HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH Questions and Answers Through its reports and advocacy efforts, Human Rights Watch works to stop abuses wherever we uncover them. Our timely, reliable disclosures have made us an essential source for anyone concerned with human rights. Our experienced staff of over 100 regional experts, lawyers and linguists helps explain why abuses break out and—most important—what must be done to stop them. Our goal is to make governments pay a heavy price in reputation and legitimacy if they violate the rights of their people. What does Human Rights Watch watch? Human Rights Watch works to end a broad range of abuses, including summary executions, torture, arbitrary detention, restrictions on the freedom of expression, association, assembly and religion, violations of due process, and discrimination on racial, gender, ethnic and religious grounds. The standards we use are universal civil and political rights as embodied in international laws and treaties. We seek to curb abuses regardless of whether the victims are well-known political activists or those of lesser visibility such as factory workers, peasant farmers, undocumented migrants, women forced into prostitution, street children, or domestic workers. We also address such war-related abuses as indiscriminate shelling or the use of rape or starvation as weapons of war—no matter which side in a conflict is responsible. What does Human Rights Watch do to stop the abuses it uncovers? Often our best tool is to publicize our information on abuses in order to embarrass a government before its own citizens and in the eyes of the international community. Human Rights Watch also presses for withdrawal of military, economic and diplomatic support from governments that are regularly abusive. Traditionally, Human Rights Watch sought to enlist the influence of the U.S. government on behalf of human rights worldwide. In recent years, we have expanded these efforts to other centers of influence such as the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank and Tokyo. With whom does Human Rights Watch work? Because the defense of human rights depends on strong local advocates, Human Rights Watch builds close partnerships with human rights organizations around the world. We work actively with these partners to collect evidence of abuses, to devise strategies for change, and to ensure that local concerns are heard and acted upon by the international community. Because the number and strength of local human rights advocates has grown exponentially in recent years, abusive governments go to great lengths to silence them. Human rights monitors are threatened, harassed, tortured, and even killed in many countries. Human Rights Watch makes a priority of protecting these courageous activists on the front line of our movement. How does Human Rights Watch collect information? We conduct frequent investigations in countries where abuses take place. In a number of hot spots, we maintain offices to gather information on an ongoing basis. We interview victims and witnesses of human rights abuse. We meet with government officials, opposition leaders, local human rights groups, church officials, labor leaders, journalists, lawyers, relief groups, doctors, and others with reliable first-hand information on the current human rights situation. If a country refuses to allow us to enter, we find other ways of obtaining information to compile as complete and accurate a picture as we can. Human rights are important, but what about other problems facing the world? We believe that human rights abuses lie at the core of many of today’s most serious social problems. For example, the best way to prevent famine today is to secure the right to free expression—so that misguided government policies can be brought to public attention and corrected before food shortages become acute. Similarly, the right to safely join with others and speak out about social problems is essential to enable workers to seek better wages, environmentalists to combat ecological hazards, and farmers to defend themselves against the arbitrary deprivation of their land. How did Human Rights Watch get started? Human Rights Watch was founded in 1978 as Helsinki Watch (now Human Rights Watch/Helsinki), in response to a call for support from embattled local groups in Moscow, Warsaw, and Prague, which had been set up to monitor compliance with the human rights provisions of the landmark Helsinki accords. A few years later, when the Reagan administration argued that human rights abuses by right-wing “authoritarian” governments were more tolerable than those of left-wing “totalitarian” governments, we formed Americas Watch (now Human Rights Watch/Americas) to counter this double standard. By 1987, we had honed a powerful set of techniques—painstaking documentation of abuses and hard-hitting advocacy in the press and with governments—and put them to use all over the world as Human Rights Watch. Today, we are the largest U.S.-based human rights organization.