Yeah, even though it's the same as the other day.
Welcome everybody.
It starts very naively.
I call this German, which is the era of our human rights.
We should do...
Who's you write, write, and write as an opening film?
And then very naively, I said to the office,
why don't we call the most of our people as they know them?
Maybe they will come, you never know.
And since then, I'm quite happy to go there now.
Actually, I'm going to come and have a assembly.
We have to quiet because I didn't believe they would actually do it until I told them.
And since then, it's been a crazy time,
but also very inspiring times.
And we were thrilled that they were here and that they'll be here later tonight.
I want to welcome you all at Human Rights Weekend.
It's a weekend organized by Human Rights Watch and Bank.
Our media partner, Kuna Amsterdamer, is sponsored by ASN Bank,
for which we are very grateful.
We'll start with a clip to show a couple of the issues that we work on
and that we'll be featuring this weekend.
Then we'll have an opening speech by Ian Levine,
our deputy executive director on the program.
And then we'll have our film on Syria.
And we will close this opening with Max Christian,
who will moderate a discussion with Ian Levine and with Lama Faki,
our Syria and Lebanon researcher who joins us from Beirut.
I hope that this will be a very inspiring weekend for all of you.
Thank you.
Russia today is a country where the government would like to rule completely unchallenged.
With Putin returning as president, we had new draconian laws
that were rammed through the parliament at unprecedented speeds,
including the new laws that would require any advocacy organization
that accepted foreign funding to register as a foreign agent.
On August the 4th, over 20 different armed opposition groups
launched an offensive campaign in the Takia countryside.
We identified more than 185 civilians killed during the operation.
We're talking about a pre-planned, meditated pattern of abuse
that was intentionally undertaken.
These abuses do amount to crimes against humanity.
On the 26th of August, we heard about an attack on a school in Aleppo
that was filled with teenagers,
an attack involving the use of incendiary weapons.
We've seen the use of incendiary weapons since approximately November 2012,
which was around the time that the Syrian government
intensified its campaign of airstrikes.
We started to notice use of incendiary weapons across the country.
No one in Cameroon should go to prison
simply because they're suspected of having sex with someone of the same sex.
This is in clear violation of both Cameroonian law
and international law, and yet it happens on a regular basis
and it destroys the lives of innocent Cameroonians.
Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in the world.
More than half of its population lives below the poverty line.
I visited Tep Province, where thousands of people are being displaced
to make way for coal mines.
Foreign companies are investing billions of dollars
and communities are being forced to move to make way for these new coal mines.
I'm here in Hazarbagh in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh,
and this has to be one of the most polluted urban environments in the world.
The water that you see bubbling around me
is giving off a strong pungent odor of chemicals.
The pollution comes from the neighbourhood's 150 leather tanneries.
Bangladesh exported more than $660 million worth of leather in 2011,
much of which ended up in Europe.
But the Hazarbagh tanneries do not comply with local environmental regulation.
I saw her. I saw the girl.
I saw the girl.
I saw the girl.
In the city of Tripoli in northern Lebanon, a street battle erupts.
The fighting pits Alawite supporters of Syria's President Assad
against Sunni supporters of the Syrian opposition.
Residents are caught in the middle.
Every family we visited had an escape route out of their homes.
They know where they're exposed to snipers.
They know what buildings they need to run into
that have secret passageways that lead to safety.
They know where they're exposed to snipers.
I'm Ian Levine from Human Rights Watch in New York.
As you all know, the theme of this Human Rights Weekend is the idea of close to home,
stories and topics in Europe or close to our borders.
As a European living in New York City, I love to tell my American friends
just how much more sophisticated we Europeans are
when it comes to so many critical issues of human rights importance.
From gun control to the use of the death penalty, access to health care,
or same-sex marriage.
But the reality is that we at Human Rights Watch are kept in fact very busy
working on human rights issues here in various parts of Europe.
As you saw in the film, Russia is experiencing the worst crackdown
on human rights since the end of the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago.
Hundreds of non-governmental organisations face hostile government scrutiny.
Parliament has adopted laws restricting LGBT rights
and freedom of expression infringing the right to privacy.
And even the release of high-profile prisoners such as Mikhail Khodorovsky
and the members of Pussy Riot did not significantly, indeed at all,
lighten the crackdown.
