Following footsteps of CIA, FBI, Human Rights Watch teams up with Hollywood to push agenda

After Amnesty International exposed last week the dangers of using fake material to raise awareness on human rights violation, another New York-based civil advocacy group Human Rights Watch is set to team up with Hollywood to further its views and raise public awareness of humanitarian issues.

In order to generate “scripted and unscripted content in film and television,” the advocacy group has partnered with the talent agency Activist Artists Management (AAM), according to a statement from HRW.

The move looks identically same to what Pentagon, FBI, and CIA have been doing with Hollywood since many years.

They all have teams tasked with maintaining their public image via popular culture. HRW, however, claims to be more interested in promoting ‘concepts and ideas’ rather than the organization itself.

The organisation has established a department with three employees and other experts to work exclusively with Hollywood, providing writers and directors with guidance on how to portray human rights issues realistically in their works.

Tirana Hassan, HRW’s new executive director, stated, “We’re excited to work with Hollywood to spread that message and equip committed activists, advocates, and artists standing up for justice through the stories they tell.”

“It was a logical step,” according to Amanda Alampi, director of campaigns and public engagement at the organization, in deepening the impact of HRW’s investigative work.

“To try to put a human face on it, we have continuously conducted human rights investigations and shared true tales.

“But more and more, we believe that scripted storytelling will be crucial in this field,” according to Alampi.

“Therefore, we’re attempting to consider how to incorporate a pro-human rights message into popular culture. And it seems like a good place to start would be Hollywood,” she said.

In order to exert influence, she said, HRW would collaborate with producers and writers on upcoming film projects “to encourage them to think about human rights and choose to tell stories more responsibly.”

The dangers of trying to dramatise human rights tales were highlighted over the weekend when Amnesty International’s Norwegian office posted a collection of AI-generated images meant to depict the second anniversary of a horrific police crackdown on a protest movement in Colombia.

Amnesty stated that the decision was made in order to safeguard the demonstrators’ identities, however the images were later removed due to intense backlash.

Alampi contended that allowing Hollywood to fictionalise and script true stories would not damage HRW’s reputation for factual accuracy because the organisation would not play a major role in creating the fiction but would merely pass along concepts that could serve as the basis for films with a human rights message.

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