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Kenneth Roth, "Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments" (Knopf, 2025)
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An interview with Kenneth Roth
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New.
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Books and Human Rights, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Kenneth Roth about his new book, Righting Three Decades on the Front Lines of Fighting Abusive Government. Ken spent almost 30 years as the executive director of Human Rights Watch. Turning it from a small organization with a handful of staff into one of the most influential and respected human rights organization on the global stage. Righting Wrongs is a compelling dive into the day to day work of Human Rights Watch and the kind of challenges that come with leading an organization that takes on some of the world's most powerful governments and autocrats. Part memoir, part guide to human rights campaigning, and part tribute to the extraordinary staff of Human Rights Watch, Righting Wrongs is an absorbing account of what it takes to defend human rights in the harsh reality of international politics and the difference it can make. With that, let's dive into the interview. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Ken, welcome to the show.
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Good to be here, Nicole.
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Ken, maybe you could start by saying a few words about what Human Rights Watch is and where it sits in the galaxy of human rights organization. From Amnesty International to the International Committee of the Red Cross, all the domestic organization, the office of the High Commissioner. What is Human Rights Watch?
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Okay, well, Human Rights Watch is one of the two big global private human rights organizations. It's entirely non governmental like Amnesty. And Amnesty is much bigger than Human Rights Watch in budgetary terms. But the two organizations pretty much cover the world, that is to say, any serious human rights violation both Amnesty and Human Rights Watch would address. Human Rights Watch has researchers based around the world who do firsthand investigations of serious problems. They publish their findings and the organization then uses those findings to generate pressure on governments to change. You know, partly by shaming them in the media, partly by enlisting powerful allies to exert diplomatic or economic pressure on a government. Now the International Committee of the Red Cross is a wonderful organization. It both is a humanitarian service organization and it regulates or attempts to influence adherence to international humanitarian law, the laws of war, which both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty also address. But we address it in kind of the opposite way of the icrc. They sacrifice their public voice in order to maintain access to prisoners and contested territory. Both Amnesty and Human Rights Watch are willing to sacrifice access in order to maintain our public voice. And finally, you mentioned the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. That's a UN body. So that has all the complexities of having to deal with government funding, having to deal with pressure from governments, but it is a well resourced institution that has its own set of investigators and its own moral authority because the High Commissioner is a senior UN official.
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So this is Human Rights Watch today. This is definitely not the organization that you joined 30 years ago. So tell us a little bit about that journey you spent 30 years leading and growing the organization. What was Human Rights Watch when you joined and how did you get to join Human Rights Watch?
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Well, I mean, how I started was totally fortuitous. I wanted to do human rights work, but when I graduated from law school, there were no jobs whatsoever. Human Rights Watch at that point had two employees. Amnesty was a little bit larger, but there really were not jobs. And so I resigned myself to, to working as a lawyer and then nights and weekends volunteering, doing human rights work, which is what I did for six years. And finally a job opened up at Human Rights Watch and I was extremely fortunate to get it. I was also particularly fortunate for five and a half years to have a mentorship with Aryeh Nair, who was my predecessor as director and who really started the organization off on its path and is a real intellect, a real strategist. And so I learned an enormous amount from Aryeh when he left. I took over at the ancient age of 37 and had a lot to learn, but I had a great team around me and over time built the organization from at the time it was about a six and a half million dollar annual budget. When I left, it was 100 million annual budget. And I really built a global institution. That is to say, I'm not only putting researchers around the world, but also building advocacy and media offices in key capitals around the world with the aim of enabling us not simply to collect and publish information about serious abuses, but to deploy that information in capitals where there would be, you know, significant opportunity to exert pressure on the target government.
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And I think that people don't really realize that today we take for granted that human rights organizations are going to investigate, comment, press for accountability, be present in the news media, really be an actor in world politics, in domestic politics. That was really not the case when you started, right? We talking late 80s, early 90s.