It's deeply disappointing to Human Rights Watch that the Netherlands
will be represented at the opening of the Sochi Olympics in Russia next week
with its highest-level delegation ever, the King, the Queen, the Prime Minister.
The opening ceremony of the Olympics is a big deal for President Putin.
And the attendance of Dutch VIPs symbolises endorsement of Russia's oppressive policies,
including oppression of LGBT people.
We urge the Prime Minister to speak out against government repression in Russia
as well as about Russia's hugely damaging role in Syria,
something I'll come to in a few minutes.
Still in Europe, just today in Ukraine,
we spoke out against police beatings of and shootings
at dozens of journalists and medical workers
while they were trying to disperse protesters in Kiev.
In many of these cases, the police deliberately targeted journalists and medics
who were not participating in the protests.
Even closer to home here in Western Europe,
we've seen the rise of extremist parties in several countries,
parties which use strong anti-immigrant rhetoric to promote intolerance
and even violence and discrimination against minorities,
migrants, refugees, Muslims, Roma and Jews.
In Greece, Human Rights Watch has documented racist vigilante attacks
against migrants and refugees.
70,000 Roma were expelled from France last year.
And in Hungary, we've seen growing authoritarianism, anti-Roma activity and anti-Semitism.
Yet perhaps the biggest stain on the conscience of Europe are its asylum policies.
We've documented policies that directly contribute to deaths at sea
as thousands of desperate people fleeing poverty and violence in Africa,
the Middle East and elsewhere seek safety and security,
a sense of home here within our borders.
Just 10 days ago, 12 women and children,
refugees from violence and oppression in Syria and Afghanistan,
drowned when their boat was forcibly pushed back by the Greek coast guard.
We've also found terrible detention conditions
for refugees, migrants and asylum seekers in Bulgaria, Ukraine, Greece, Turkey and Malta,
as victims of violence and repression from Syria, Libya, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan
and other countries seek safety and security.
And here in the Netherlands, as we wrote in our World Report,
which we released just last week,
concerns about immigration and asylum policy persist.
In June, the UN Committee Against Torture expressed concerns about immigration detention,
the treatment of unaccompanied children and conditions and treatment in detention.
But as I think about the work of human rights watch in 90 countries around the world
and the challenges and the issues that drive our 400 staff day in and day out
to document and bring attention to human rights violations
and to seek justice for those violations,
I'm struck ever more by the fact that our notion and our understanding of close to home is evolving.
What do I mean?
20 years ago this month, General Romeo de Lair,
who was the head of the UN peacekeeping operation in Rwanda,
sent a now famous fax to UN headquarters in New York.
In that fax he warned that there was a potential genocide brewing in Rwanda.
And as we all know now, his warning was not heeded.
The international response was too little, too late,
and 800,000 people died as a result.
Rwanda was just too small and too insignificant a country,
too far from home for people to mobilize the necessary response.
And as hard as we and many others tried,
we didn't have the instant images nor the mobilizing capacity that technology today now provides
to galvanize the necessary response to save lives.
Today we live in an interconnected world where even the farthest country
and the smallest country and the most politically insignificant country
is but a tweet or a mouse click away.
We can no longer claim that we don't know what is happening.
Close to home can mean Amsterdam or Paris or Geneva or Athens or the borders of Europe.
But close to home can also reflect the capacity of journalists
and human rights activists and humanitarian organizations
to make us all aware of humanitarian and human suffering,
even in far off lands,
and to remind us all of our obligations as global citizens.
Human Rights Watch is currently focused on two major crises in Africa,
the Central African Republic and South Sudan,
both very poor countries devastated by political crises,
mass atrocities, ethnic violence and massive humanitarian need.
These are countries that could not be further from home,
geographically, economically, culturally, socially, politically,
for us as we sit here tonight in this beautiful setting.
But by bringing the situation in these countries to international attention
and by urging international support to protect life and needs suffering,
we all help to strengthen the idea that close to home is not just a physical concept,
but one that goes to the essence of our shared humanity.
Our understanding of interconnectedness and bringing human rights issues closer to home
is not limited to our work on conflict and mass atrocities.
Human Rights Watch increasingly focuses on poverty and economic development
and the way in which human rights protections are essential to just and sustainable economic development
and efforts to address poverty.
In the film you saw my colleague Nisha Varia talk about the work that we did in Mozambique
to address the behavior of multinational corporations working there
who were violating the rights of some of the poorest Mozambicans
in resettlement programs in the context of coal mining.
