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It is important to recognize that the human rights organizations generally have not concentrated on the full spectrum on human rights, which ranges from basic food and shelter needs to rights such as the right to irritate governmental authorities without any reprisal. I suspect many posters on this board recognize in principle the full spectrum, though people are always most sensitive to what they can understand from their own experience: those, whose food and shelter needs have always been met, may not immediately remember that most of the world suffers from limited access to necessities. The United States, for example, has not typically ratified international human rights conventions recognizing primary ecoconomic needs. I have followed HRW for many years, and with few exceptions it fits this pattern: there was a beautiful HRW study in the 1990s on the relation between famine and political power, but it was unusual. The same could, of course, be said about AI, which originally focussed entirely on the civil and political rights issues guaranteed by standard international conventions. This limitation does not mean that such rights groups are worthless; it does mean that they have a limited framework for analysis, within which they generally do a decent job
The credibility of the human rights groups depends on their ability to obtain and convey accurate and reliable information, without becoming embroiled in political considerations. As a rule, they cannot be expected to analyze events from the perspective of who-was-justified-in-doing-what but must merely discuss the violations of reasonable and accepted standards, without attempting to decide whether the violations were in some sense understandable. On any objective point of view, the rights organizations have no alternative to such an attitude: if they fail to adopt it, they will be dismissed as partial and biased. The consequences, of being regarded as partial and biased by the leaders of countries where violent repression is rampant, can be very serious indeed. At times, human rights work in El Salvador or Guatemala was nearly impossible, and it has been very difficult in recent years in Colombia: the worst case scenario, where international human rights workers or their local contacts are obviously murdered or simply disappear, has been common enough that the rights organizations cannot afford to ignore the possibility. The following paradox can result from differing ground situations: a report on a country, in the brutal throes of a human rights crisis can be very short and may contain relatively few details, simply because a careful investigation is completely impossible; whereas a much longer and more detailed report may be possible in the case of a country where the situation is much better. I had precisely this debate concerning reports on Nicaragua and El Salvador in the mid-1980s: at one point, Americas Watch had produced a long report on Nicaragua and several much shorter reports on El Salvador; it was completely inappropriate simply to count pages, since to understand what was being said one needed to read the reports. If you have been reading the news, you know (say) that Colombian officials have regularly accused human rights workers of siding with the guerrilla opposition, and you understand that such accusations are essentially death threats which limit the ability of human rights professionals to do their work freely; information will be limited, and criticism must be handled carefully to have any prospect of success. The full significance, of a long and detailed report detailing carefully the accusations of the Venezuelan opposition and comparing the situation on the ground to international standards, may therefore be difficult to parse: it might have the effect of sending a political message to Colombia that HRW is not associated with any particular political ideology; if you read the report in its entirety, it may also appear that HRW largely (though perhaps not entirely) reported petty abuses of power
There remains the question of the uses to which the HRW report might be put. Insofar as the report acknowledges that Venezuela has a vibrant political culture, one hopes that the Venezuelans themselves examine the report carefully and draw appropriate conclusions about how to improve their own civil and political culture. There is, of course, not a country in the world that respects civil and political rights as fully as suggested by existing international standards. Certainly, there are political factions in the United States that will attempt to use such a report to justify some US intervention -- but those factions were advocating intervention before the report was issued, and they would have continued to advocate intervention regardless of the content of the report. A careful reading of the report, with one eye on the United States, will suggest to many of us that the US itself does not meet many of the international standards cited therein: but that observation, though relevant when dealing with the interventionists, could not have been included in the report, simply because it did not belong there. It is not the task of the human rights organizations to compare or rank the failures of different countries: those are political triage questions, which inevitably are contaminated by other issues such as political ideology or nationalist sentiment. For the same reason, discussion of Bolivia or Paraguay or Ecuador, or of foreign relations issues between these countries and the United States, simply does not belong in the HRW Venezuela report
I suspect that if you examine the available HRW publications, you will find a significant amount of useful information regarding historical and current human rights conditions in much of the world. You will typically not find the political analysis you want. But if the organization attempted to provide political analysis, the human rights information would have become impossible to obtain. So I suggest that you should consider HRW as one reliable and useful source, for the information that it attempts to provide, and that (instead of criticizing the organization for not doing everything) you look elsewhere for the political and economic analyses that may help complete the picture
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