Human Rights Watch

• 1. Introduction

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  Human Rights Watch began not as a global organization but as a single watchdog group with a single, specific mandate: hold the Soviet Union to promises it had already made. The year was 1978, three years after the signing of the Helsinki Accords, and a small group of Americans believed those accords could be turned into a lever for change. Co-founded by Robert L. Bernstein, Jeri Laber, and Aryeh Neier, the group called itself Helsinki Watch. Nobody then would have predicted that within a decade it would absorb separate monitoring committees for Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and merge into one of the most cited and most disputed human rights organizations on earth.

  What questions does that trajectory raise? How does an organization built for one cold-war purpose become a global arbiter of human rights? What happens when the world's most repressive governments push back? And what does it mean when your own founding chairman becomes a public critic? This is the story of Human Rights Watch.

• 2. From Helsinki Watch to HRW

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  Robert L. Bernstein, Jeri Laber, and Aryeh Neier launched Helsinki Watch in 1978 with a purpose that was almost legalistic: the Soviet Union had signed the 1975 Helsinki Accords, and someone needed to check whether it was keeping those commitments. The founding logic was elegant. The Soviets had put their signatures on a document promising certain freedoms. Helsinki Watch would simply hold them to it.

  The model proved adaptable. Asia Watch followed in 1985, then Africa Watch and Middle East Watch in 1988 and 1989. These separate groups were collectively known as the Watch Committees, and in 1988 they united under one banner to form Human Rights Watch. What began as a monitoring operation aimed at one superpower had become a structure capable of scrutinizing governments on every inhabited continent.

  The archive that documents this expansion now lives at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University in New York, where it was transferred in the summer of 2004 from the Norlin Library at the University of Colorado, Boulder. It holds field notes, taped and transcribed interviews with alleged victims of human rights violations, video and audiotapes, and administrative files stretching back to the Helsinki Watch years. Historians working with the collection do face one constraint: the records of board of directors meetings, executive committee meetings, and various subcommittee sessions remain closed, limiting insight into how the organization made its most consequential internal decisions.

• 3. Kenneth Roth and the Long Watch

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  Kenneth Roth served as HRW's executive director from 1993 to 2022, a tenure of nearly three decades that shaped the organization's voice and its appetite for confrontation. His route to human rights work was personal before it was professional. As a child, Roth heard stories from his father about escaping Nazi Germany in 1938, and that formative account gave him an early understanding of what is at stake when rights are stripped away. He later graduated from both Brown University and Yale Law School.

  Before arriving at HRW, Roth had already conducted investigations into abuses in Poland after martial law was declared in 1981. He later focused on Haiti, a country that had only recently emerged from the Duvalier dictatorship but remained badly troubled. These early experiences gave Roth a template for the kind of work HRW would come to define: go to the places governments prefer the world to ignore, document what is happening, and make it visible.

  In August 2020, the Chinese government sanctioned Roth along with the heads of four other U.S.-based democracy and human rights organizations and six U.S. Republican lawmakers. Beijing characterized the move as a response to earlier American sanctions on eleven Hong Kong officials, which were themselves a reaction to Hong Kong's National Security Law enacted in June 2020. HRW ultimately left Hong Kong as a result of those sanctions, with the situation there handed to the organization's China team. Tirana Hassan succeeded Roth as executive director, holding the position from 2023 to February 2025.

• 4. How HRW Works

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  Pursuant to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, HRW takes positions against capital punishment and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and it advocates for freedom of religion and freedom of the press. Its strategy for change rests on two pressure points: it publicly names governments and policymakers it considers responsible for abuse, and it tries to convince more powerful governments to use their influence on those that violate rights.

  The reports HRW produces are often lengthy and include extensive analyses of the political and historical backgrounds of the conflicts they cover. Some of that analysis has been published in academic journals. Each year, HRW also presents its Human Rights Defenders Award to activists it judges to have shown leadership and courage, and those award winners collaborate closely with HRW on investigations and documentation.

  HRW is a founding member of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange. The countries that have blocked HRW staff members' access include Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, Iran, Israel, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela. Russia effectively banned the organization from operating in the country in 2025.

• 5. Money and Its Complications

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  In 2023, HRW reported revenue of $94.2 million. The funding model that made that scale possible was reshaped significantly in 2010, when George Soros of the Open Society Foundations announced a grant of $100 million to be delivered over ten years. At the time, the donation was the largest in HRW's history. It allowed the organization to expand an operating staff of 300 by 120 additional people.

  A decade later, a very different donation exposed the risks in how HRW raised money. In 2020, HRW's board of directors discovered that the organization had accepted $470,000 from Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber, a Saudi real estate magnate whose company HRW had previously identified as complicit in labor rights abuse. The donation came with a condition: it could not be used to support LGBT advocacy in the Middle East and North Africa. After The Intercept reported the donation, HRW returned the funds and issued a statement calling the decision to accept them deeply regrettable.

  Critic Jonathan Foreman, writing in 2010, argued that HRW's dependence on wealthy donors who want to see the organization's reports make headlines may push it to concentrate on places the media already covers, with Israel receiving particular attention in his analysis.

• 6. Criticism and Controversy

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  Robert L. Bernstein, one of the three people who founded Helsinki Watch, became one of HRW's most prominent critics. The criticism directed at HRW generally centers on allegations of bias, often surfacing after the organization releases a report that a government or its supporters dispute.

  In 2014, two Nobel Peace Laureates, Adolfo Perez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire, organized a letter signed by one hundred other human rights activists and scholars. The letter criticized HRW for what the signatories described as a revolving-door hiring relationship with the U.S. government, a failure to denounce American extrajudicial rendition practices, its endorsement of the 2011 U.S. military intervention in Libya, and its silence during the 2004 Haitian coup.

  In April 2021, HRW released a report accusing Israel of apartheid and calling on the International Criminal Court to investigate what it characterized as systematic discrimination against Palestinians, making HRW the first major international rights NGO to do so. That move deepened existing debates about the organization's focus. In 2026, HRW's director for Israel and Palestine resigned after the organization blocked a report arguing that Israel's denial of the Palestinian right of return constitutes a crime against humanity.

  A separate controversy involved Marc Garlasco, a former staff member who resigned over a scandal connected to his collection of Nazi memorabilia. The case drew attention both to HRW's hiring process and to the difficulty of separating an employee's private conduct from an organization's public credibility.

• 7. HRW and Amnesty International

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  Amnesty International is a mass-membership organization, and mobilizing those members is its central advocacy tool. HRW operates differently: its influence comes from crisis-driven research and lengthy reports rather than from letter-writing campaigns or the formal adoption of individual prisoners of conscience.

  Where Amnesty International's reports tend to focus on specific documented abuses, HRW openly lobbies for concrete responses from governments, including naming particular individuals for arrest or calling for sanctions against specific countries. HRW called for punitive sanctions against the top leaders in Sudan who oversaw a killing campaign in Darfur, and also called for the release of human rights activists detained there.

  In 2010, Jonathan Foreman wrote that HRW had all but eclipsed Amnesty International. Whether that assessment was accurate or not, it reflected a genuine divergence between two organizations with overlapping missions but distinct institutional characters. HRW is a founding member of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange, a network that reflects its particular emphasis on press and expression rights as levers for broader change.