The Work of Human Rights Watch

The increasing willingness of the United Nations to initiate peacekeeping and humanitarian operations in defense of human rights prompted a corresponding shift in emphasis in the work of Human Rights Watch. While encouraging U.N. involvement in appropriate cases, we felt a duty to scrutinize U.N. operations, to ensure they remained true to the human rights principles that in theory were guiding them. We examined the conduct of U.N. representatives in Angola, Cambodia, El Salvador, Iraq, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan and the former Yugoslavia. As outlined earlier, we found U.N. actions wanting in significant respects, particularly the tendency to devalue the importance of justice.

Our work on the United Nations was facilitated by our receipt of formal consultative status. The last time our application for U.N. consultative status was considered, in 1991, it was blocked under a voting system that gave a veto to any member of the pertinent committee. In light of this privilege, many of the most abusive governments flocked to the committee, and our application was rejected with vetoes by Cuba, Iraq, Libya and Sudan. In 1993, when similar vetoes seemed likely, the U.N. broke its usual procedure and, for the first time in memory,called for a vote. Our application was approved by an overwhelming majority.

Our monitoring of U.N. field operations was also facilitated by our broad mandate, which has long extended not only to traditional violations of civil and political rights, but also to violations of the laws of war, including such abuses as indiscriminate shelling, the targeting of civilians, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, forcible displacement, and the use of indiscriminate weapons such as chemical weapons and landmines. This mandate also permitted us to address conduct by both governmental and guerrilla forces. We devoted extraordinary attention to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and also investigated or reported on abuses in the course of conflicts in Angola, Burundi, Cambodia, Colombia, Georgia, Iraq, Kashmir, Lebanon, Liberia, Mozambique, Nagorno-Karabakh, Northern Ireland, Peru, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Tajikistan, and Turkey.

As this introduction demonstrates, we attach special importance to seeking accountability for gross abuses of human rights. We collected large quantities of evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia, which we shared with the U.N. War Crimes Commission and hope to share with the War Crimes Tribunal, once it is functional. For much of the year, we pressed for the establishment of the tribunal, the naming of an aggressive prosecutor with a record of action on behalf of human rights, and appropriate funding. While the tribunal has been established and a prosecutor has been named, we fear that continuing critical scrutiny will be needed in 1994.

Our emphasis on accountability was also reflected in our massive research project into the genocidal campaign, known as the Anfal, waged by Iraq against its northern Kurdish population in 1988. We have collected some 350 testimonies from victims and survivors of the Anfal, and are well along in our review of literally tons of documents of the Iraqi secret police that were seized by the Kurds during the 1991 uprising and airlifted to the United States. We are in the process of seeking a governmental plaintiff to bring a case against Iraq before the International Court of Justice, the World Court, for violating the Genocide Convention. The quest for accountability was also central to our work in such places as Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Peru, and Somalia.

We devoted substantial resources to an effort to stop the growing epidemic of communal violence. As in 1992, we saw our function as highlighting the governmental role in such violence, to point the way toward ending the violence and avoiding new outbreaks. Our broad mandate allowed us to address problems of discrimination, which often spark communal strife. Illustrative of our work was our reporting in 1993 on India, Kenya, Latvia, South Africa, the former Yugoslavia, and Zaire.

Despite the compelling nature of wartorn situations, we devoted considerable attention to addressing traditionally repressive governments. We sought to protect and enlarge the political space for the independent institutions that make upcivil society. Foremost among our concerns was protecting nongovernmental human rights organizations. Again our broad mandate, which allows us to address not only issues of imprisonment but also noncustodial restraints on civil society, was central to the task. In addition, we kept up pressure on governments where the emergence of civil society is still limited, as in Burma, China, Cuba, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia.

With an office in Moscow, we closely scrutinized the Russian government's human rights practices. Our monitoring addressed the government's conduct toward its own citizens and, through its military policies, toward the governments of the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union.

We sent a substantial delegation to the World Conference on Human Rights, where we sought to highlight the conceptual threat to the human rights movement noted above, and to rally sympathetic governments to respond forcefully. We also published two reports to contribute to the discussion in Vienna, a worldwide survey of prison conditions, and a review of U.N. field operations.

Perhaps our most visible presence in Vienna was our Women's Rights Project, launched in 1990 to remedy traditional neglect of women's rights issues. In 1993, the Women's Rights Project addressed rape in the course of conflicts in Peru and Bosnia, forced trafficking of Burmese women and girls in Thailand, discriminatory forced virginity exams in Turkey, and mistreatment of Somali refugees in Kenya.

Our Arms Project, formed in late 1992, made its mark with a groundbreaking global report on the scourge of landmines. The report was timed to correspond with efforts at the United Nations to amend the Land Mines Protocol from a regulatory to an abolitionist legal regime. The Arms Project also investigated arms transfers and related abuse in Argentina-Brazil-Chile, Georgia, India-Pakistan, Lebanon, and Rwanda.

We continued to devote substantial time and effort toward shaping U.S. foreign policy. The advent of the Clinton administration, including several officials who are strong advocates for human rights, provided new opportunities. But the need for strong vigilance remained, since the administration often allowed countervailing interests to prevail over the consistent promotion of human rights.

In keeping with our belief that third-party governments and institutions can exert considerable influence on behalf of human rights, we took steps in 1993 to expand our advocacy work to the European Community. In early 1994, we plan to open an office in Brussels to address the E.C.'s human rights policy, and to scrutinize compliance with its stated commitment to link external assistance to the human rights record of the beneficiary. Several chapters of this report include discussion of the policy of the E.C. or its member states. We also continued to work with the Japanese government to encourage it to live up to its commitment to condition foreign aid on human rights grounds. Thechapter on Japan in this report analyzes Japan's evolving human rights policy.

We have always prided ourselves on the flexibility of our advocacy efforts, and one particularly noteworthy undertaking was our campaign to deprive Beijing of the prestige of hosting the 2000 Olympic Games because of its deplorable human rights record. The hard-fought campaign, launched when it seemed only a pipedream, paid off in September when the International Olympic Committee rejected Beijing's bid by the narrowest of margins. In countries where international assistance was not substantial, particularly in China and Central Asia, we also increased our efforts to enlist the support of the business community in promoting human rights.

Our work on human rights in the United States in 1993 focused on the treatment of migrants and refugees seeking to enter U.S. territory. We investigated and reported on abuse by the Border Patrol along the U.S.-Mexican border, the U.S. government's summary repatriation of Haitian asylum-seekers, its inadequate attempts to compensate for this illegal policy by substituting an in-country processing center in Haiti, and its proposed restrictions on asylum procedures in the United States. In addition, in a joint project with the American Civil Liberties Union, we are scheduled to publish in late 1993 an assessment of U.S. compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the U.S. government formally ratified in September 1992.

What follows is a review of human rights in 68 countries. As noted, the report covers 1993, through the end of November, plus the last month of 1992. For each country, we describe some of the major human rights developments of the year, restrictions on human rights monitoring in that country, U.S. human rights policy toward the country (sometimes supplemented by a discussion of the role of other governments and international actors, such as the U.N.), and our own response to these developments. This is our eleventh annual review of U.S. human rights policy, and the fourth report that also describes human rights developments worldwide.

This volume does not include a chapter on every country on which we have worked. Nor does it discuss every issue of importance. Rather, the countries and issues treated reflect the focus of our work, which in turn is determined by a variety of factors: the seriousness of abuses, our access to information about them, our ability to influence abusive practices, and our desire to balance our work across various political and other divides.