Human Rights Watch is part of the imperialist NGO Industrial Complex, serving as a propaganda outfit for imperialists.
Its main weapon, which actually applies to all propaganda, is emphasis: which topics they even cover in the first place and how they use language. Human rights, as a term and as a topic, is something they explore almost exclusively in the global south. Iran has “human rights violations” for mandating hijab but France does not for banning face veils. From HRW’s own website, they have mentioned Iran’s hijab policy around 100 times on their own “reports”. They have mentioned France’s veil ban about 20-30 times and usually in passing. Everything bad that happens due to a target of US imperialism or an otherwise non-ally of the US is treated as a barbarous backwater with some modern liberal racist-coded terminology to match. Everything bad that happens in due to the US or other imperial core country is (1) mostly ignored and (2) framed in terms of concern. The ongoing antiblack impoverishment in the US, for example, is virtual never mentioned.
Similar is their wishy washy standards of evidence, as on didplsy here. They jump on a story in Burkina Faso with virtually unstated sourcing for their major claims and relying on 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacom to try and tie it to Traore. It took them 14 months to use the term genocide to describe what the imperialists are doing go Gaza. They gladly jump the gun against imperialist targets and pump the brakes on the imperial core.
Human Rights NGOs, accordingly, tend to be a facilitator of imperialist violence in its various forms, including sanctions on entire populations, blockades, attacks on food sovereignty propsgandized as “aid”, justifying regime change in various forms, and invasions and bombing campaigns. They spend little time discussing these impacts as human rights violations. They characterize themselves as fighting for human rights! What could be bad about that? Then they spend more time and effort vilifying Maduro than the sanctions HRW helped justify in Venezuela, which per CEPR (and not CEPR - they never mention this) killed tens of thousands of people. They’re the strident NYT opinion piece writer that always pops up at the most convenient times to manufacture consent against a target of empire and never contends with, say, the millions killed in the “war on terror” they cooked up. This lack of perspective is intentional, it is a fundamentally chauvinist way by which the West is considered by chauvinists within it and, in particular, these organizations’ leadership teams and major donors.
There’s more to it than this but this has been a basic intro.
Cool part is that this is a whole-ass eel. It feels all the same stuff as any other eel but it is clear like jelly.