What Happened to George Soros’s $100 Million Bet? How Human Rights Watch Went Global.
In 2010, Open Society Institute gave its biggest gift to a New York City-based human rights nonprofit, with the mandate to expand internationally. Meanwhile, the world became more authoritarian.
In 2009, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, embarked on an ambitious plan — to expand the American nonprofit he had long run from New York City into a truly international organization.
Although Human Rights Watch was renowned for advancing the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, for which it shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, and was instrumental in establishing the International Criminal Court in 2002, Roth and his colleagues believed Human Rights Watch depended too much on an American staff who parachuted into dozens of countries and influenced largely American and European governments.
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In 2009, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, embarked on an ambitious plan — to expand the American nonprofit he had long run from New York City into a truly international organization.
Although Human Rights Watch was renowned for advancing the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, for which it shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, and was instrumental in establishing the International Criminal Court in 2002, Roth and his colleagues believed Human Rights Watch depended too much on an American staff who parachuted into dozens of countries and influenced largely American and European governments.
“I knew we needed to globalize,” Roth said.
With Michele Alexander, HRW’s longtime head of development, Roth sat down to chart a philanthropic pitch for expanding staff, offices, programs, research, and advocacy. The idea was to pursue a donor who could give $10 million a year for five years. But there was only one person with the means and the interest to make a gift of that size, according to Roth. That person was George Soros. And he was already donating $1.5 million to $3.4 million a year to the organization.
Yet when Roth presented his internationalist vision to the billionaire hedge fund manager and founder of the Open Society Institute, not only did Soros get on board, he extended the pledge to 10 years, a $100 million gift, then his largest to a single nonprofit.
“He doubled the ask. That doesn’t happen every day,” recounted Roth, who now teaches human rights law at Harvard and Princeton.
Part of Soros’s gift to Human Rights Watch was what Roth called a “soft challenge” — that the nonprofit try to raise another $100 million over the next decade from outside of the United States, with a small percentage coming from Asia, South America, and Africa. It was an effort that had almost no previous parallel and tested the degree to which a U.S. nonprofit could influence foreign governments to adhere to human rights law.
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In announcing the Human Rights Watch grant to the New York Times in 2010, Soros said he was concerned that the U.S. was in a weak position to promote human rights abroad after its use of torture in the name of post-9/11 security.
“I’m afraid the United States has lost the moral high ground under the Bush administration, but the principles that Human Rights Watch promotes have not lost their universal applicability,” he said. “So to be more effective, I think the organization has to be seen as more international, less an American organization.”
But could an American-born organization in the twilight of the American century really meet its internationalization goals? And, if so, what would the results look like?
Going Global
Soros’s comments were made as Open Society itself was going global. In the 1980s and 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, his foundation poured hundreds of millions of dollars into his native Hungary and other Eastern European countries to promote civil society and liberal democracy.
That included hiring staff and establishing satellite offices throughout the region and then on practically every continent, eventually employing about 1,600 people. It was as if Soros intended to be a one-man Marshall Plan for a democratizing world — an ambition some fear is reversing with the announcement in June that Open Society will cut 40 percent of its staff and close many of it foreign offices under the foundation’s new chair, George’s son, Alex Soros.
The American century is an idea that blows like a strong wind at the backs of Open Society Foundation, Human Rights Watch, and many other U.S. nonprofits that operate abroad. The term was coined in 1941 by Time magazine publisher Henry Luce to describe the dominant role the United States should play to make the world safe for democracy after World War II.
That dominant influence happened. One of its high points was in the early 1990s when political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared that with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, mankind had reached an “end of history” and “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
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But with the rise of the BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — countries that did not adhere to American-style democratic capitalism and a U.N.-driven rights agenda, the certainty of a new American world order slipped away. That required complicated adjustments for Human Rights Watch.
“Especially in the 1990s,” said Samuel Moyn, a Yale history professor who has written extensively on human rights, “there was a general perception about human rights organizations that there they were at risk of being perceived as neo-imperialist or as kind of white saviors, relative to the rest of the world.”
HRW’s quest to diversify staff and globalize projects in the 2000s and 2010s was not unique. Amnesty International, Oxfam, and practically all U.S. entities with a foreign presence accelerated hiring more non-Americans and people of color and women in and outside their headquarters. But Moyn questions the outcome of the diversity push: “You can change the optics, but do the results differ?”
Human Rights Watch leadership and supporters are adamant that the results have differed. From 2010 to 2020, the nonprofit grew from a staff of 300 documenting rights abuses largely from New York City to a global organization with 550 employees representing 83 nationalities working in 33 foreign offices and 93 other locations. Revenue also doubled from 2010 to 2020, mostly from big grants from North American and European donors. And donations came from all over the world, including from foundations and individuals in the Middle East, Asia, and South America, meeting Soros’s challenge.
By 2020, the 42-year-old organization had become more international, though with bumps and setbacks along the road. Several offices HRW opened since 2010 closed due to the failure of the Arab Spring and the rise of repressive governments there and in Europe and South America. Anti-Americanism also shot up, especially under President Donald Trump, making the need for HRW to distance itself from its American-ness even greater.