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At that point, there was a novelty to human rights investigations. So in an odd way, it was almost easier to get media attention because I think about the first report I put out, which was about martial law in Poland, and it was embarrassingly amateurish, but it got a New York Times article, you know, and that just. It was because of its novelty. Over time, there are many, many more organizations reporting on human rights abuses, including, you know, a very rich wide variety of domestic and national groups around the world. There also are many journalists. So it's become, you know, a much more common topic of conversation. The other big change, though, is that when I started, it was still, shall I say, contested. The idea that human rights Groups would have a seat at the table when influential governments were discussing their foreign policy. And under arigay, that had begun to happen in Washington, where Human Rights Watch played a significant role in trying to shift U.S. policy toward the Central American conflicts of the mid-1980s. But this is something that we had to fight for around the world. And over time it became accepted that Human Rights Watch would meet with senior ministers, that we would speak regularly at UN fora. And that was because of a combination of the quality of the research and also frankly, the insightfulness of the policy recommendations. Because one thing that we learned is that it's not enough to report on a problem and then just tell the government to do the right thing. That gets you no place. You've got to actually investigate the government and figure out, okay, what are the realistic policy options before that government and how do we present steps that they feasibly could take that would advance our goal of curbing the abuses with the target government. And because we were able to do that, we did get a seat at the table.
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And I think that comes very clearly in your book, is that the, the method that you follow is really to use the facts to put pressure on governance. That is the name. And shame is. Shaming with facts is not shaming with a moral discourse. It's not shaming with a sort of popular mobilization. I think you're very candid in your book about the fact that you don't really like activism, picketing governments, rallies. So Human Rights Watch in a way has developed a very well oiled mechanism to bring new light to situations, bring facts, and then through this gain access to policymakers. And I quite surprised you open in the book with Syria, which of course has gone through tremendous changes with the fall of the Assad regime, finally since you wrote the book. But even in these extraordinarily complex situations, war situations, where you have major powers involved, humanitarian crisis, large amounts of financing on both sides of the conflict and so on, even there you manage to insert yourself and to try to shape the policy debate. You think in this book. I think reading this book, I have the impression that personalities matter greatly beyond government specific individuals. Who is in charge of what agency, the personality of the autocrat ruling the government. This comes out quite strongly in your memoir.
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Well, I should say first of all, I chose to open the book with Idlib, which is the province in northwestern Syria, which at the time I wrote the book was the only part of Syria that was controlled by the armed opposition. And little did I know that that armed opposition would Take over Syria as the book was going to press. So it was fortuitous in that sense. But I wrote about it because it was seen as an intractable problem of the Russians. And the Syrians were deliberately bombing hospitals and schools and marketplaces and deliberately killing civilians with the aim of driving them away to make it easier to try to retake the territory on the ground. And the question was, how do you stop this? Assad himself was really beyond shaming. He had been so despicable already, using chemical weapons against his own people, starving his own people, dropping barrel bombs on his own people so that he was not a good target of shaming. But at that stage, Putin, this was before his invasion of Ukraine, did care about his reputation. And so our strategy was, how do we put pressure on Putin? Now, this was under Trump. So we did not look to the US Government as a source of pressure because that was not Trump's inclination toward Putin. But I mean, you talk about personalities mattering at that point. Angela Merkel was Chancellor of Germany. Emmanuel Macron was at a point where his presidency was much stronger than it is today. And so we focused on those two individuals as well as the Turkish government, where I did have relationships with Merkel and Macron. I didn't have a personal relationship with Erdogan, but did regularly meet with his government. And we really tried to enlist those three critical powers to put pressure on Putin. And this was a multi year effort, but it ultimately worked. And beginning in March 2020, the bombing of civilian institutions stopped and it stayed stopped for three full years. It picked up a little bit as some of the fighting resumed, but in essence, the millions of civilians who were living in Idlib were able to live their day to day lives without worrying about suddenly being killed by a bomb in the sky. And I chose this because it was not an easy situation. It required not just investigating what was happening, but using that information and deploying it strategically in key capitals and doing this outside of Washington, because Washington at this point was useless. And that little did I know that that would be the beginning of the overthrow of the Assad regime. But it nonetheless was an important example.
