME ONE OF THE TWO most important institutions for the protection of human rights worldwide, its beginnings in the late 1970s did not seem to foreshadow its subsequent development. The organization is an outgrowth of the efforts of a handful of people to address one particular human rights problem of the era. They did not plan in advance its expansion to address a full range of issues worldwide. Nor did they begin with the intent to adopt the modus operandi that soon came to define the organization’s character. Those developments were, to a large extent, accidents of history.

There were, of course, aspects of the development of Human Rights Watch that, at least in retrospect, seem inevitable. The organization was created in the late 1970s, at a moment of burgeoning public concern, particularly in the United States, with the cause of international human rights. As the major nongovernmental organization already active in the field, Amnesty International, was based outside the United States, was not the recipient of significant financial support from well-to-do U.S. donors and private philanthropies, and did not seek such support, there was an obvious opening for a new American organization. Moreover, in that period, Amnesty’s definition of its own mandate was narrow. It did not include efforts to address violations of the laws of war and, from the standpoint of many Americans who were starting to become concerned with the protection and promotion of rights internationally, it had an even more important shortcoming. It did not then consider that it should devote itself to influencing the conduct of American foreign policy. Amnesty was so concerned to operate evenhandedly that it would only have turned its focus on American foreign policy if it could do the same with respect to the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, which was impossible. In combination, these factors assured that one or another of the several international human rights organizations that were formed in the United States in that period would become an important institution in the field and would have the potential to rival Amnesty International in the leadership it could provide worldwide. The accidental factors that worked in favor of the development of Human Rights Watch included the radical political shift in the United States in 1981 from the Carter administration that espoused the human rights cause to the Reagan administration that initially disdained it; the growing need to confront violations of the laws of war in the context of the Central American wars of the 1980s; and the organization’s development of a style of reporting that equipped it well to enter into political combat with officials of the Reagan administration who were intent on co-opting the human rights cause for their own Cold War purposes, and who greatly resented reporting that portrayed American client states and military forces as culpable for serious abuses.

The first component of the organization that began using the name Human Rights Watch nearly a decade later was Helsinki Watch, established in 1978.

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