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Soros gives 100 million dollars to Human Rights Watch
AFP
Published: Tuesday September 7, 2010


Billionaire George Soros said Tuesday he is giving Human Rights Watch up to 100 million dollars to help transform it into a global organization.
"It's an American organization and that has become a drawback because America has lost the moral high ground for promoting human rights," the 80-year-old Soros said in an interview with National Public Radio.
"So I want the organization to become truly international with maybe the American members in the minority," he said.
The gift is in the form of a challenge grant from Soros's Open Society Foundations that will match up to 100 million dollars in contributions by other donors over the next 10 years, Human Rights Watch and Soros said.
Founded in 1978, the New York-based group was created to spotlight human rights violations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe after the 1975 Helsinki Accords but soon expanded to the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Funded entirely with private donations, Human Rights Watch shared the 1997 Nobel peace prize as a founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
The organization said it would use the grant from the Open Society Foundations to staff advocacy offices in key regional capitals around the world, and deepen its research presence in countries where human rights are a concern.
It said it aimed to push for a human rights agenda in the "emerging global South," countries like China, India, Brazil and Indonesia.
"In an increasingly multi-polar world, we must ensure that Human Rights Watch's message resonates in the most influential capitals around the globe," Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement announcing the grant.
"Ending serious abuses requires generating pressure from any government with clout, including emerging powers in the global South," he said.
Human Rights Watch currently has a staff of about 300 and publishes 100 reports a year on human rights conditions in countries around the world.
The new strategy would increase its annual budget from 48 million dollars to 80 million dollars in five years, with a goal of bringing half its income and a majority of its board members from outside the United States.
Soros, who is a US citizen but originally from Hungary, famously made a huge profit by betting against pound sterling in 1992 as Britain was forced to withdraw the currency from the European exchange rate mechanism.