Human Rights Watch

   Human Rights Watch (formerly Helsinki Watch) was created in 1978 as an international nongovernmental organization to conduct regular systematic investigations of human rights abuses all over the world both by governments and rebel groups. The organization defends freedom of thought and expression; demands due process and equal protection of the law; and documents and denounces murders, disappearances, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and exile, among other abuses of internationally recognized human rights.

   As such, Human Rights Watch has long played a very important role in publicizing human rights abuses against the Kurds, especially in Turkey and Iraq. Human Rights Watch specifically played an important role in translating the tons of captured Anfal documents that clearly demonstrated how Saddam Hussein was guilty of genocide against the Kurds as defined by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. This convention defined genocide as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Other important sources that have documented human rights abuses against the Kurds include Amnesty International, the European Union (EU)'s annual progress report on Turkey's EU accession talks, and the U.S. State Department's annual country reports on human rights.