HRW

Investigates and reports on abuses in every corner of the world.

Human Rights Watch began in 1978 as Helsinki Watch, a small US committee set up to monitor Soviet-bloc compliance with the human-rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki Accords. Regional 'Watch' committees for the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Middle East followed, and in 1988 they merged to form Human Rights Watch.

The organisation is a US 501(c)(3) headquartered in New York with offices in around twenty cities worldwide. As a matter of policy it does not accept funding from any government, in order to preserve independence from the states whose conduct it investigates.

Its core method is field research — investigators travel to countries where abuses are alleged, interview victims and witnesses, gather documentary and open-source evidence, and publish detailed reports naming perpetrators. Those reports feed into advocacy at the UN Human Rights Council, the African Union, the European Union and in national capitals, and into treaty campaigns such as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and the Cluster Munition Coalition, both of which HRW co-founded.