And tomorrow, for those of you who will be here, in our panel on land grabs,
we'll be looking at the conduct of international corporations in different parts of the world
producing goods for citizens in yet different countries.
We will, I am sure, talk about the obligations of companies and governments
but also about our obligations as consumers here, close to home,
to do what we can and we must for more ethical action and human rights protection.
Of course, the extraordinary technological advances that allow Human Rights Watch
and many others to bring closer to home stories from around the world.
The technological advances which enabled activists who drove the Arab Spring,
these advances also have their dark side.
Thanks to Edward Snowden, we learned this year the ways in which technology
has enabled unfettered surveillance worldwide, outstripping whatever legal protection exists.
We learned that George Orwell's big brother, a standby of totalitarian regimes,
is also operating in Washington DC.
The National Security Agency is watching and gathering data from millions of us,
Americans and non-Americans alike, with what most of us see as totally inadequate oversight,
overbroad authority, approved in secretive courts.
It's clear that privacy laws passed before the internet, before mobile phones existed,
provide very dubious and inadequate protection in 2013.
Governments obviously have a duty to protect national security and to prevent crime,
but that does not give them a free pass to monitor the communications of millions of people
who are under no suspicion.
For the National Security Agency, all of us are closer to home,
but in that case, it's a trend we have to resist.
I want to end talking about Syria, perhaps the most critical and challenging human rights
and humanitarian crisis in the world today.
In a few minutes, you'll see a short film about our work there,
and you'll have an opportunity to hear from our amazing Syrian researcher, Lama Faki.
But let me just say a few words about just how vast a human rights and humanitarian crisis Syria is today,
and why it must matter to all of us.
The statistics are staggering.
Well over 130,000 people killed, nearly 2.5 million refugees who have left the country,
some 6 million or so displaced within the borders of Syria,
and according to the UN, nearly 10 million people in need of humanitarian assistance.
We at Human Rights Watch have documented deliberate attacks on civilians,
the use of indiscriminate weapons as you saw in the film, including of course chemical weapons,
torture, executions, disappearances, rape, detentions on a vast scale.
Both government and rebel forces have been guilty of gruesome atrocities.
And yet, despite Syria's deliberate policy of waging war by killing civilians,
as well as increasing abuses by rebel groups,
the international response has not been as strong as it should be.
There's not been nearly enough pressure from world leaders to end atrocities or hold perpetrators to account.
What does that mean for closer to home?
Well, two thoughts.
First of all, we need more intensive, engaged pressure from European governments on Syria,
and Russia, its chief enabler.
So far, we've seen too little action to unblock humanitarian assistance,
which has been denied to hundreds of thousands of people.
We've seen no arms embargo against the Syrian government,
and we've seen no referral of the situation to the International Criminal Court
so that those responsible for atrocities can begin to face justice.
The peace talks in Geneva were not even able to agree on allowing food through
to the starving children of Yarmouk in the south of Damascus.
After the awful chemical weapons attack in August of last year in Ghouta,
which killed well over a thousand civilians, many of them children still in their pyjamas,
there was an international revulsion which created an agreement to destroy Syria's chemical weapons.
But the more conventional weapons which have killed far, far, far more civilians than that have not been stopped.
And let's look at the refugee situation at those desperate to find some sort of home,
even temporary, where they can live in peace and security.
I already spoke of Syrian women and children who drowned off the Greek coast last week.
There were nearly two and a half million Syrian refugees at present, mostly in the neighbouring countries
of Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Turkey.
And how many of these refugees have been accepted in Europe?
150 in Switzerland, 130 in Spain, 500 in France, 5,000 in Germany,
and just 250 here in the Netherlands, out of two and a half million.
As you watch the short but very powerful film about human rights watchers work in Syria,
which will come up now, a film which tries to show how we uncover atrocities
and tell the story of ordinary civilians caught up in this dreadful conflict.
Please think about what it means to bring human rights closer to home
and the responsibility that each and every one of us, as citizens in this global
and interconnected world, have to make this dream a reality.
Thank you.
The Watchdog Group Human Rights Watch interviewed people who'd been detained during recent protests.
Some of them, ages 16 and 17, described to the group what Syrian security forces did to them.
Electrocution with cattle prods, beatings, being hung.
