Why We Need A New Human Rights Organization

[shira]

As many of you know, I founded Human Rights Watch and am today Founding Chair Emeritus of the organization. I am Chair of Advancing Human Rights. A fair question is: Why is a new organization needed, especially one headed by someone who devoted so much of his life to one of the largest, best financed human rights organizations in the world? Let me give a partial answer. Human Rights Watch started as an organization believing that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was an important document starting with free speech and that it should try and get closed societies to recognize it. Somewhere along the way, it became another critical voice by joining other human rights organizations already doing this in an open society. Some of these human rights organizations have gone one step further and decided to become arbiter in wars and believe that the Geneva Conventions, rules of war and international law are a major human rights concern.

<snip>

I believe that creating Advancing Human Rights is the most important thing I’ve done in my life. I never imagined that at 88 years old I would be founding a new human rights organization. But, I am doing it out of necessity because I believe there are trends which are doing great damage to democracies throughout the world.

I want to stress that our organization is not right or left wing – not in the least. I don’t think of myself as either. We focus on issues from a human rights perspective, case by case. I’m sure people will try to label and corner us, but there is no need for this. Initially, our work will be on the Middle East, China and Russia where we start with good information and sources. We have groups in each hot spot that have expressed interest to work with us.

We will focus on women’s rights and free speech. These two rights – the spearhead of most totalitarian repression – are so important because where they are absent, achieving the other very important human rights is practically impossible. We will, of course, go into closed societies. The very idea of human rights organizations spending some of their small resources to be another voice in an open society with what we see happening all over the world in closed societies is almost ludicrous. Now that these closed societies are exploding, they will need every ounce of the human rights community’s attention so that we don’t have another Iran.

more...
http://advancinghumanrights.org/news/human_wrongs_why_we_need_a_new_human_rights_organization

[Shaktimaan]

1. interesting.

His NYTimes oped is also worth looking at.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/opinion/20bernstein.html?scp=1&sq=%22Robert%20L.%20Bernstein%22&st=cse