HUMAN RIGHTS
WATCH
Human
Rights Watch (HRW) was founded in 1988 but its origins
date to a seminal event in Cold War history, the Conference
on Security and Cooperation in Europe which was held in
'neutral' Helsinki, Finland in July/August 1975. The Soviets
went along with it because the Helsinki Accords, as the
final agreement of this star-studded conference was popularly
known, recognized contemporary national borders as being
set and inviolable, thereby confirming Soviet suzerainty
in Eastern Europe. The Americans and their European allies,
for their part, pressed by a nervous West Germany, were
happy to see a ratcheting down of tensions in Europe.
No
sooner had the ink dried, the CIA, the KGB, and allied
masters of the dark arts started undermining the pact.
The 'civil rights' portion of the agreement, which the
Soviets had agreed to with great reluctance, was soon
being used by the West as a cat's paw to undermine Soviet
power, especially in Eastern Europe. The Moscow Helsinki
Watch Group spawned 'human rights' groups in Eastern European
capitals. Typically, Western countries pronounced themselves
quite beyond the need of such patronizing supervision.
Human
Rights Watch descended directly from these NGOs that poked
about in the Soviet Union's nether regions. Its New York
base probably reflects its old CIA affiliations. Be that
as it may, HRW has done stellar work around the world
during the last 20 years in calling out when groups violate
'human rights' (as it defines them). And there's the rub;
human rights for people with Judaeo-Christian sensibilities
are not necessarily the same as those of people with other
backgrounds. The right to life itself surely overrides
more pedestrian rights like the right to free expression,
for free movement, etc. but HRW often forgets that. And
'Western' causes get a relatively free ride; the weak
protests of HRW during Israeli outrages against the Palestinian
people contrast starkly with its vehemence against Sri
Lanka.
-Read Full Story- (HRWW)
|
The
"Human Rights Watch" Watch, Installment 1
ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ is a Brooklyn native
who has been called “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer”
and one of its “most distinguished defenders of individual rights,”
“the best-known criminal lawyer in the world,” “the top lawyer of last
resort,” and “America’s most public Jewish defender.” He is the Felix
Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Dershowitz, a graduate
of Brooklyn College and Yale Law School, joined the Harvard Law School
faculty at age 25 after clerking for Judge David Bazelon and Justice
Arthur Goldberg..
"Who will guard the guardians?" asked Roman satirist Juvenal.
Now we must ask, who is watching Human Rights Watch, one of the world's
best-financed and most influential human rights organizations? It turns
out that they cook the books about facts, cheat on interviews, and put
out pre-determined conclusions that are driven more by their ideology
than by evidence. These are serious accusations, and they are demonstrably
true. Consider the highly publicized "conclusion" reached by Human Rights
Watch about the recent war in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel.
This is their conclusion, allegedly reached after extensive "investigations"
on the ground: "Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah
deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory
IDF attack."After investigating a handful of cases, Human Rights Watch
found that in "none of the cases of civilian deaths documented in this
report [Qana, Srifa, Tyre, and southern Beirut] is there evidence to
suggest that Hezbollah forces or weapons were in or near the area that
the IDF targeted during or just prior to the attack." No cases! None!
Not one! -Full
Report-(huffingtonpost.com-21/08/06)
Human
Rights Watch and nonviolent mass action: a footnote Posted by Helena
Cobban .-Full
Report-(justworldnews.org-)
Hijacking
Human Rights
By Michael Barker
August 03, 2007 -Human Rights Watch (HRW) is one of the latter
such organizations, and as a highly regarded and influential international
nongovernmental organization (NGO), it is vital that its global
work be regularly examined to ensure that it remains true to it's
stated humanitarian mission. Simply put, this is because as Jonathan
Cook writes: "The measure of a human rights organisation is to
be found not just in the strides it takes to seek justice for
the oppressed and victimised but also in the compromises it makes
to keep itself out of trouble. Because of the business that human
rights defenders are in, they must be held to a standard higher
than we demand of others."[2] -Full
Story- (zmag.org)
Human
Rights Watch as a Political Instrument of Liberal Cosmopolitan
Elite of the United States of America
Co-operation of Russian and western human rights activists depends
not only on their professional solidarity but on their ideological
closeness of interests, sometimes - closeness of their goals.
-Full
Report-(pravoslavie.ru-19/11/04)
O'Reilly
smeared "very shadowy" Human Rights Watch
FOX News Channel and radio host Bill O'Reilly called the group Human Rights
Watch (HRW) "very shadowy" and claimed that "they don't tell you where
their money comes from" because the group "knows how they're perceived
by most Americans." In fact, HRW's website freely discloses its donors.
Later, O'Reilly's guest from the conservative Heritage Foundation complained
that HRW has focused narrowly on "Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib"
(prison in Iraq) and "Gitmo, Gitmo, Gitmo" (Guantánamo Bay, Cuba), where
Americans have been accused of abuses, rather than "using their scarce
resources to really shine the light on these places around the world where
there truly are human rights abuses" like China, Syria, and Sudan. In
fact, Human Rights Watch does extensive research and advocacy on these
nations and scores of others. -Full
Report-(mediamatters.org-Fri,
Nov 19, 2004)
Who
is behind Human Rights Watch? (2004)
Under President Clinton, Human Rights Watch
was the most influential pro-intervention lobby: its 'anti-atrocity crusade'
helped drive the wars in ex-Yugoslavia. Under George W. Bush it lost influence
to the neoconservatives, who have their own crusades. But the 'two interventionisms'
are not so different anyway: Human Rights Watch is founded on belief in
the superiority of American values. It has close links to the US foreign
policy elite, and to other interventionist and expansionist lobbies. .-Full
Report-(web.inter.nl.net-).-Full
Report-(forfolksake.com-29/08/08)
Why
human rights are wrong
Paul
Treanor,
Human rights conflict with the principle of
moral autonomy, and form an excuse for oppression. Any harm to others
can be justified by claiming that it is intended to respect certain 'rights',
even if the victim does not know of their existence. Revised June 2004. -Full
Report-(web.inter.nl.net-)
I
renounce my human rights
Paul Treanor, 7 September 1999
The first online renunciation of human rights by an individual, written
in the immediate aftermath of the Kosovo war. Since then, the crusade
in the name of such liberal ideologies has intensified. The supporters
of human rights believe that they are morally entitled to conquer the
world - and they have begun to do so. .-Full
Report-(web.inter.nl.net-) |