Human Rights Watch say the attacks on bakeries, bread lines and hospitals
in the north of the country amount to war crimes.
We have been able to document abuses by the opposition
and we have strongly condemned those abuses.
Human Rights Watch says that Syrian surgeons in Syria have killed at least 190 civilians
and described the August attack as the first evidence of crimes against humanity
by foreign-backed militants.
A school in Dael last autumn.
The Human Rights Watch report says at least one in five Syrian schools are no longer functioning.
Syria is the major human rights challenge of our time and as there is this very brutal real war that's going on on the ground,
there is an information war, propaganda war that is being played by all sides.
Human Rights Watch's role is to arrive as close as possible to the truth.
We are not going to go back to the White House, we are going to live in Syria.
In Baida, which was an opposition-friendly village in the middle of government area,
there was just no way for us to get there.
So what can we do in the meantime?
We started looking for survivors using our extensive networks.
Slowly we started finding them showing up in Lebanon and in Turkey and in parts of northern Syria.
And then interviewing them one by one in great detail.
We slowly pieced together what happened that terrible afternoon of May 2nd.
This is still image from the video footage of the women and babies and children who were found in this part of the village here.
We spoke to more than 15 witnesses and survivors in Al Baida.
But there were a number of key witnesses, including a woman, Imam Ahmad, who had seen the perpetrators, the government forces and the pro-government militia,
take away her husband and two sons and execute them.
The information she gave was extremely powerful.
What she had seen that day allowed us to reconstruct many, many details that otherwise would not have been documented.
One witness told us that the soldiers who entered her home had a Khasa special written on their armband.
This information is confirmed by video footage filmed by TV stations close to the Syrian government that were on the outskirts of Baida
and that interviewed regular soldiers as well as members who identified themselves as national defense forces.
Our role is to cut through the fog of war and to say, these are the perpetrators.
It takes time. In the case of Baida, it took us two and a half months to find enough witnesses from enough neighborhoods
to be able to say, we have enough pieces of the puzzle that we are certain of the information we have.
Imam Ahmad wants justice. She wanted her story to be told.
And by telling their story, by telling it in a way that the facts are not disputed, you shift the burden on the perpetrators.
But there's one thing that's clear. People will remember Baida now.
So I wanted to ask you some questions about the attack on your house.
So the helicopter dropped one bomb here.
We're there to document abuses whoever is carrying them out. We don't take sides.
We get as close as possible to where the abuses took place. We talk to those most intimately involved,
whether they're the victims, whether they're witnesses, in some cases perpetrators.
We corroborate. We've also developed guerrilla expertise in the field of analyzing video footage, photographic evidence, satellite imagery.
We use doctors reports, hospital reports. And all this we piece together to provide a credible account of what happened and who is responsible.
One of the first images that emerged from Guta is a video showing a room full of children,
dead many of them in their pajamas, without a single injury on their bodies.
And immediately we knew that this was a crime of a completely different magnitude.
So who's left your family?
Guta is completely surrounded by the Syrian government.
We knew we could not go on the ground, but that doesn't mean we can't carry out our investigation.
So we began with the videos that appeared on YouTube.
Then over Skype we interviewed the activists and the eyewitnesses and the first responders and the doctors.
We saw symptoms which indicated that people had been exposed to a nerve agent.
The foaming at the mouth, the lips turning blue, the pinpoint pupils.
We identified a rocket which is not in the standard identification manuals.
So we contacted the activists inside Syria and we asked them to take photographs with a measuring tape of all of the different components of this bomb.
We immediately posted them on a specialized network we have developed,
consisting of military experts and weapons identification experts from around the world to ask them to help us identify the weapons.
Identifying and reconstructing the weapons used in the Guta attack was of fundamental importance because these are very large rocket systems.
They have never been seen in the hands of opposition fighters and they will be very difficult to hide.
Our investigation indicates that both the 140mm rockets and the 330mm rockets used in this attack were in the stockpiles of the Syrian regime.
We have the transfer records to prove that and we also have videos of them being fired by Syrian soldiers during this conflict.
Who did carry out this horrific attack?
The UN weapons inspectors already in Damascus ought surely to be well placed to find out,
but maybe not.
Their mandate is to establish if chemical attacks have taken place, not to name the guilty.
The UN investigators were not allowed to assign responsibility for the attack,
but they left important clues in the report.