And in 2023, Human Rights Watch named a new executive director, Tirana Hassan, a Singapore-born lawyer of Pakistani, Sri Lankan, and Chinese descent, who is identifiably Muslim and Asian — a background far different from Roth and his mostly Jewish American predecessors. Hassan says the question of whether human rights are seen as a Western construct “has been debated forever and will continue to be debated forever.” But she emphasized:
“I’ve never met somebody in the two decades of doing this work who’s been tortured or whose rights have been violated or whose sons or daughters have been disappeared, who say that their rights — their quest to build a dignified life — is a construct that is being imposed on them. I think that’s a discourse that is being weaponized right now in a very polarized society.”
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Beyond ‘Name and Shame’
After the $100 million grant agreement to Human Rights Watch was finalized in 2010, “It all went very quick,” Roth said.
He and his staff interviewed 100 human rights activists, to better determine criteria for internationalization, particularly where to open new offices and deepen research and advocacy.
Since the mid-1970s, the organization had adopted a strategy of “naming and shaming” abusive governments through media coverage and pressure from U.S. and European policy makers. Under Roth, HRW also gained recognition for publishing meticulously investigated reports, relying on satellite photography, data analysis, social media, and eyewitness video.
But there were limitations to this strategy, Roth said. Although HRW had offices in Hong Kong and Berlin since 1996, and a presence in Tokyo, it still had no offices with more than two full-time employees in Africa, India, the Middle East, Oceania, or South America to put pressure on governments there.
Sarah Leah Whitson, who served as director of the Middle East and North Africa division of HRW from 2004 to 2020, said her first big undertaking when hired was to reach more people in the region. Her team began issuing HRW reports simultaneously in Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian, exploding its news coverage and audience.
“Our Arabic content became the second most widely read language, and the second highest visit rate to Human Rights Watch’s website came from the Middle East. It was very clear that there was a demand,” Whitson said.
By 2006, HRW opened small offices in Cairo and Jerusalem. The first permanent Middle East office was opened in Beirut in 2010. And following the anti-government protests that became known as the Arab Spring, HRW opened additional offices in the region — in Tunis, Sodo, and Tripoli.
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Over the next decade, Human Rights Watch launched offices and hired local staff in Nairobi, Sydney, Sao Paulo, New Delhi, Johannesburg, and Seoul. It pulled out of India in 2015 and South Africa soon after due to blowback from its condemnations of various rights violations. And with the collapse of the Arab Spring in 2013, HRW shut down its Cairo office because, said Whitson, “our staff would be arrested, detained, and prosecuted.”
But Human Rights Watch did manage to pressure governments engaged in violations from multiple sides, often bringing those violations before the United Nations.
“When the governments get together and choose to investigate or report or condemn one of their peers, that’s where the U.N. is really powerful,” said Roth. “And while we don’t win everything there, we win a lot.”
Hassan recounted how a recent HRW effort reduced civilian killings on the Saudi-Yemeni border. Her colleagues interviewed dozens of people, and HRW’s Digital Investigations Lab analyzed over 350 videos and photographs of Saudi border guards firing on Ethiopian migrants as they attempted to cross into the desert landscape from March 2022 to June 2023. Satellite imagery captured the mass graves that followed.
“The end result was exposing that and taking it to the U.S and Europe, to those selling weapons to Saudi Arabia,” said Hassan. “With that pressure and attention, we saw an immediate drop in the number of attacks.”
Hassan argues that would not have been possible without a sophisticated regional presence.
“The ability for us to have a permanent presence around the world isn’t just about our research capacity. It’s also about having deeper relationships with governments in all these locations,” Hassan said. “That is fundamentally how the world is changing. All conversations don’t happen in some core capitals just in the global north. They are happening across the world.”
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Internationalizing Donors
Human Rights Watch’s ability to put pressure on abusive governments from multiple countries transformed its influence, Roth said.
But, he said, the tougher challenge was internationalizing donors — and meeting Soros’s request to raise another $100 million during the 2010s from outside the U.S. That challenge was managed by Alexander, who in the 2010s led a team of about 50 fundraisers based in 36 cities.
Roth and Alexander created committees in 22 cities around the world, which held annual dinners to attract advocates and raise money. Among the attendees, said Alexander, were influential people who “would get involved in real advocacy” and participate in naming and shaming “because they knew the target.”
Among the hardest countries in which to fundraise, Alexander said, were Brazil, India, and Lebanon. “While [elites] may have been willing to support one thing, they might not be willing to support something else that Human Rights Watch is doing,” said Alexander, who added, “Philanthropy is more developed in the West than in the South.”
Human rights causes also vary from country to country. In 2020, the Intercept revealed that Roth had accepted a $470,000 donation in 2012 from Saudi billionaire Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber, which came with the caveat that it could not be used to support HRW’s LGBT advocacy in the Middle East and North Africa. The revelation caused criticism internally and externally, and was additionally complicated by the fact that Al Jaber’s real estate company had been under investigation by HRW for labor rights abuses before the donation was made.
HRW published a statement on its website in 2020 explaining it had returned the donation and had made a “deeply regrettable decision” that “stood in stark contrast to our core values and our longstanding commitment to LGBT rights as an integral part of human rights.”
That donation revealed the minefields of HRW’s new fundraising mandate. “This was a complicated story,” Whitson said, because Al Jaber had leased to the Saudi Air Force the building where the labor violations had taken place. The workers were not his employees, and due to HRW’s reporting, she said, Al Jaber sued the Saudi government, demanding it clean up the labor problems in his building. And that’s how Al Jaber became familiar with HRW and made the donation from his foundation.
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However, Whitson said, Al Jaber’s position on HRW was, “I love the work you do, but I am a practicing Muslim. My religion does not support LGBT. And I can’t have anybody say, ‘Oh, Al Jaber is funding gay marriage in Saudi Arabia.’”
Alexander, Human Rights Watch’s development chief, noted that Al Jaber “could have gotten the same thing without the [exclusionary grant] language,” which she said she should have caught. “When somebody says to me, ‘I only want to support juvenile justice in California’ and they give HRW a gift for that, I’m writing a grant that says the funding has to go to juvenile justice work.”
HRW reported its highest contributions and grant revenue — $134 million — in 2011, because of the way it front-loaded the reporting of Soros’s $100 million gift. Annual revenue fluctuated from $43 million in 2010 to $70 million in 2020. with an average of about $56 million, a significant leap from the 2000s, when annual revenue was less than half that.
Most impressively, HRW managed to raise another $10 million annually in non-U.S. donations in the 2010s, drawing $13 million in donations in 2010 and $28 million in 2020, due in part to an explosion of $5,000 gifts. And HRW’s fundraising from countries in Asia, Africa, and South America rose from 0.7 percent to 3.8 percent during those years, Roth said.
Binaifer Nowrojee, who serves as vice president of programs at the Open Society Foundations and worked as legal counsel at Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2004, said HRW “is a pretty incredible organization as a fundraising success story.”
But donations were not the only mark of internationalization during the Soros grant period. Roth recounts that the number of international board members almost doubled, from eight to 15. The staff became increasingly non-American, with 51 nationalities in 2010 growing to 83 by 2020. Both the number of staff and offices outside the U.S. doubled. And from 2011 to 2020, website traffic grew from 7.5 million to 32 million, with global social media followers expanding from 1 million to 11 million, according to Stacy Sullivan, HRW’s communications director.
The result, Roth said, is that “people don’t think of Human Rights Watch as a U.S.-based organization.”
Democracy vs. Authoritarianism
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Has Human Rights Watch’s internationalization effort succeeded? It depends on who you talk to.
Critics of the movement, like Stephen Hopgood, professor of international relations at the SOAS, University of London, has argued for a decade that due to dispersed state power, the model championed by organizations like HRW and Amnesty International is limited.
“Both are trying to adjust, Amnesty by relocating to the global South, and Human Rights Watch by turning itself into a genuinely global brand,” he wrote on OpenDemocracy.net. “But if the concept of global human rights is to endure, a new and more political, transnational, agile and adaptable kind of movement must emerge, replacing today’s top-down, western-led model of activism.”
For Whitson, the internationalization of HRW has failed in the Middle East because governments there have “become more repressive, more authoritarian, more at war with human rights.” She said HRW has had to shut down nearly all its Middle East offices and “the Beirut staff is barely surviving because of the insecurity there,” none of which, of course, is HRW’s fault.
“The irony is, after all this, we have less access to countries, less ability to do our work, less places where Human Rights Watch can travel. It’s a shrinking world,” Whitson said.
Roth disagrees with Hopgood that human rights should be advanced largely by social movements and grass-roots activist groups, since they aren’t equipped to bring violations before the United Nations. But he readily admits that world events are not on the side of human rights advancement.
“I think the big issue at the moment is a kind of global contest between democracy and autocracy,” he said.
Nowrojee at Open Society, notes that human rights work is “never linear” and “never rewarding in a sustained way.”
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“Especially in today’s world, as it gets more and more volatile, you just can’t see what’s coming next,” she said. “It’s harder for any organization within the private or public sector. I think we’re all kind of navigating the ups and downs of that global volatility.”
Nowrojee sees Soros’s $100 million gift as achieving an “institutionalization” result for HRW, with its expanded size and influence having gone hand in hand. In particular, she said HRW’s more diverse staff and leadership “brings credibility to the whole endeavor of human rights universalism.”
Tirana Hassan, less than a year into filling the big shoes left by Roth, bemoans that “many governments are actively trying to suppress human rights organizations and strangle civil society.” But she agreed with Nowrojee that HRW’s staff growth and diversification have given the organization new strengths and credibility.
The Open Society grant was “transformational for our advocacy and ability to diversify,” she said. “It changed the way we were able to engage with the human rights movement. It changed the way that we were able to consistently be on the ground. And it has allowed us to participate in how power is shifting in the world.”
Now the question is: Can that leap forward to be sustained?
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
Tamara Straus is senior editor at the Chronicle of Philanthropy, where she supervises reporters as part of our effort to increase coverage of philanthropy, including nonprofits, charities, and foundations.