Advancing Human Rights (AHR) is an non-governmental organization “dedicated to individual liberty and good governance.” Founded in 2011, AHR is based in New York City and advocates for fundamental freedoms with a focus on “closed societies.”
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AHR was founded on the view that human rights groups have strayed from focusing on the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that instead the international human rights community has focused its limited resources disproportionately on democratic states and their behavior in combat. AHR believes there should be a return to focusing on the Universal Declaration in "authoritarian countries without free speech or corrective mechanisms."[1]
AHR argues that domestic human rights groups in democratic countries openly criticize their governments, while non-democratic states are incapable of self-correction because they lack the basic liberties necessary. Instead, as one Human Rights Watch board member confided to the New Republic, open societies become “low-hanging fruit” because of their easy access to information and human rights groups’ need to seek “the limelight.” [2]
AHR “returns to the values outlined in the Universal Declaration while focusing primarily on unfree states” that do not have domestic “means to correct human rights violations.” [3] The organization was started by Robert L. Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch, and David Keyes, who is AHR's Executive Director and co-founder of CyberDissidents.org.[4]
Bernstein served as the President of Random House for 25 years. He published many great American authors, including William Faulkner, James Michener, Dr. Seuss, Toni Morrison and William Styron. After being invited to the Soviet Union as part of a delegation from the Association of American Publishers, he became interested in writers whose work could not be published in their own countries. Beginning with Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, he ensured that authors like Václav Havel, Jacobo Timerman and Wei Jingsheng were published at Random House.
After his experience in Moscow in 1973, Bernstein returned to the U.S. and established the Fund for Free Expression, the parent organization of Helsinki Watch which later became Human Rights Watch. Bernstein served as the Founding Chair of Human Rights Watch until 1990 and thereafter as the Founding Chair Emeritus. He is also Chair Emeritus of the largest Chinese human rights organization, Human Rights in China, with offices in New York, Hong Kong and Brussels.
In October 2009 Bernstein wrote an OpEd for the New York Times criticizing Human Rights Watch for what he considered its unfair treatment of Israel. He argued that the organization he founded had "lost its critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields."
Keyes served as coordinator for democracy programs under famed Soviet dissident, Natan Sharansky. In 2010, he spoke in the United States Congress, Italian parliament and Google, and he has been featured on PBS, Bloomberg TV, Voice of America and other forums. He has written for Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast and many other newspapers. A self-described “Sharanskyite”,[5] Keyes has been a staunch advocate of basic liberties around the world. He often references the legacy of Soviet dissidents including Andrei Sakharov, Andrei Amalrik, Anatoly Marchenko, Elena Bonner and Vladamir Bukovsky. Keyes speaks Arabic, Hebrew and English.
AHR currently runs two programs: CyberDissidents.org and Straight Talk on Human Rights.[6] CyberDissidents.org promotes freedom of expression for bloggers and online activists in the Arab world and Iran. In late 2010, it launched a Blogger Board composed of some of the best-recognized dissidents in the Middle East and North Africa.[7]
CyberDissidents.org has been praised by the director of policy at Google, a former US ambassador to the EU, Natan Sharansky and other leading public figures.
Straight Talk on Human Rights is a platform for common-sense approaches to key questions in human rights. Of particular focus will be freedom of speech, women’s rights, asymmetric war and incitement to genocide.