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How is Human Rights Watch different from Amnesty International?

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are the only two international human rights organizations operating worldwide in most situations of severe repression or abuse. Though close allies, the two groups play complementary roles, reflecting a healthy division of labor. The major differences lie in the groups’ structure 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 principal advocacy strategy is to shame offenders by generating press attention and to exert diplomatic and economic pressure on them by enlisting influential governments and institutions. With the help of our significantly smaller membership base, we have also played a key role in building broad coalitions around specific human rights issues, such as the campaigns to ban landmines, to stop the use of child soldiers, and to establish the International Criminal Court.


To facilitate communication with its membership, Amnesty International addresses a narrower set of abuses. Traditionally, it has focused on abuses confronting individual prisoners, although it has gradually broadened this case and prison orientation to address other abuses as well. Human Rights Watch has long addressed a far broader range of abuses, including not only prisoner-related concerns but also many abuses that do not involve custody, such as discrimination, censorship and other restrictions on civil society, issues of democratization and the rule of law, and a wide array of war-related abuses, from the indiscriminate shelling of cities to the use of landmines. Human Rights Watch prides itself on aggressively expanding the categories of victims who can seek protection from our movement. Since the late 1980s, we have gradually added special programs devoted to the rights of women, children, workers, common prisoners, refugees, migrants, academics, gays and lesbians, and people living with HIV/AIDS.