Questions re Human Rights Watch's credibility in Lebanon reporting

(Update, November 24, 2006. Someone has pointed out to me that I have been quoted from this post by NGO monitor in an exchange over Aryeh Neier's piece in the New York Review of Books (November 2, 2006) defending Human Rights Watch from attacks by NGO monitor. The letter is here. I certainly have criticisms of HRW - I make some of them below - but I do find that the quotation in the letter is taken more than bit out of context. It does come, after all, in the middle of a paragraph defending HRW as nonetheless the most scrupulous of the human rights monitors. I can't address the specific factual issues in the Lebanon war that got this dispute underway; I criticize below HRW's tendency to present to the public and press what are essentially lawyers' briefs that shape the facts and law toward conclusions that HRW favors without really presenting the full range of factual and legal objections to its position - I think this is tendentious because these brief-reports are not addressed to a court that would receive briefs from both sides, but instead to a credulous press that has no real basis for understanding the debate on both sides. I think - and have repeatedly told people at HRW - that it has an obligation to present fairly the entire debate; I can say categorically that it has never paid the slightest attention and that its reporting continues to be as tendentious as ever. But that's something quite limited and does not take a position on the current argument between HRW and NGO monitor, which, truth be told, I had not been following until someone mentioned that this blog post had been quoted.)

I don't suppose this argument over Human Rights Watch's credibility in its Lebanon reporting is going to be resolved anytime soon. Here is Volokh Conspiracy's David Bernstein on the subject; Dershowitz is over at the Huffington Post, here. And Maimon Schwarzschild, here, thanks Instapundit. And Avi Bell, guestblogging at Opinio Juris, here. There are probably some others I don't know about, but will add the links here as I find out. For that matter, here is HRW's website. I'm afraid I don't have anything to say on the actual facts of what they dispute - but wanted to archive the dispute here for future reference.

(Welcome, Instapunditeers, and thanks Glenn for the Instalanche. I should add autobiographically that I was the first director of the HRW Arms Division and worked for HRW for several years back in the early 1990s; I had also done a great deal of pro bono work for the organization back in the 1980s, reporting on countries such as Guatemala, Yugoslavia, Panama, Georgia, Iraq, and other places. I am reticent about criticizing an organization I once worked for, and anyway, although I have grave concerns about where the human rights movement is headed - on a general perception that NGO movements, such as the human rights movement, often get trapped in a kind of spiral toward more and more extreme views, trapped in a certain rhetoric that eventually leads over a cliff - I still regard HRW, for the difficulties it clearly has, as the most credible of the human rights monitors. Amnesty International has clearly gone over the cliff; I very much hope that HRW does not - but it will take considerable outside pressure, I think, to shift it away from the kind of internal dynamic that so often seizes hold of NGO movements and carries them into weirdness. The risk, we should all bear in mind, that as they get weirder, they carry with them into disrepute moral language and concepts - the concept and language of human rights - that the rest of us cannot afford to lose. It's not merely an organization or a movement that is at risk - it is the credibility of human rights itself. HRW clearly thinks that it is sufficiently pure to be the Gate-Keeper of the True Path, or the human rights Vatican, or something like that - Kant, maybe - but everyone else who values these things as well might want to exercise their own judgment on that.)

I have criticized Human Rights Watch in the past on some of its legal judgments. In particular, I and others challenged HRW's reporting on Jenin, criticizing legal standards used in its reporting that made little or no reference to the obligations of defenders - ie, the commingling of military targets among civilians in advance of anticipated fighting. HRW wound up changing its characterization of the report on the website, at least for a time, to acknowledge the obligations of defenders, although not in the report itself. It is a general problem for human rights organizations, seemingly, that they focus to near exclusion on what the attackers do, especially in asymmetrical conflicts where the attackers are Western armies presumably more susceptible to media pressure of the kind that human rights monitors are able to generate. In addition, I suppose, these groups have so thoroughly internalized the asymmetrical rules of Protocol I that it is hard for them even to see that their legal standards have a problem. (See the discussion of this problem in relation to NGOs, press, and human rights monitors reporting on the commingling of civilians and military targets in the Iraq war, in this public letter, here.)

More broadly than that, however, my primary problem with Human Rights Watch's reporting is its lawyerly tendency toward tendentiousness. I mean that Human Rights Watch's reports are not neutral, scrupulously acknowledging the evidence or law or legal views that run against its reporting and legal conclusions. On the contrary, it rather proudly offers what can only be called briefs - shaping the law and evidence towards whatever conclusions it has decided to offer. In occasional conversations I've had with its senior staff and lawyers over the years, they defend this practice on the grounds that it is a legal organization, writing conclusions based on law applied to facts.

In my view, it is, however, a tendentiousness and frankly noxious practice because this 'brief-writing' is aimed not a court, which will at least have the benefit of an opposing counsel's briefs, with a different point of view, but instead a credulous, not well educated, and alas not-so-bright media. The media tend already to share HRW's point of view, and hence tend to ask few questions - if they could even think of any - and mostly wind up quoting the press release. (I don't think anyone - except in the most extraordinary instances, such as the Lebanon war - ever reads the actual reports, least of all the press, and it became something of a joke in the organization, with senior executives pleading with staff not to write so many pages that simpl;y won't get read. I'm sure that during the years I worked with and for HRW, and wrote many reports from the field, no one ever read the actual texts.)

In my view, an organization genuinely scrupulous about its neutrality and objectivity would make a concerted point, in its reports and analyses, of noting the objections that might be raised to its views, on both factual issues as well as legal points of view. It should adopt, that is, a scholarly or historical point of view, rather than that of a lawyer presenting one side to a court. This is not to say that it should not adopt whatever conclusion it thinks is right - but that it should make a genuine point, always, of presenting what a knowledgeable opponent might reasonably say on the other side, rather than relying on the ignorance and credulity and pre-existing sympathy of its media audience to not ask it any hard questions.

But this is a point I've made repeatedly over the years to HRW, and I'm not holding my breath. In any case, compared with the leading competition, the downward spiraling Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch is a beacon of disciplined thought.

(PS. The question of neutrality by NGOs is an important one, something I took up in an academic article a couple of years ago, available as a pdf from SSRN, here.)

(PPS. I had forgotten that I wrote a little about these issues while critiquing Amnesty International's infamous report talking about Guantanamo as a gulag. Here in the Weekly Standard from June 13, 2005.)