Editing Human Rights Watch (section)

=== Comparison with Amnesty International ===

Human Rights Watch and [[Amnesty International]] are both international non-governmental organizations headquartered in the North Atlantic [[Anglosphere]] that report on global human rights violations.<ref name="SocialSciences.in"/> The major differences lie in the groups' structures and methods for promoting change.

Amnesty International is a mass-membership organization. Mobilization of those members is the organization's central advocacy tool. Human Rights Watch's main products are its crisis-directed research and lengthy reports, whereas Amnesty International lobbies and writes detailed reports but also focuses on mass letter-writing campaigns, adopting individuals as "[[prisoners of conscience]]" and lobbying for their release. HRW openly lobbies for specific actions for other governments to take against human rights offenders, including naming specific individuals for arrest, or [[International sanctions|sanctions]] to be levied against certain countries, such as calling for punitive sanctions against the top leaders in [[Sudan]] who oversaw a killing campaign in [[Darfur]]. The group also called for human rights activists who had been detained in Sudan to be released.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnJOE4AQ00Q.html|title=Reuters.com|website=arquivo.pt|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090109190851/http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnJOE4AQ00Q.html|archive-date=January 9, 2009}}{{failed verification|date=June 2022}}</ref>

HRW's documentations of human rights abuses often include extensive analyses of conflicts' political and historical backgrounds, some of which have been published in academic journals. AI's reports, on the other hand, tend to contain less analysis, instead focusing on specific abuses of rights.<ref>{{Cite book|title=The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of globalization|date=2012|publisher=Wiley-Blackwell|others=Ritzer, George., Wiley-Blackwell (Firm)|isbn=9781405188241|location=Chichester, West Sussex|oclc=748577872}}</ref>

In 2010, [[Jonathan Foreman (journalist)|Jonathan Foreman]] wrote that HRW had "all but eclipsed" Amnesty International. According to Foreman, instead of being supported by a mass membership, as AI is, HRW depends on wealthy donors who like to see the organization's reports make headlines. For this reason, according to Foreman, it may be that organizations like HRW "concentrate too much on places that the media already cares about," especially Israel.<ref>{{cite news|author = Jonathan Foreman | newspaper = [[The Sunday Times]] | date = March 28, 2010 | title = Explosive Territory}}</ref>