Source
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch Guidelines for Describing Migrants
Access posture
About
Human Rights Watch (HRW) is one of the world’s largest international human-rights organizations. These guidelines (June 2014) set out how HRW itself describes people who cross borders without authorization — and why it rejects illegal immigrant, illegal alien, and illegals. The statement gives three reasons: the terms are dehumanizing, legally imprecise (unlawful presence is a civil, not criminal, matter in many countries including the U.S.), and corrosive to the rights such people hold under international law. It recommends undocumented, unauthorized, or irregular instead, and documents the media organizations that had already dropped “illegal” by 2014.
On the commons’ source spectrum this is a progressive equity guide in rights-organization form: institutional usage guidance with legal reasoning attached. With PICUM’s Words Matter! it is one of the migration additions to the Immigration & Citizenship chapter, and it pre-dates much of the U.S. style movement on the same terms. The illegal-immigrant and illegal-alien pages cite it for that chronology.
Access
The guidelines are published openly on hrw.org (linked above) and were live as of the last check, including all nine footnotes. Host posture is private-mirror-link-out: the commons keeps a private preservation copy for citation verification and links readers to HRW’s authoritative version. Quotes are held within fair-use limits.
Publication details
Version history
- 2014 edition Current canonical
June 2014 statement; remains HRW's published guidance on the subject.
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