Comparison HRW with Amnesty International
Human Rights Watch and
Amnesty International are the only two western-oriented international human rights organizations operating worldwide in most situations of severe oppression or abuse. Though close allies, the two groups play complementary roles, reflecting a division of labor[
citation needed]. The major differences lie in the groups' structure and methods for promoting change.
Amnesty International is a mass-membership organization. Mobilization of those members is the organization's central advocacy tool. Human Rights Watch's main products are its crisis-directed research and lengthy reports, whereas Amnesty lobbies and writes detailed reports, but also focuses on mass letter-writing campaigns, adopting individuals as "
prisoners of conscience" and lobbying for their release. Human Rights Watch will openly lobby for specific actions for other governments to take against human rights offenders, including naming specific individuals for arrest, or for
sanctions to be levied against certain countries, recently calling for punitive sanctions against the top leaders in
Sudan who have overseen a killing campaign in
Darfur. The group has also called for human rights activists who have been detained in Sudan to be released.
[29]
Its documentations of human rights abuses often include extensive analysis of the political and historical backgrounds of the conflicts concerned, some of which have been published in academic journals. AI's reports, on the other hand, tend to contain less analysis, and instead focus on specific abuses of rights.
In 2010
The Times of London wrote that HRW has "all but eclipsed" Amnesty International. According to The Times, instead of being supporting by a mass membership, as AI is, HRW depends on wealthy donors who like to see the organization's reports make headlines. For this reason, according to the Times, HRW tends to "concentrate too much on places that the media already cares about," especially in disproportionate coverage of Israel.
[30]
There are some small differences in policy: for example, Human Rights Watch believes that women have the right to wear a veil
[31] whereas Amnesty has no policy on this issue.
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Human Rights Watch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia