Congratulations to Human Rights Watch on the Opening of a Dutch Office

To Human Rights Watch, to Kenneth Roth, Executive Director for Human Rights Watch and to Anna Timmerman, Human Rights Watch Netherlands Director

We wish to congratulate you on the opening of a Dutch office for Human Rights Watch next week, September 14.

We hope now that you have opened an office in the Netherlands, that we can, if so needed, support each others' efforts to improve the state of human rights both in The Netherlands and worldwide.

We do hope you, as an organization, Human Rights Watch, will become more audacious in addressing some of the issues as we have. We, as organizations, share similar views and thus we are very open in maintaining contact and to support any major press release for instance concerning The Netherlands, should you find it beneficial. We also think that human rights organizations should remain to have unique identities, and thus that this should only be applied once in a while, in some important issues that most human rights organizations should agree on.  

We furthermore agree on most issues that are discussed in your letter to our Dutch government of September 12, 2010, especially regarding the effect of the human rights dialogues, and its arbitrary use by The European Union.  

We do have a question about your press release in which you seem to advice our Dutch government to completely discard the "integration test abroad". Does this imply that you would like to see The Netherlands to discard all and any tests for immigrants? Although we assume to know the answer, we are asking it with a purpose in mind.

Good luck with all your efforts!

Sincerely,

Justice for the World (JFW) - European Human Rights Awareness Foundation