Human Rights Watch, Inc.

Despite great strides made by the international women’s rights movement over many years, women and girls around the world are still married as children or trafficked into forced labor and sex slavery. They are refused access to education and political participation, and some are trapped in conflicts where rape is perpetrated as a weapon of war. Around the world, deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth are needlessly high, and women are prevented from making deeply personal choices in their private lives. Human Rights Watch is working toward the realization of women’s empowerment and gender equality—protecting the rights and improving the lives of women and girls on the ground.

We work to build just economies based on respect for human rights. We investigate how the global economic system both drives inequality that undermines human rights and enables private actors to harm communities, workers, and the environment. Our work is driven by rigorous, thorough, and objective investigations. The Poverty and Inequality program exposes policies and practices that concentrate wealth in private hands at the expense of public well-being, challenging corruption, deregulation, privatization, and the dismantling and underfunding of tax-funded systems of social protection. Our Corporate Accountability program works to ensure that products and services are free from abuse or exploitation by holding businesses accountable for the human rights impacts of their operations, investments, and supply chains. Our work illuminates opaque and diffuse global supply chains and investment flows that obscure involvement in human rights abuses and advocates for stronger regulation.

Worldwide one billion individuals have a disability. Many people with disabilities live in conflict settings or in developing countries, where they experience a range of barriers to education, health care and other basic services. In many countries, they are subjected to violence and discrimination. People with disabilities are also often deprived of their right to live independently, as many are locked up in institutions, shackled, or cycled through the criminal justice system. Many of these human rights abuses are a result of entrenched stigma and a lack of community-based services essential to ensuring their rights, including under the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Our goal is to help change that, working closely together with disabled persons’ organizations and other partners.

As the world urbanizes and industrializes, and as effects of climate change intensify, environmental crises will increasingly devastate the lives, health, and livelihoods of people around the globe. A lack of legal regulation and enforcement of industrial and artisanal mining, large-scale dams, deforestation, domestic water and sanitation systems, and heavily polluting industries can lead to host of human rights violations. Activists and ordinary citizens defending their rights to land and the environment may face intimidation, legal harassment and deadly violence. The primary victims of environmental harm are often impoverished and marginalized communities with limited opportunity to meaningfully participate in decision-making and public debate on environmental issues, and have little access to independent courts to achieve accountability and redress.

Human Rights Watch considers international justice—accountability for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—to be an essential element of building respect for human rights. The International Justice Program works to shape investigations, bring about arrest and cooperation, and advocate for effective justice mechanisms. We actively engage with the work of the International Criminal Court and other international tribunals as well as the efforts of national courts, including in Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Bosnia, to bring perpetrators of the worst crimes to justice. Human Rights Watch also supports the efforts of national courts to use their domestic laws to try those charged with serious crimes in violation of international law, regardless of where the crimes occurred.

People around the world face violence and inequality—and sometimes torture, even execution—because of who they love, how they look, or who they are. Sexual orientation and gender identity are integral aspects of our selves and should never lead to discrimination or abuse. Human Rights Watch works for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender peoples' rights, and with activists representing a multiplicity of identities and issues. We document and expose abuses based on sexual orientation and gender identity worldwide, including torture, killing and executions, arrests under unjust laws, unequal treatment, censorship, medical abuses, discrimination in health and jobs and housing, domestic violence, abuses against children, and denial of family rights and recognition. We advocate for laws and policies that will protect everyone’s dignity. We work for a world where all people can enjoy their rights fully.

Human Rights Watch’s Refugee Rights Program defends the rights of refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced people worldwide. We respond to emergencies as well as chronic situations, focusing especially on documenting government efforts to block access to asylum, to deprive asylum seekers of rights to fair hearings of their refugee claims, and to the forcible return of people to places where their lives or freedom would be threatened. We conduct on-the-ground investigations to speak with uprooted people and document abuses against them. We take our findings directly to policy-makers and the media as we advocate for governments to improve access to asylum, to stop forced returns, and to ensure that all migrants are treated with dignity and regard for their basic human rights.

Human Rights Watch conducts regular, systematic investigations of human rights abuses around the world. At any given time we are actively researching, reporting, and advocating for change in more than 90 countries. We choose our countries of focus, and the issues we address, based on where we think our attention is needed, and where we can make a difference. We respond to emergencies, but we also challenge entrenched, longstanding, or steadily deteriorating human rights problems.