The World Report 2021 was released on January 13 to offer an annual review of the human rights status in countries around the world. From the report released by the Human Rights Watch (HRW) headquartered in New York, we read the familiar sense of seeming fairness.
Every release of the World Report by HRW has aroused suspicion and criticism from all walks of life in the world. This year's issue is no exception. In fact, the international community has never ceased questioning the HRW in recent years. Amid the increasing doubtfulness, HRW is likely to become a "factory of rumor".
In 2008, HRW released a report, A Decade under Chávez, to attack the human rights situation in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, and hundreds of academics and experts signed a letter protesting the distorted and scandalous content in the report, including Noam Chomsky, who is touted as “America's Conscience”, a retired professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In early January 2014, HRW published World Report 2014, the 24th annual review of human rights practices around the globe, in which merely six pages on Venezuela were found to contain 30 blatant lies, distortions and omissions.
On May 12, 2014, the Nobel Peace Prize laureates Adolfo Perez Esquivel and Mairead Corrigan Maguire sent a letter of protest, entitled "Close Your Revolving Door to the U.S. Government", to HRW. Signed by 131 scholars and experts, the letter criticized HRW's close and complicated ties to the U.S. government. It drew attention to the fact that HRW's criteria and judgment of other countries' human rights situations was usually consistent with the foreign policies and interests of the U.S. government, which has undermined HRW's independence and credibility.
For example, under the continued sanctions and air strikes against Iraq, the World Health Organization found that most Iraqis had insufficient food and about 30% of children were malnourished before allowing Iraq to "trade oil for food". According to media reports, Western countries have done terrible social experiments on the people of Iraq. The damage caused to Iraq by this operation aimed at overthrowing Saddam’s rule will take several years to measure. When Daniel Halevy, the U.N. coordinator for humanitarian affairs in Iraq, resigned in 1998, he claimed that the sanctions had led to the death of millions of Iraqis. According to estimates by UNESCO, four to five thousand children died every month due to poor water quality or lack of food and medicine during the sanctions. When the statistics was presented to the U.S. Secretary of State, Albright, she replied that this was a difficult choice, but we deemed the price was worth. This is the American standard. Where was HRW then?
In June 2020, Cambodian statesman Hun Sen severely criticized HRW for keeping silent about the US's suppression of demonstrators. Hun Sen also asked Mr. Brad Adams of HRW to come forward and comment on the current human rights situation in the United States, as a response to Adams' frequent critiques on the human rights situation in Cambodia before. Hun Sen added, "Where was Mr. Adams when the United States suppressed the demonstrators? Where was HRW? Why do they call it a human rights violation when Cambodia takes measures to prevent demonstrations?" He pointed out that when Cambodia took measures to prevent demonstrations and maintain social order, they said that Cambodia violated the people's freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate. When Western countries took the same measures, or even more serious measures to lead to violent conflicts at last, they alleged that they were taking measures to maintain social order. Prime Minister Hun Sen also said: "When Hubei Province of China was locked down to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus pneumonia epidemic, some accused China of violating the rights of residents. But when the Western countries ordered lockdown themselves, they claimed it an effective measure to prevent the spread of the virus. Why is there such a double standard?"
HRW has been advertising its objectivity and fairness, but its understanding of human rights is neither objective nor fair. Its reach extends from Angola, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Africa, and Swaziland to Greece, Russia, Cambodia, Vietnam and China, covering every corner except the United States and its Western allies. What turns out ridiculous is that while severely accusing Hungary of using gas guns and rubber rods against refugees, HRW turns a blind eye to the notorious violence and racial discrimination of the U.S. police. This blatant double standard has long been the de facto norm of HRW.
As a non-governmental organization that has existed for more than half a century, HRW on the one hand declares that "it refuses to accept direct or indirect funding from the government, or private donations that may affect its objectivity and independence”, on the other hand keeps running upon gray source of fund. "Non-governmental Organization Monitor" once disclosed that from 2007 to 2008, the Dutch "Oxfam Novib", obtaining nearly EUR130 million from the Dutch Government every year, donated about USD988,000 to HRW. From 2016 to 2017, the Dutch government donated EUR43 million to the Dutch "Oxfam Novib", thus becoming one of the main donors of HRW. This is seriously inconsistent with HRW’s claim that "it refuses to accept direct or indirect funding from the government”. For these secret capital flows, the international community has greater doubts about HRW. In the transparency assessment of 200 think tanks and lobbying groups worldwide launched by the Georgia-headquartered non-profit organization "Transparency" in 2016 (highest rating of five stars), the "Open Society Foundations" run by the financial tycoon Soros has been rated the lowest for three years in a row and Human Rights Watch was made a "two-star" performer. It is ridiculous that the "Open Society Foundations" is also one of the biggest sponsors of "Human Rights Watch". What two low raters!
