Human Rights Watch Brings Neoliberalism To Africa http://www.swans.com/library/art16/barker48.html

Doctrinal human rights groups, while attracting the attention and support of many well meaning citizens, are in fact -- in a perverse testimony to the logic of capitalism -- protectors of corporate rights not human rights. As such organizations fail to challenge the primary driver of human rights abuses... an exploitative political and economic system, they ultimately promote the type of legalistic band-aids that legitimize capitalism's systemic violence as occurring as a result of some sort of unfortunate aberration.

"[T]he great paradox of human rights is that mirroring the story of an ever-expanding corpus of international law ratified by ever-greater numbers of states, hundreds of millions of people have been dispossessed of their land and livelihoods and thrown into abject poverty." Indeed, as activist-researcher Nick Rose concludes: "The pretense that human rights are above politics and economics has long outlived whatever doubtful utility it may once have had, and must be abandoned forthwith."

(2) This, however, is unlikely to happen in the case of groups like Human Rights Watch (HRW) whose very founding was tightly connected to capitalist development priorities (see "Hijacking Human Rights"); consequently, in such cases it is perhaps more appropriate to abandon the group rather than seek to reform such a vibrant expression of capitalist "humanitarianism."