Our History
1990
We are established by a group of women activists as the Britain and Ireland Human Rights Project, an independent organisation to monitor human rights abuses during the conflict in Northern Ireland.
1992
Renamed British Irish Rights Watch, we play a central role in campaigning for a second Bloody Sunday inquiry and organise a first-of-its-kind Northern Ireland human rights assembly in London, where survivors from both the Protestant and Catholic communities testify.
1996
We publish Human Rights, Human Wrongs – a first-ever practical guide to using the UN human rights machinery. The guide is later translated into many languages.
1998
The Good Friday Agreement is signed, and we help secure the launch of the second Bloody Sunday Inquiry.
1999
We send a confidential report, Deadly Intelligence, to the British and Irish governments and the UN – prompting a third UK inquiry into collusion and warnings of threats to murdered solicitor Rosemary Nelson. We begin our privacy and technology work by challenging the tapping of our phone calls from the UK to Ireland.
2002
We promote a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland.
2003
Lord Stevens confirms systemic UK collusion in Northern Ireland killings; the European Court rules that previous investigations into the murder of lawyer Pat Finucane were inadequate.
2005
Our work helps end police use of plastic bullets in Northern Ireland.
2007
We expand our mission to include counter-terrorism and human rights abuses throughout the UK.
2008
The European Court of Human Rights rules in the case we brought, along with the UK organisation Liberty, about the surveillance of our calls to Ireland – declaring that the UK violated our privacy rights.
2009
We win the Parliamentary Assembly for the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Prize for outstanding action in the defence of human rights in Europe.
2010
The Saville Inquiry clears the Bloody Sunday victims, validating decades of our organisation’s advocacy.
2012
Prime Minister David Cameron officially apologises for UK state collusion in the murder of Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane.
2013
British Irish Rights Watch becomes Rights Watch (UK), in honour of our decision to use lessons learned in Northern Ireland to tackle UK government abuses of human rights elsewhere.
2015
We and other experts publish Gender principles for dealing with the legacy of the past, insisting that women and their experiences be represented in transitional justice processes.
2016
We publish Preventing Education, a landmark critique of the misuse of the UK’s ‘Prevent’ counter-terrorism programme in schools.
2019
We challenge the UK government’s flawed appointment of Lord Carlile as reviewer of the ‘Prevent’ programme – and we win.
2020
We become Rights & Security International, reflecting our increasingly global work to challenge abuses committed in the name of national security.
2021
We publish Abandoned to Torture, concluding that the UK and other governments have left their nationals – including children – in situations of torture in northeast Syria following the conflict with Islamic State. We also address the UN Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee in relation to the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks; we are one of only two civil society organisations invited to address the committee.
2022
We publish two research reports on Prevent, tackling free expression and data protection violations. In the midst of litigation with us, the UK Home Office finally releases statistics about people it has stripped of their British citizenship.
2023
We obtain and publish first-ever data on the racial impact of Prevent, and we launch a major global study on barriers for civil society to communicating with the UN about counter-terrorism and human rights issues.
2024
We launch our global report on civil society at UN headquarters in New York, and publish an investigative report showing UK support for rights-violating ‘counter-extremism’ in Indonesia.
2025
We launch a free immigration advice service for migrants in Northern Ireland in the wake of the 2024 anti-migrant riots, and bring activists from El Salvador and Kenya to Geneva for human rights advocacy at the UN.