The Importance Of Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch’s selective and biased application of the human rights norms enshrined in the UN Declaration not only undermines its credibility, it also promotes injustice. Over the past thirty years, Human Rights Watch has become one of the most recognized non-governmental organizations in the world due to its global promotion of human rights. But despite its claims to be an advocate of international human rights law, the reports issued by Human Rights Watch over the past decade have increasingly exhibited a bias towards certain rights over others. More precisely, Human Rights Watch repeatedly focuses on political and civil rights while ignoring social and economic rights. As a result, it routinely judges nations throughout the world

The Declaration encompasses political, civil, social, economic and cultural rights. Publicity has great impact on the implementation of human rights law. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other NGOs produce annual reports on countries or themes, which give invaluable information about human rights violations. Human Rights Watch, for example, conducts regular, systematic investigations of human rights abuses in some seventy countries around the

Human Rights Watch refuses to recognize the ways in which a human rights paradigm rooted in capitalist values (i.e. only civil and political rights) may not be suited to countries searching for a socialist alternative in their struggle to liberate themselves from centuries of imperialism. After all, countries such as Venezuela and Cuba are forced to exist in a global context in which the most powerful nation on earth is using all of its resources to undermine them, not in the name of democracy or human rights, but because they dare to challenge the hegemony of the United States by promoting alternative