Legal Commentary

Soros Gift to Human Rights Watch

By Kenneth Anderson

No doubt many readers have seen the press articles announcing George Soros? gift of $100 million to Human Rights Watch.  Most interesting to me was that the gift is aimed, in part, at diversifying the organization, staff, and board away from its current US-centric arrangement.  As the AP puts it:

But the money also is meant to make its donor base as international as its outlook. Plans call for Human Rights Watch to draw at least half its income and most of its board members from outside the U.S. within five years. Now, about 70 percent of the money and 80 percent of the board members are U.S.-based.

Soros considers that a liability ? one he blamed on a frequent target of his, former President George W. Bush.

?They?re basically an American organization advocating human rights all over the world. But the United States has lost the moral high ground, during the Bush administration, and, therefore, it runs into opposition because there?s resentment of American interference,? Soros said in an interview in his sleek office in a midtown Manhattan high-rise. ? ... It?s a drawback, to be American in this context.?

HRW agrees, although it already believes it is seen as independent of the US government.

?But it is helpful for our organization to personify the global values we promote,? Executive Director Kenneth Roth said.

I wonder if it is quite so easy to personify global values in that way, however.  Multinational corporations, for example, often talk about how global they are, in outlook, in values, in all those ways.  I query whether it actually works that way in MNEs; likewise, my experience in international NGOs is that they all preach globalization and universality, but in practice it does not actually happen that way.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on September 08, 2010 (boomark / email).