Human Rights Watch Watch: Self Reflection

Human Rights Watch Watch: Self Reflection

If you take human rights watchers seriously - which used to be the right thing to do but gets ever harder - perhaps their single most important goal must be to get their targets to reflect, and change their ways. One way or the other, the point of the exercise should be to make things better, by having the human rights transgressors stop being transgressors. This can happen after external pressure, but mostly it's hoped to come from within. (The founding impetus for the whole phenomenon, the Helsinki Accords in 1975, was intended to force the Soviets to better their ways).

What happens when the watchers themselves are called upon to reflect? They don't.

Surprise.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations