Shia Rights Watch (SRW) is a non-governmental not-for-profit organization defending the rights of Shia Muslims around the World. Founded in 2011 and based in Washington, SRW claims to be both a “research entity” and an “advocacy group”. As such, the main activity of Shia Rights Watch is gathering information via a wide variety of Medias (interviews of witnesses, victims and their families, on-site resources, reports from national and international organizations, etc.) and analyzing it. In addition, the organization supports scholarship on topics related to human rights, religious discrimination and persecution, specifically against Shia Muslims.
One of the main interests of Shia Rights Watch’s website for researchers is the publishing of a large amount of primary and secondary source documents. Resources are discoverable via the categories constituting the main horizontal menu:
- Publications include Shia Rights Watch’s annual reports, and monthly analysis
- News Room leads to a monthly selection of press articles about Shia Communities’ struggles around the World
- Shia News Wire documents in chronological order Shia rights violations happening around the World
- Anti-Shi’ism proposes definitions of Anti-Shiism in four different languages (English, French, Turkish, and Arabic)
- Letters archives official letters addressed by Shia Rights Watch to national and international organizations
- SRWomen focuses on Shia Women’s rights around the World
- SRW at United Nation provides an overview of the consultation work done by the organization for the U.N.
Otherwise, resources are full-text searchable via the window located at the top right of each page. And conveniently, all documents can be either downloaded in PDF and/or printed. At the time of our visit, some categories had not been updated since the Fall of 2016.
The website is in English. The homepage is also available in Arabic and Persian.