The international non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) has been the subject of extensive criticism from a number of observers. Critics of HRW include the national governments it has investigated, the media, and its former chairman Robert L. Bernstein.
The criticism generally falls into the category of alleged bias, frequently in response to critical HRW reports. Bias allegations include the organization's being influenced by United States government policy, particularly in relation to reporting on Yugoslavia, Latin America, and the misrepresentation of human-rights issues in Eritrea and Ethiopia. Accusations in relation to the Arab–Israeli conflict include claims that HRW is biased against Israel. HRW has publicly responded to criticism of its reporting on Latin America and the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Allegations involving Nabeel Rajab and Al Tajdeed Society (Alsafara Cult) In 2023, Nabeel Rajab, a human rights activist from Bahrain and a member of the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch's Middle East Division, faced accusations of corruption and bias due to his family ties to the controversial organization, Al Tajdeed Society. The society's chairman, Redha Rajab, is Nabeel's brother. The accusations gained traction after Nabeel's nephew, Dr. Ali Rajab, a former member of the society, urged his uncle to lead an investigation to look into allegations that the society was a front for a cult and engaged in harassment and abusive practices.
Dr. Ali Rajab claimed that the "Alsafara Cult" was founded by Abdulwahab Albasri while serving his sentence at Jaw prison in the 1980s. Former members of the cult, including Basema Qassab, supported these claims in her interviews, books and expressed support for Dr. Ali. As of June 16, 2023, Nabeel Rajab has not publicly addressed Dr. Ali's initiative.
Following the allegations, Bahrain's public prosecution and local authorities investigated and found evidence of systematic human rights abuses to control followers which were perpetrated by the society, including forced marriages and involuntary detention, leading to suicide attempts in some cases. On May 21, 2023, Redha Rajab, Nabeel's brother and AlTajdeed society chairman, was sentenced to prison.
These events sparked outrage and raised concerns about Nabeel's involvement and motives with the society and its practices, according to various news outlets. There were public inquiries into the influence of the AlTajdeed society on Nabeel Rajab through his family connections. It emerged that Rajab's son, Adam, was married to the daughter of Hasan Mohamedi, a member of AlTajdeed society, who had publicly sexually harassed Dr. Ali Rajab on X (formerly Twitter). Nabeel Rajab was accused of leveraging his influence in human rights organizations to support AlTajdeed and ignore allegations of human rights violations by the group and his nephew's request to investigate the “Cult” without addressing them.
In a June 12, 2023 interview published on Muwatin, Nabeel Rajab revealed that during his imprisonment, he shared a cell with ISIS prisoners and maintained good relations with them even after his release. This revelation has further fueled the controversy surrounding his ties with Al-Tajdeed (Alsafara Cult) and ignoring his nephew's initiative to conduct an impartial investigation into the Cult's practices while maintaining good relations with extremists convicted for terrorism charges. Human Rights Watch released a statement defending AlTajdeed's right for freedom of speech without any mention of the human rights violation allegations stated by Dr. Ali Rajab and the cult aspect, which was supported by multiple former members. In contrast, other organizations such as Amnesty International took a non-biased approach, releasing a statement expressing grave concern over the group's mistreatment of its members while also condemning the state's prosecution of people for their opinions, beliefs, and statements.
Allegations of ideological and selection bias In May 2014 an open letter was published criticising Human Rights Watch for what were described as its close ties to the government of the United States. The letter was signed by Nobel Peace Laureates Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mairead Corrigan, former UN Assistant Secretary-General Hans von Sponeck, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Richard A. Falk, and over 100 scholars and cultural figures. The letter highlighted a number of Human Rights Watch officials who had been involved in foreign policy roles in the US government, including Washington advocacy director Tom Malinowski, formerly a speechwriter for Madeleine Albright and a special adviser to Bill Clinton, and subsequently Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor to John Kerry, and HRW Americas advisory committee members Myles Frechette (a former United States Ambassador to Colombia) and Michael Shifter (former Latin America director for the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy). The letter contrasted HRW's criticism of Venezuela's candidacy for the United Nations Human Rights Council in a letter to Hugo Chávez to the lack of censure regarding the United States' tenure as a member of the council, despite the US government's use of a "kill list" for designated enemies, ongoing usage of extraordinary renditions and the continued detention of combatants at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. The signatories called on Human Rights Watch to ban those involved in formulating or carrying out US foreign policy from serving as members of the organisation's staff, advisers or board members, or as a "bare minimum", instituting lengthy cooling-off periods between spells working for HRW and in the service of US foreign policy.