They were able to look at the rockets on the ground and establish the trajectory,
the direction from which the rockets came.
But when Human Rights Watch took those trajectories and mapped them out,
we were able to establish that they were fired from government-controlled areas.
It pointed another finger of responsibility directly to the Assad regime.
Human Rights Watch finds that Syrian government forces were almost certainly responsible for the August 21st attacks
and that a weapons-grade nerve agent was delivered during the attack using specially designed rocket delivery systems.
Part of Human Rights Watch's methodology is not only to name and shame the abusers,
but also to name and shame the supporters of the abusers.
We need to put maximum pressure on the backers of the Syrian regime to end the abuses.
Well, Mr. Roth, let's get realistic.
If you have such persuasive set of evidence and prove that,
submitted to the United Nations, submitted to the Security Council...
Everybody, when they think about Russia and the Security Council, they think about,
are you going to condemn the clear, widespread bombing and targeting of civilians in rebel-held areas?
Are you going to send perpetrators on both sides to the International Criminal Court?
Of course, nobody trusts the Security Council at this stage because of the Russian veto.
I wish it were otherwise. I wish Russia were...
When Putin wrote his op-ed in the New York Times trying to support the version of events of the Syrian regime,
immediately responded with an article pointing out the misinformation that Putin was peddling,
the lies and half-truths.
It was one of the most reprinted op-eds the Human Rights Watch has ever written.
Even if Russia wanted to continue to deny that Syria was responsible, the facts were now established.
The United Nations has finally agreed on a resolution to destroy Syria's chemical weapons.
On Friday, the 15 member Security Council voted unanimously on the deal put forward by the US and Russia.
The passing of this resolution breaks a two-and-a-half year deadlock at the UN over Syria,
where at least 100,000 people have been killed.
When we established who was responsible for the chemical attacks in Ghouta,
it helped change the international momentum towards holding Assad accountable.
And for the first time, Assad was forced to take action.
By taking it one investigation at a time, we are establishing the truth about what's happening on the ground,
establishing who's responsible for these atrocities,
and ultimately building the momentum we need to stop the killings in Syria.
Are you still here?
Yes, what an impressive movie.
Good evening for all of you again.
My name is Max Christen.
I think I saw this movie now for the fourth time or so,
and it seems every time or more you get even more impressed by the work of Human Rights Watch
and about the huge problem you're helping to solve.
Lama, you already said that this was your place, wasn't it?
So Lama, please give her a hand, because you saw her in the movie.
She's doing wonderful work as the Syria Lebanon researcher.
And Ian, please join us too, because I have some questions about your speech too now.
We have about 20 minutes or so to go through your work, and that's far too short, of course.
So let's touch on some subjects, just to get an impression.
As I said, I'm a journalist, and we need these facts to write stories, you could say,
and I can also be very honest, I wouldn't dare to do what you do.
But what does your daily job look like?
Someone in the movie said we're cutting through the fog of war.
Where does it start, and why is it that you chose to do this?
So what does my daily job look like?
Most of the day is spent, so we're based in Beirut.
Most of the Syria work is happening from our Beirut office.
And being based in Beirut now, which is hosting the largest Syrian refugee population,
we get a lot of people that come by the office.
Refugees that have relatives that are detained inside Syria or are having problems settling into Lebanon,
they're looking for someone who will hear their case document the abuses that have been perpetrated against them,
sometimes just listen to what they're dealing with.
And of course we spend a lot of time in the field going to the areas where refugees live in all of the neighboring countries
to document abuses perpetrated against them inside Syria by both sides of the conflict,
as well as to hear from them what their protection concerns are in the refugee context.
And then of course we travel to Syria.
And why would someone take the risks that we take when we go to Syria?
In the video you see a clip with my colleague Ulle where we're in a home in Latakia and there's an airstrike.
You can hear it.
We go outside to see what's happening.
That same day we went to a small village in Latakia, a government called Najiyi.
And we were there documenting aerial attacks and specifically the use of cluster munitions by the Syrian government.
And a cluster strike had just happened earlier in the day.
So we were there to see the munitions, to take photos and to speak to witnesses.
And while we were there, the helicopter came back.
And you have, for the people that are living there, an instantaneous reaction.
You know, you want to seek cover.
But you know really there's nowhere that you can go that you are going to be safe.
And so we went to this half constructed home and sort of paused together.