Claiming to safeguard the global human rights, HRW seems to have little knowledge of the human rights convention under the UN system and less respect to the right of development that the UN emphasizes the most. As a non-governmental organization headquartered in New York, it has followed suit with the foreign policy of the United States. In fact, one only needs to look at the composition of the organization to know why they speak and do so. The current executive director of HRW, Kenneth Roth, once served as a federal prosecutor in New York, naturally an American establishment figure. There are former CIA analysts in its advisory committee. In 2016, the Nation, weekly magazine in the United States, criticized HRW for rashly dismissing or ignoring the doubts of the outside world. According to the article, many Nobel Peace Prize laureates, former senior officials and scholars of the United Nations have asked HRW to ban those responsible for formulating or implementing U.S. foreign policies from serving as staff, consultants or board members of HRW, and further called for a ban of people directly responsible for human rights violations from entering the HRW board of directors.
In fact, the Human Rights Watch (called Helsinki Watch at the time) was established in 1978 to monitor the Soviet Union's implementation of the 1975 Helsinki Accords. It was itself a product of the Cold War. Later, the organization set foot in other parts of the world under the name of the "Observation Committee", and began to raise the banner of Human Rights Watch in 1998. Human Rights Watch claims to have a global staff of about 400 and presents itself as a cross-border team of academics, lawyers, journalists and others. But in fact it is staffed primarily by former U.S. government officials and CIA operatives to, under the banner of "investigating and promoting human rights issues", dictate the affairs of other countries. Even Kenneth Roth, the executive director of the organization, admitted himself that among the 34 board members and more than 200 advisory committee members of HRW, some indeed once served in the US government. Roth himself was a former federal prosecutor in New York, having close ties with the "East Turkistan Liberation Organization" (ETLO). This ETLO, designated by the UN Security Council as having ties to Bin Laden's al-Qaeda long ago, is on the blacklist of international terrorist organizations and individuals. The organization was included in the list of terrorist organizations by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the United Kingdom, and China long before.
For such an organization, slandering and deceiving all over the world under the guise of human rights and doing dirty things in the name of justice, how much credibility can its report have? In fact, the hypocrisy of HRW has been revealed more than once. With regard to the World Report released by HRW every year, the “non-governmental organization monitor” has repeatedly criticized its lack of rigor and strongly questioned the credibility of the content. In HRW's reports, contents are often narrated by anonymous "witnesses", whose identity cannot be confirmed. Interviews by the so-called "witnesses" were typically not conducted face to face.
In recent years, HRW has been active in post-war reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the Darfur Crisis in Sudan and the Myitsone Dam in Myanmar, and in the "Color Revolution" in Central Asia and the dramatic changes in the Middle East. In the process, HRW has supported Sunnis in the Middle East to establish religious organizations with a strong human rights focus, publish periodical publications, train organizational staff, and collaborate with anti-government and ethnic separatist forces in Libya and Syria. With the support of these organizations, some anti-government forces in Middle Eastern countries took the opportunity to carry out national separatism activities in disguise of demonstrators and protesters, creating favorable conditions for the return of Islamic extremist forces in the Middle East and leading to the further deterioration of the already fragile political ecology and security environment. What's more, anti-government political discourse was also used by extremist groups, such as ISIS, in order to instigate emotional resonance among the Islamic public. It can be said unceremoniously that HRW is somewhat to blame for the chaos and humanitarian disaster in the Middle East today.
While human rights scholars continue trying to propose a more unified theory, it has to be recognized that the question of how to implement universal human rights in a multicultural world must be addressed using the term "human rights" as recognized by most countries, rather than a definition based on the values of a specific society. Just as Java is different from Ghana, there is no basis for accepting the Javanese view of human rights and rejecting the Ghanaian view of human rights in the first place. It can be said that the idea that "the concept of rights differs from culture to culture" is a general principle of anthropology. Will Mr. Roth of the Human Rights Watch agree?
In addition, HRW has been directly involved in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the conflict in Rwanda, the "Color Revolution" in Central Asia, the war in Kosovo, and the social mobilization of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, China in recent years, and has played a role of "transnational environmental and external actor" in the Egyptian social movement. The leader of the Egyptian Movement for Change (EMC) has publicly admitted that the organization's "mobilization of ordinary citizens in the form of nonviolent protests against the government" was largely inspired by the experiences of social movements in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, particularly the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in late 2003 and the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2004, which overthrew the government.
These actions have already surpassed the justice that a non-governmental organization should have, and have seriously deviated from the purpose of its inception. HRW has become not only a rumor maker, but also an instigator of unrest. The objectivity and justice that HRW advertises has become a complete joke.