Human Rights Watch

Rights Groups Call On United Kingdom To End All Arms Sales To Israel

May 13, 2025 Areeb Ullah, Middle East Eye. Resist! Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israel, Oxfam, Palestine, United Kingdom (UK), weapons

Rights groups and charities gathered outside the Royal Courts of Justice on Tuesday to support a legal challenge against the UK government's continuing export of F-35 fighter jet parts for use by Israel. Holding Palestinian flags and signs calling on the government to “stop arming Israel”, dozens of campaigners joined the lawyers leading the case to demand an end to all UK arms exports to the country as its war in Gaza enters its 20th month with more than 52,000 Palestinians killed. Groups present at the protest included Palestinian rights group Al-Haq, which bought forward the current case with the support of the Global Action Legal Network (GLAN), Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam.

Human Rights Watch Outflanks Trump

May 5, 2025 Roger D. Harris, Popular Resistance. Educate! Human Rights Watch, Liberal class, Trump Administration, US Sanctions, Venezuela

It’s been over 100 days since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. Most NGOs to the right of the Heritage Foundation are alarmed about his confrontational international posture and related erosion of the rule of law. Human Rights Watch (HRW), a supposedly liberal organization, is also concerned. But their problem is that the president hasn’t gone far enough – at least in the case of Venezuela. HRW’s latest report on Venezuela calls for intensified illegal measures that cause misery and death, outflanking Trump from the right. At issue for HRW is last July’s Venezuelan presidential election that saw Nicolás Maduro declared the winner.

Israel’s Genocide Day 404: Israel Is Committing Ethnic Cleansing

November 15, 2024 Qassam Muaddi, Mondoweiss. Educate! Ethnic cleansing, Genocide, Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine

Israel is committing “systematic,” “widespread” displacement of the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip, the international human rights group, Human Rights Watch, said in a report on Wednesday. According to the report, Israel’s actions may amount to a crime against humanity. The group dismissed Israeli claims about Palestinian fighters hiding among civilians, and said that “There is no plausible imperative military reason to justify Israel’s mass displacement of nearly all of Gaza’s population, often multiple times,” indicating that “from the first days of the hostilities, senior officials in the Israeli government and the war cabinet have declared their intent to displace the Palestinian population of Gaza.”

How Human Rights Watch Laundered Israel’s 7 October Falsehoods

July 23, 2024 William Van Wagenen, The Cradle. Educate! Genocide, Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Israel, Media, Palestine, Propaganda, Report, Wars and Militarism, Whitewashing

Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a new report on 17 July entitled “I Can’t Erase All the Blood from My Mind,” in which the US-based rights group brazenly claims that Hamas’ leadership issued orders for its fighters to deliberately kill Israeli civilians during their attack on Israeli military bases and settlements in the Gaza envelope on 7 October. Then, based on that unsubstantiated premise, HRW declares that Hamas leaders are guilty of committing crimes against humanity for launching last year’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. However, any close reading of the report reveals that HRW bases these allegations on dubious evidence. The rights group deliberately ignores the much stronger evidence – presented by numerous Israeli military sources – that Israeli military leaders issued orders to their forces to kill Israeli civilians deliberately.

The Zionism Discourse On Palestine Is Crumbling

May 16, 2021 Ramzy Baroud, Middle East Monitor. Educate! Human Rights Watch, Israeli Apartheid, Palestine, Zionism

On April 27, one of the world's largest and most credible rights groups, Human Rights Watch (HRW), concluded, in a comprehensive 213-pages report, that Israel is an apartheid state. "Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power and land has long guided government policy," the report entitled "A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution" read in part. More specifically, HRW wrote that Israeli "authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity."

Billionaire-Backed Human Rights Watch Lobbies For Lethal US Sanctions

April 12, 2020 Ben Norton, The Grayzone. Educate! Human Rights Watch, Nicaragua, US Regime Change, Venezuela

Human Rights Watch, the leading so-called rights organization in the United States, has actively lobbied for Washington to impose suffocating sanctions on leftist governments in Latin America. The group has even praised the Donald Trump administration for ramping up its aggressively destabilizing regime-change measures. NGOs like Human Rights Watch (HRW) depict targeted sanctions as a more palatable alternative to military action, although these measures are widely recognized by international legal experts to be a form of economic warfare that have led to the deaths of many thousands of civilians, destroyed the livelihoods of countless people, and devastated entire nations’ economies. As the coronavirus pandemic spread across the globe, HRW operatives took credit for new sanctions the Trump administration had imposed on Nicaragua’s democratically elected leftist government.

Open Letter Criticizes Human Rights Watch On Nicaragua

September 10, 2018 Nan McCurdy, Popular Resistance Educate! Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Nicaragua

I am writing to protest vigorously about your August 23rd press report in which you accuse two Nicaraguan police officials of leading the ‘assassination of dozens of protesters’ during the recent crisis in Nicaragua. These accusations rest on evidence supplied by local ‘human rights’ organizations, either directly or via bodies such as the IACHR, which in many cases are contested or unsubstantiated, or misleadingly blame state actors for violence that was actually carried out by protesters.

Rwanda: Another Example Of Human Rights Watch As An Arm Of US Empire

March 24, 2017 Ann Garrison, www.blackagendareport.com Educate! Human Rights Watch, Imperialism, Rwanda, US Imperialism

By Ann Garrison for Black Agenda Report - Human Rights Watch acts as an arm of U.S. foreign policy. This phony “rights” organization backs the deportation and prosecution of Rwandan dissidents like Joseph Nkusi, who dared to maintain that Hutus were also massacred in the Rwanda bloodbath. Under a minority Tutsi dictatorship, “even using the description ‘Rwandan Genocide’ is a crime; authorities enforce a law passed in 2008 making ‘genocide against the Tutsi’ the only legal description.” “Human Rights Watch is OK with Nkusi's prosecution because its own absolutist conclusions about the genocide are compatible with those of Rwanda’s absolutist, totalitarian government.”

Human Rights Watch: The Empire’s Human Rights Group

February 12, 2016 Staff, www.telesurtv.net Educate! Foreign Policy, Human Rights Watch, Latin America, United States

By Staff of Tele Sur - In its 2016 World report, Human Rights Watch shows how deeply it shares the U.S. government’s concern about its declining influence in Latin America. Executive director Ken Roth does not see the U.S. and its EU allies as the most abusive and dangerous states in the world - something the ongoing destruction of Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan should make clear to anyone. In Latin America, hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost due to U.S. backed coups and “counterinsurgency” in the past half century – all motivated by the U.S. government’s efforts to maintain a dominant role in the region.

Media Don’t See Problem With HRW’s Proximity To Power

September 6, 2014 Keane Bhatt, www.fair.org Educate! Human Rights Watch, Journalism, Mass Media

In late 2010, a US District Court judge threw out a case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights against President Barack Obama. The groups had argued that the administration was violating the Constitution and international law in attempting to assassinate Muslim cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki, a US citizen residing in Yemen, without providing him with charges, evidence or due process. “If the court’s ruling is correct, the government has unreviewable authority to carry out the targeted killing of any American, anywhere, whom the president deems to be a threat to the nation,” explained ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer (CNN, 12/7/10). A little over a month later, Obama hosted a state dinner for President Hu Jintao of China—an event “highly choreographed,” supposedly, to raise human rights concerns, according to Voice of America (1/24/11). The dinner was to take place on the heels of a joint news conference in which Obama “gently but pointedly prodded China to make progress on human rights,” wrote the New York Times (12/19/11) unquestioningly.

Nobel Peace Laureates Slam Human Rights Watch

July 9, 2014 Mairead Maguire, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Richard Falk, Richard Falk and Keane Bhatt, www.alternet.org Educate! Human Rights, Human Rights Watch

The credibility of a global human-rights organization depends on its independence. Human Rights Watch has done important, critical work, but it can do better. It should implement at least a five-year "cooling-off" period before and after its associates move between HRW and the U.S. government's foreign-policy divisions. Human Rights Watch associates should concentrate on protecting human rights. They should not have conflicts of interest with past or future careers in branches of the U.S. government that may themselves be involved in human-rights violations. We eagerly await your reply, and believe that HRW’s implementation of cooling-off periods for its associates and its removal of Solana from its board of directors will represent valuable first steps toward greater independence.

Human Rights Watch’s Weak Position On Drones

June 19, 2014 Jeffrey Bachman, www.commondreams.org Educate! Barack Obama, Drones, Human Rights Watch

In an effort to defend Human Rights Watch against recent criticism that its cozy relationship with the U.S. government threatens its objectivity, Executive Director Kenneth Roth and Reed Brody, Counsel and Spokesperson, mistakenly thought HRW’s coverage of the Obama administration’s use of drones offers a defense against such charges. On May 12, Roth received a letter written by Keane Bhatt and co-signed by multiple Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, a UN Special Rapporteur, and more than 100 scholars. In the letter it states, “Human Rights Watch characterizes itself as ‘one of the world’s leading independent organizations dedicated to defending and protecting human rights.’ However, HRW's close ties to the U.S. government call into question its independence.”

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