Me and my colleague videographer that was with us and children from the neighborhood.
And this moment of anticipation of what's going to happen.
And there's a complete sense of helplessness, you know.
You're waiting for this helicopter to drop a bomb.
It may be lucky or you may not be lucky.
And there was nothing we could do.
And the bomb dropped and it actually fell near to us, but it didn't explode.
And afterwards we finished conducting our investigation on the cluster munitions and we left the area.
But for me, the significance of that day was, despite feeling that helplessness,
the people that we spoke to had a sense of hope in that they were delivering a message to us
that we would then deliver to the United Nations, to the Russians,
to people that actually could do something to help them.
So I think those are the moments that motivate me to do the work that we're doing.
And you say you're taking one case at a time.
It's one step by step you're getting the facts, the pieces of the puzzle together.
How do you know the sources you're talking to are the ones you can trust fully?
So our methodology requires that we always go back to the witness, the victim.
We get first-hand information about attacks that have happened, about violations that have occurred.
And then we build a picture of abuse.
So we don't just rely on one person's statement about an execution or about a chemical weapons attack.
We look at video evidence, photographic evidence.
Increasingly we're using satellite imagery.
And we corroborate statements by other people that were present to try to fill the picture
and to get as close to the truth as we can.
And how do you know then whether you're safe or not?
Were you surprised that you were suddenly in a very unsafe location when the helicopter came back?
So we do take very serious security precautions before we conduct trips into Syria.
And we did know that we were operating in an area where there were aerial attacks.
The attacks were happening at a frequency with which we felt we could manage the risk
and we could take concrete steps to minimize our risk in terms of what times of day we were traveling to areas,
how much time we spent in areas, making sure we checked in with local contacts before traveling to areas.
But we know that there is a risk.
And we take measured risks when we believe that the information we are going to gather,
we need it to present a case for an egregious rights abuse that is happening on the ground.
Ian, you called Syria the most critical humanitarian crisis today.
How difficult is it to keep it on the agenda, on the international agenda?
Like today we saw, well, Pussy Riots are coming to Holland every once here.
There's queues outside in a couple of minutes or maybe even now to see the movie.
So then the lights are on Russia again.
Now, what's your strategy to keep Syria on the agenda?
Especially as the solution that we want internationally is not coming as quickly as we want.
It's a good question and it's a huge challenge.
I mean, Lama described our role very well just now when she talked about the conversations with the people on the ground
who are coming and seeing us as people who can take their stories to the attention of some of the most powerful
and influential people in the world to try and do something.
And that clearly is what we look to do in Syria and South Sudan and Central African Republic and so many other places.
But we live in a world of very fleeting attention spans.
Even as more information is out there, people's ability to focus on one issue is often very short.
There's a sense of hopelessness sometimes and let's move on to something where we can make a difference.
So we really have to work hard to keep Syria on the public and international agenda.
Part of that is by constantly bringing forward new information to reminding people that this is not something
to be forgotten just because you haven't heard about it for a week, but that every single day things are going on
that need to be brought to attention.
And what Lama and other colleagues early in the morning and others who've worked on Syria doing is constantly bringing
new information forward.
Just yesterday, two days ago, we had a new report about demolitions of homes, 200 soccer fields worth of buildings,
civilian buildings destroyed, devastated as part of the strategy of Assad.
Keeping those facts, that information, those stories in the public eye, trying to exploit every public opportunity
to remind people this is what is happening and this is what needs to be done.
It's not enough just to say how bad things are.
We have to constantly be saying these are the responses needed to change the situation to end suffering to save lives.
And so it's a mix of stories for the mix of media also.
It's newspaper, TV, radio, social media.
What's your favorite platform in that sense to get the story across?
Whatever reaches the people whose decisions are necessary to address the situation.
So on Syria might be one thing, in an African crisis it might be another, in a story that's less in the public eye,
it might be something different.
So it's the full range.
We have, thanks to technology and social media, a tremendous array of tools from our reports to our multimedia features.
We tweet.
We have our own YouTube channel.
We have a million Twitter followers now on Human Rights Watch.
We work in five, six, seven languages on a regular basis.
So we're constantly looking who are the people we're trying to reach.
Is it the security council members, the EU governments, the US government,
and then you work backwards how are you going to influence those policy makers at the right time in the right way?
And this is a very difficult question because if you know the answer you probably solved the problem.
