Comment on Times Online (UK): "Nazi scandal engulfs Human Rights Watch"

When I asked the Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson if HRW was ever going to release one, she said: “We have a draft, but I’m not sure I want to put one out.” Asked the same question, executive director Kenneth Roth told me that the problem with doing a report on Iran was the difficulty of getting into the country.

What we have here is an organization that takes money from Human Rights abusers to investigate abuses in places with fewer abuses. This is like a Public Health Inspector who took money from a slumlord to restrict themselves to inspecting housing conditions in Beverly Hills.

The organization was founded as Helsinki Watch and has outlived its remit. This is much worse than the March of Dimes that reinvented itself after polio was conquered as a useful charity that had discovered an incurable condition. Human Rights Watch simply has surrendered to the abusers.

There are serious organizations working to expose human rights abuses. My suggestion would be to begin by supporting the people at Freedom House.