Human Rights Watch Asks Europe to Take a Closer Look at Migration
Take a Closer Look is a 2024 film and integrated media campaign created by French agency ici Barbès for Human Rights Watch, launched in France and across multilingual European markets to challenge public perceptions of migrants and apply pressure on EU institutions over maritime rescue policy.
Human Rights Watch launched the campaign on social media on October 31, 2024, with a 90-second film released on December 9, 2024. The campaign operates across six languages — English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish — reflecting a deliberate pan-European reach anchored in France, where ici Barbès is based. Its components include social-media content, a multilingual landing page, and the short film, all unified under the hashtag #WithHumanity.
The campaign's central strategic objective is to shift the terms of the migration conversation in France and across the European Union. Rather than presenting migration as a policy abstraction or a statistical phenomenon, Take a Closer Look asks audiences to examine the individual human realities behind the numbers. The binoculars metaphor — a device that physically and symbolically brings distant subjects into focus — structures every creative element, from the film's visual grammar to the campaign's interactive landing page. In France, where public and political discourse around migration and border policy has intensified considerably in recent years, the campaign enters a charged cultural environment and stakes a clear moral position. According to adsoftheworld.com, the campaign website and petition received more than 50,000 visits at the time of publication, signalling meaningful early traction for a public-service initiative operating without a commercial media budget. The Clapboard Score for Take a Closer Look is 68 out of 100, reflecting strong conceptual clarity and multilingual ambition set against the structural constraints common to advocacy campaigns in the public-interest category.
Human Rights Watch identified a specific strategic gap in the European migration debate. Advocacy communications in France and across the EU had long relied on aggregate data and policy arguments, leaving audiences emotionally disengaged from the lived experiences of refugees and migrants in distress at sea. The Take a Closer Look campaign was designed to close that gap by recentring the conversation on individual human stories rather than institutional positions.
The competitive landscape for human-rights advocacy is defined primarily by Amnesty International, which, according to amnestyusa.org, operates one of the largest membership-based human-rights organisations globally and maintains an active presence in France. Amnesty International's communications, as documented on Amnesty, have historically leaned on urgent, crisis-framed messaging tied to specific country situations. Human Rights Watch, through ici Barbès, chose a structurally different approach: a sustained, multilingual narrative built on empathy and visual intimacy rather than alarm. This distinction is meaningful in France, where public attitudes toward migration are complex and where campaign fatigue around conventional advocacy formats is a documented challenge for non-governmental organisations.
The decision to launch the campaign across six European languages from a French base reflects an understanding that maritime rescue policy is a shared EU responsibility, not a single-nation issue. France remains a central political actor in European migration governance, making it a logical anchor market for a campaign aimed at influencing both public opinion and institutional behaviour. By attaching the #WithHumanity hashtag to the campaign's social media content, ici Barbès created a durable, searchable identity for the initiative that could travel across platforms and language communities without losing coherence, according to adsoftheworld.com.
The creative execution of Take a Closer Look is organised around a single, disciplined metaphor. Binoculars — instruments designed to collapse distance and reveal detail — become both the visual motif and the conceptual argument of the campaign: that closer examination of refugees and migrants dissolves the abstraction that enables political indifference.
The 90-second film, produced by The Lazy Dog and released on December 9, 2024, features actor Ryan Highley in a performance that anchors the campaign's emotional register. Sound post-production was handled by Wild Times Record, with sound engineering by Augustin Bretillard, whose work contributes materially to the film's atmosphere of quiet moral urgency. The campaign was directed creatively by Timothée Bouquet and Loris Utard, the creative directors at ici Barbès, with associate direction by Julie Parod. Digital art direction was led by Mathias Quintin, while motion design was shared between Guillaume Coiffet and illustrator and motion designer Vincent Ben Abdellah, whose illustration work gives the campaign's social-media assets a visual distinctiveness that separates them from the photographic conventions of standard advocacy content.
On the client side, Digital Campaigner Ziva Luddy Juneja and the Director of Campaigns and Public Engagement at Human Rights Watch shaped the strategic brief that informed ici Barbès's creative response, according to adsoftheworld.com. The multilingual landing page and social-media content were developed in parallel with the film, ensuring that each platform touchpoint reinforced the binoculars concept without simply duplicating it. The result is a campaign in which form and argument are genuinely integrated: the act of looking more closely is not just the campaign's message but its mechanism, making the creative execution inseparable from its advocacy intent. In France, where the campaign was published and where ici Barbès operates, this level of conceptual discipline is consistent with the agency's documented approach to public-interest work, as noted on icibarbes.com.
No verified third-party performance data for Take a Closer Look beyond campaign-reported figures is publicly available at the time of writing. The analysis that follows is therefore structural, drawing on the campaign's documented architecture and the publicly reported engagement figures cited by adsoftheworld.com.
The most concrete figure in the public record is meaningful for a non-commercial advocacy campaign: more than 50,000 visits to the campaign website and petition at the time of publication, as reported by adsoftheworld.com. For a public-service initiative in France operating without paid media at commercial scale, this level of direct petition engagement indicates that the campaign's multilingual distribution strategy — spanning English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish — successfully extended its reach beyond the French-language audience that might otherwise represent the ceiling for a Paris-based agency's output.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several attributes associated with effective advocacy communications. The binoculars metaphor is legible across cultures and requires no translation, which is a material advantage in a six-language rollout. The combination of a 90-second film, social-media content under the #WithHumanity hashtag, and a petition-linked landing page creates multiple conversion pathways from passive awareness to active participation. The decision to centre a single actor, Ryan Highley, in the film rather than deploy anonymous archival footage of migrants reflects a creative choice that research in advocacy communications consistently supports: named or individualised subjects generate stronger empathic response than statistical or aggregate representations. Whether these structural strengths translated into measurable shifts in public attitudes toward migration or EU rescue policy in France cannot be determined from publicly available data.
Take a Closer Look is a 2024 film and integrated media campaign created by ici Barbès for Human Rights Watch. Launched in France on October 31, 2024, it challenges public perceptions of migrants and calls on EU institutions to improve maritime rescue policy, using a binoculars metaphor across six European languages under the hashtag #WithHumanity.
French agency ici Barbès created the campaign. Creative directors Timothée Bouquet and Loris Utard led the work, with the 90-second film produced by The Lazy Dog, sound post-production by Wild Times Record, and actor Ryan Highley appearing on screen, according to adsoftheworld.com and icibarbes.com.
The campaign runs in six languages. According to adsoftheworld.com, Take a Closer Look is available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish, reflecting its pan-European ambition and its goal of pressuring EU institutions — not just French audiences — over maritime rescue and migration policy.
No verified third-party performance data is publicly available. According to adsoftheworld.com, the campaign website and petition received more than 50,000 visits at the time of publication, a notable figure for a public-service initiative in France operating without a large commercial media budget behind it.
#WithHumanity is the primary hashtag for Take a Closer Look. According to adsoftheworld.com, ici Barbès developed it to unify the campaign's social media content across platforms and languages, giving the Human Rights Watch initiative a consistent, searchable identity that could travel across the six European markets the 2024 campaign targeted.
The campaign uses a binoculars metaphor as its central creative device. According to adsoftheworld.com and icibarbes.com, ici Barbès designed the concept so that the act of looking more closely at refugees' individual stories — rather than treating migrants as statistics — functions as both the campaign's visual language and its moral argument.
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