But you were telling it's so difficult to get this international breakthrough to finally get to an international solution.
What are the crucial factors that could open the Syria case up from your perspective?
Which countries have to start moving and what could be the factors for that?
Or Lama, also your opinion on that, but maybe even for you first?
Lama's best place.
Let me just say one thing because Lama knows Syria much better than I.
Just one thing, it's really important I think to say.
There is a political process that has started now with Geneva 2.
We obviously didn't see much progress this week.
We all, I think, recognized that ultimately there has to be some kind of political solution, whatever it may be,
that's not our job to decide.
What's very important for us is to ensure that in the meantime, as people work towards a political solution,
the critical human rights and humanitarian questions that we are talking about cannot be put aside because, oh, we're working towards peace.
And what we would argue is that ensuring humanitarian access to people in need, releasing detainees,
ending the inhumane conduct of war against civilians are actually essential steps towards achieving peace,
not issues to be resolved once those agreements are reached.
But Lama can say much more.
Lama, your view on that, yes?
I would echo a bit what Ian is saying.
I think we have two crises now in Syria.
We have the political crisis, which is fueling the war, and we have a humanitarian crisis.
And when it comes to the humanitarian crisis, there is a range of countries, really,
that should be doing much more to ensure that civilians in the conflict are receiving the types of assistance that they need.
And that is both Europe taking a greater role in easing the pressure on neighboring states who are hosting over 2.5 million refugees now,
as well as putting more pressure on the Syrian government to allow aid to get to the areas that it needs to be.
For the political crisis, I think it's no secret that the Russian government has stonewalled in the Security Council,
which has resulted in a failure of the Security Council to act to impose an arms embargo on the Syrian government,
to impose targeted sanctions against individuals incredibly found to be perpetrating rights abuse,
critically to a further situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court.
Russia needs to move, but other countries need to do more to put pressure on Russia to raise the cost of its Syria policies.
And that means not doing business as usual with the Russian government.
Thanks for that. As I said, it's far too short to go through all your stories.
The only positive thing is that if you talk only 20 minutes, people will remember better your messages.
But what would be your favorite message to share with the people here?
We're going to have a weekend of Human Rights Watch movies.
If people walk out on Sunday, what should they remember?
What should they take with them from the work you two are doing, Ian, you first?
That's a tough one.
The first thing I want to say is, you know, I realize as people look at the images in the films we've just seen
and hear us talk, I think it's easy sometimes to think, oh my God, things are terrible.
And sometimes they are.
But I would like people to reflect on the fact that the International Human Rights Movement has never been stronger,
has never had more impact, has never been more influential, has never been so widespread throughout the world.
We have seen enormous progress. There is still an incredible amount to be done.
There are huge crises around the world where levels of suffering are unacceptable in this day and age
when we don't have the excuse of not knowing.
But we do make a difference. Every day we make a difference.
Every day people are released because of the work of Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations.
New better laws are passed. People are brought to justice.
New and different communities have a voice, are recognized, are respected.
Ethnic minorities, religious minorities, sexual minorities, we are making progress.
And that's what I want people to remember.
There are still huge challenges. We are not complacent, but we are making a difference every single day.
Thanks. Great.
On the theme, I guess, of close to home, I would say the thing I would really urge you to keep with you after this weekend
is that it really matters what you do in your own life for these conflicts that may seem very far away.
And it can be a function of doing solidarity protests.
There were people recently doing solidarity hunger strikes with civilians living in areas under siege in Syria.
Those messages get across to people on the ground as messages of hope.
But it's also in Europe, living in countries where your governments care what you think and they can be moved by public pressure.
So just that it matters what you do.
And it definitely matters what you do. Again, and I'm sure I speak on behalf of all of us, very impressed by the work you do.
I think you give hope in situations that seem hopeless.
Keep doing that and know that we are all supporters of you.
Thank you very much for your time. Give them a big hand.
There's never enough applause for you, but we have to leave this.
We're already four minutes over time and I had to leave this place at 2030.
But listen to me carefully. I'm only going to say this once.
You have to leave this place out of that door.
This is again, you'll be back if you have tickets for the Pussy Ride movie through that door later on.
But first, I'll go out here.
I wish you, do I have to say anything else? I don't think so.
I wish you a very exciting weekend.
Have fun and be inspired by the wonderful work of Human Rights Watch.