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And through your book, you know, you talk about Syria, you have a chapter on China, you have one on Saudi Arabia, on the United States as well. I have the distinct impression that you have no qualms about being opportunistic in the topics and the issues that you choose to concentrate your efforts on. You identify a situation that has the potential to receive more attention or to get political traction. And that is a major factor for you to sort of engage. Is that fair?
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Well, Nicola, let me modify that a bit. I actually tend not to be opportunistic in terms of the situations I address and that I tend to look at the most serious situations. And particularly as Executive Director, I felt that that's where I needed to spend my time. So I needed to deal with the Uyghurs in Xinjiang being persecuted by China. I needed to deal with Syria because it was just so awful. I needed to deal with Ukraine or Israel for that matter, in Gaza. So there are certain situations that just cried out for attention where we were opportunistic. And you're correct here is that once you know that you want to try to address a situation, then the question comes up, well, how do you do that?
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Where's the entry point?
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Where do we have leverage? And that requires really thinking through a strategy and it's not always obvious. And so we will look around and for example, when the Saudi led coalition was bombing civilians in Yemen, the European Union rejected our efforts to intervene. But we got the government of the Netherlands to take the lead and ultimately were successful in getting the UN Human Rights Council to create what became known as the Group of Eminent Experts, basically a commission of inquiry that through the period of its existence made a difference in curtailing the civilian killing. And when it was finally lifted, the killing doubled until finally a ceasefire was put in place. Other times with the Saudi Crown Prince, for example, after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, it's not easy to put pressure on Saudi Arabia because it's so rich. But he was going off to the G20 summit in Buenos Aires and we saw an opportunity. We got the Argentine authorities to launch a criminal investigation of the Saudi Crown Prince. And so as he was landing in Buenos Aires, thinking that this was going to be his, you know, his re entry into civilized society, suddenly newspapers around the world were talking about this investigation and he ran and, you know, cowered in, in the Saudi Embassy rather than the four seasons where he had been planning to stay. And so you have to, you know, you have to be opportunistic in terms of how you put pressure on governments and you use what leverage you have.
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And that in a sense is a central message of your book. I think you write in the introduction that you, through this book and through your experience, you want to show what is possible and that the tactics which are very often decried that are used by the human rights community, which is naming shaming, asking for accountability, asking for justice, asking for respect for international humanitarian law that all these are sort of impractical won't make a difference. I think you have a discussion with Jake Sullivan, the former NSC National Security Council head under Biden, saying that he's going to Saudi Arabia. What difference does it make if we raise human rights? So can you tell a little bit about what was the original impulse for writing the book and for choosing the form that you took for the book, which, as I said, is, you know, a memoir, but also sort of an expose of some of the major humanitarians and human rights development over the last 30 years, and also, frankly, a call to arms to the extent that there are arms in the human rights movement in face of increasing cynicism and big power politics. I'm sure we'll come back to that.
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Nicola. I really had two reasons for writing the book. One is that I had found, just as I represented Human Rights Watch, lots of people are for human rights in a nominal way. They're willing to make a personal statement and say, I like human rights, but a lot of people don't believe it makes any difference. And so what I wanted to do was just draw back the curtain and show people how we had an impact. Because what I had found is once people understand how we got things done, then they became more committed to the movement. It went beyond just, you know, a token preference for human rights. And so that was part of it. It's just to kind of show people how it's done. You know, these are the strategies we pursued. But I also, I mean, as you allude, took on the critics, and there are, you know, lots of skeptics out there who think, oh, this doesn't make any difference, and, you know, who. Who disparage it. I mean, naming and shaming has become a disparaging term. And. And what I wanted to show was that, you know, even in a case like China, the Chinese government cares desperately about its reputation. We have enormous leverage with China because it doesn't want to be shamed. And in that case, it's because it doesn't hold elections. There's no opportunity for the people in China to express their consent to living under the dictatorship. So partly it argues, oh, we just make life better, so they should be happy. But partly it relishes external manifestations of its legitimacy by having Xi Jinping meet with other heads of state, by having other governments say good things about China. And if we can get UN officials or UN bodies to report on Chinese abuses, to criticize Chinese abuses, that is devastating. When we came very close to putting Xinjiang on the agenda at the UN Human Rights Council, Xi Jinping was personally calling heads of state to try to fend that off. This is evidence that he cares. And indeed, often the clearest indication that the pressure is being felt is not necessarily whether a government moves. I mean, a lot of factors go into that. But when you see the government pushing back so hard, you know that this is something that they care about. And one point I try to make in the book is that the effort to defend human rights is not a matter of simple clear wins. It is a constant need for pressure because governments are always tempted to violate human rights. This is a way to stay in power, to get rid of the pesky opposition. And our job in the human rights movement is to change the cost benefit analysis to make repression more costly. And we do that in part by shaming governments, in part by generating diplomatic and economic pressure on them via sympathetic third party governments. And this combination works. And I just have example after example after example in the book. And I deliberately wrote it. I mean, it's partly a memoir, but it is filled with stories. And the point is to kind of make it accessible. This is not an academic book. It's available to the general audience in a way that they can see what it takes to make a difference. And I hope that this will spark ideas. You know, I don't pretend to have all the right ideas, but by showing what's feasible, what can be done, I want other people thinking too about what they can do.
