On the Frontlines: Photo and Video in Human Rights Reporting

Over the past year, Human Rights Watch joined forces with the most respected and experienced photo and video journalists in the world. Their work helped to reveal the human faces behind our reporting and draw international attention to human rights issues in order to inspire, motivate, and bring about positive change. 

We partnered with Susan Meiselas to document the heartbreaking stories of domestic migrant workers in Asia.  Tim Hetherington and Kadir van Lohuizen joined Human Rights Watch investigators to help document the spillover of violence from the conflict in Darfur, Sudan, across the border into Chad.  Marcus Bleasdale continued to collaborate with Human Rights Watch in Congo, exposing the link between natural resource exploitation and the widespread human rights abuses in the northeastern part of the country. Marcus also helped us document the plight of street children in Congo, another by-product of conflict, and again teamed up with Human Rights Watch to depict the disastrous health and humanitarian effects of renewed violence on the civilian population in Katanga. 

The photographs and video footage from our partners joined our research and advocacy
on the web and in hard copy, in public outreach events, and in journalistic publications and broadcast media worldwide. Touching on major human rights themes such as labor and migration, conflict, women’s rights, refugees, the perils of extractive industries, and violence against children, these visual representations infused Human Rights Watch’s research with a potent, emotional energy, enabling us to maximize our advocacy opportunities and draw the widest audience possible to our work.