It has been a rough couple of months for Human Rights Watch. The organization's reputation has taken so many hits of late- all of its own making- that its founder Bob Bernstein has taken to the pages of the New York Times to voice his serious concern.
I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group's critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.
Bernstein sticks to HRW's disproportionate number of reports on free, democratic Israel's sins versus its light treatment of the rest of the Middle East. He paints a tragic picture of dereliction of duty to the people of the Middle East who could really use HRW's watchful eye on their governments:
Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world - many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch's Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.
Bernstein doesn't mention it, but recent news stories on the organization's senior Middle East employee Sarah Leah Whitson, reveal that she was gathering money in human-rights deficient Saudi Arabia based on the strength of "report after report" on Israel. Bernstein makes the distinction that HRW has ceased to make between closed and open societies in the region.
At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them - through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform. That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag - and the millions in China's laogai, or labor camps.
That distinction, which was central to the original HRW mission, was meant to discourage a "moral equivalence game" which closed societies could use to excuse and obscure their own sins even further. Unfortunately, that game is now the favorite past time of many human-rights watchers (You know, when they're not collecting Nazi memorabilia.), and the hallmark of HRW reporting on the Middle East. Bernstein lays out what is truly at stake for the organization he formed:
Only by returning to its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it can Human Rights Watch resurrect itself as a moral force in the Middle East and throughout the world. If it fails to do that, its credibility will be seriously undermined and its important role in the world significantly diminished.
It's worth reading the whole thing to see just how far the organization has drifted from its ethical moorings.