Criticizing Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch has been a target for governments in Latin America and elsewhere for years--Hugo Chávez even had the director booted out of the country in 2008. An article in NACLA Report on the Americas now calls it essentially a puppet of the United States against leftist governments in Latin America.

To believe this, I need some evidence. The analysis, though, is weak. The argument is that if the United States violates human rights and HRW does not criticize them (or criticizes them adequately) then the human rights reports in Latin America should be ignored. The latter, though, does not follow logically from the former.

What's missing entirely is an examination of HRW's reports--especially for Venezuela--and showing how they are wrong. It's really not enough to call Michael Shifter an indirect tool of the CIA. There's lots of casting aspersions but virtually nothing on what HRW has actually published on Latin America. Here, for example, is HRW's 2013 report for Venezuela. It is definitely critical, but goes unmentioned in the article. If you could show how the report published untruths, then you have a good story. Mentioning how someone on the HRW board works for a bank is not so much.

Other parts are just hyperbolic:

HRW has taken its double standard to cartoonish heights throughout Latin America. At a 2009 NED Democracy Award Roundtable, José Miguel Vivanco described Cuba, not the United States, as “one of our countries in the hemisphere that is perhaps the one that has today the worst human-rights record in the region.” As evidence, he listed Cuba’s “long- and short-term detentions with no due process, physical abuse [and] surveillance”—as though these were not commonplace U.S. practices, even (ironically) at Guantánamo Bay.¹⁵ 

It's not cartoonish to argue that Cuba has a worse human rights record than the United States, even taking Guantánamo into account. Here is the latest HRW report on Cuba, which includes a lot more than just detentions--which part of it is false? For the U.S., we do need to discuss and condemn treatment of all kinds of people, especially immigrants, but this has nothing to do with Cuba. And the U.S., for all its faults and repressive practices, is not worse than Cuba.

In sum, what I'd like to see is an article showing not where HRW's directors used to work, but precisely how their reports are factually wrong. If that can be shown, then they're in deep trouble. But I don't see that here.