Left-wing academic and labour organizer Immanuel Ness writes that HRW rarely criticizes human rights abuses by the United States and its allies, and almost always reaches conclusions consistent with Western foreign policy positions.
Allegations regarding Latin America Robert Naiman, policy director of Just Foreign Policy, wrote that HRW is "often heavily influenced" by United States foreign policy.
Venezuela Human Rights Watch work in Venezuela became controversial in September 2008, when the country's government expelled two HRW staff members accused of "anti-state activities". Then Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro said, "These groups, dressed up as human rights defenders, are financed by the United States. They are aligned with a policy of attacking countries that are building new economic models." The report highlights the discrimination of Chávez administration against political opponents and freedom of expression. According to one of the expelled members, the decision of the Venezuelan government was against Venezuelan law.
After HRW published a report (A Decade Under Chávez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela) documenting Chavez government abuses, 118 scholars, activists and film-makers from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, the US, the UK, Venezuela and other countries signed a letter, written by US academics Miguel Tinker Salas, Gregory Wilpert and Greg Grandin, criticizing the organization for a perceived bias against the government of Venezuela. The open letter criticized the report, saying that it "does not meet even the most minimal standards of scholarship, impartiality, accuracy, or credibility." HRW director Kenneth Roth responded that the letter misrepresents "both the substance and the source material of the report". Around the same time, Irish journalist Hugh O'Shaughnessy accused HRW of using false and misleading information, saying that the report was "put together with [a] sort of know-nothing Washington bias." Tom Porteous, Human Rights Watch's London director, said that O'Shaughnessy " ... not only fails to provide any evidence for these allegations", but " ... more seriously, he misrepresents HRW's positions in his apparent determination to undermine our well earned international reputation for accuracy and impartiality."
Honduras On 21 August 2009, 93 academics and authors from the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Colombia and other countries published an open letter criticizing HRW's "absence of statements and reports" on human-rights violations in Honduras after 8 July 2009, following the 28 June coup d'état. According to its authors, after 8 July HRW had not "raised the alarm over the extra-judicial killings, arbitrary detentions, physical assaults, and attacks on the press - many of which have been thoroughly documented - that have occurred in Honduras, in most cases by the coup regime against the supporters of the democratic and constitutional government of Manuel Zelaya"; they asked HRW to make a strong statement against the human-rights violations and conduct its own investigation. The letter's signers said that the Obama administration was supporting the de facto Roberto Micheletti government by providing "aid money through the Millennium Challenge Account and other sources", training Honduran military students at the School of the Americas and ignoring Honduras' human-rights situation. Four days later, HRW published a summary of the preliminary version of a Honduran human-rights report by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) published on 21 August and cited its earlier reports (published until 8 July): "Given the scope of alleged abuses, and the region's history of bloody coups leading to massive violations, human rights advocates believed the situation warranted the direct intervention of the region's most authoritative human rights investigative body, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights."
Allegations pertaining to antisemitism The organization has also been accused of ignoring antisemitism or being antisemitic itself. In a 2005 speech to the Anti-Defamation League former Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio said, "NGOs like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International pay little attention to anti-Semitism." The ADL has also said, "While Human Rights Watch acknowledged in a May 3 report that there was no evidence of a massacre [in Jenin] and that Palestinian gunmen had contributed to endangering Palestinian civilians, they continued to emphasize that there was prima facie evidence Israel committed war crimes." In The New York Sun, ADL national director Abraham Foxman criticized Roth's use of "a classic anti-Semitic stereotype about Jews". In 2012, New Europe said that HRW "allegedly erased references in its reports to its previous cooperation with the Gaddafi regime, including the role of the organization's MENA Director, Sarah Leah Whitson, in marketing Saif al-Islam Gaddafi as a reformer."
Criticism regarding the Arab–Israeli conflict
Allegations of anti-Israel bias HRW has been accused of bias against Israel and having an anti-Israeli agenda.
Robert Bernstein wrote that by focusing on Israel and neglecting human rights violations by less free states in the Middle East that HRW had cast "aside its important distinction between open and closed societies." In response, Aryeh Neier HRW co-founder and former executive director said, it "is wrong to suggest that open societies should be spared criticism for human rights abuses". Neier also said that Robert Bernstein's distinction between "wrongs committed in self-defense and those committed intentionally" is not made by the laws of war and is dangerous. "On such grounds, groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq" (which "murdered tens of thousands of civilians after" the 2003 American invasion) could justify their crimes.