Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an independent human rights information and advocacy group which is funded entirely by private donation. HRW was founded by Robert Bernstein in 1978 as Helsinki Watch, an organization dedicated to monitoring human rights abuses in the Soviet bloc. During the 1980s, similar groups like Americas Watch and Africa Watch were founded, and these were united under the HRW umbrella in 1988.

HRW's mission statement, as read on its website, is:

Alleged anti-Israel bias
As with many other human rights organisations, it has struggled with the issue of Israel and how much emphasis to place on Israel's human rights abuses versus the crimes of Hamas and other Palestinian organizations; this led to Bernstein writing an attack on HRW as anti-Israel in the New York Times in 2009.