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And I think that people would not disagree with you with the fact that human rights work is worthy, that when you have a positive impact on the situation, when you protect human rights defenders, when you raise the cost for abuse, when you participate to a solution, this is all worth it. I think where the skepticism comes in is you address and you manage to address a few issues, but the broad trend line is going in the wrong direction. And you have a chapter or you talk a lot about drc. Romda, I'll give you credit for being a very early skeptic of political development in Rwanda and some of the biggest humanitarian and human rights crisis of the 90s and the early 2000 that we thought we had learned from these places are back into intractable conflict. Sudan, drc, Myanmar, the occupied territories. What is your answer to the fact that people feel that no matter what good human rights do, it is still marginal in the larger picture?
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Well, let me take the drc, the Democratic Republic of Congo, as an example, and I describe that in quite a bit of detail because work that Human Rights Watch did over a decade ago now, where we demonstrated factually that the Rwandan government was backing this awful rebel group in eastern congo called the M23. And Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president, lied, as is his want, and just denied and denied. And we kept issuing reports until it became undeniable that this is what he was doing. And we were able to get, at that point, the U.S. secretary of State John Kerry and the British Foreign Secretary William Hague to call Kagame and basically say, if you don't stop this, you're losing your aid. And it stopped almost overnight. The M23 collapsed. And so the people of eastern Congo enjoyed a good decade free from this predatory rebel group. Now, as we all know, the M23 has come back and it has now taken over Goma, the principal city in eastern Congo. The reason for that I think shows the need for ongoing pressure because it was this threat of cutting off aid that got Kagame to stop. Kagame has spent the last decade trying to make himself indispensable. He sends Rwandan troops on peacekeeping missions. He offered the British government to take in their asylum seekers. He's described as a so called development darling because he doesn't put development aid in his Swiss bank account, but actually spends it on people. So even though he's a brutal dictator at home and has supported this awful group in eastern Congo, he has many fabs and he's used that to fend off that pressure today. So while many governments are criticizing Rwanda for invading again eastern Congo, they're not yet imposing the same consequences. And that just shows the need for ongoing vigilance and ongoing pressure to avoid retrenchment. Now with your broader point, Nicola, I mean, yes, there are terrible wars today, I'm not going to deny that. But one thing I try to point out in the book is that there are trends over the years where things get better and things get worse. There was a time when the Soviet Union was in place, the height of the Cold War. Things seem pretty entrenched. Then suddenly Soviet Union collapses. This emergence of democracy, everything looks good. Then you have the emergence of ethnic conflict in places like the former Yugoslavia, things look bad. Then there's kind of overall a rise in democracy. Bush's counterterrorism thing makes things look bad. There's always this up and down and I don't get discouraged by that. That's kind of life. And if I look at right now where things stand, I actually think that although many people talk about this global contest between democracy and autocracy and Certainly, Trump's arrival in the United States is a win for the autocrats. But if you look around the world, people have expressed themselves over and over that when they're living under autocracies, they don't like it and they want democracy. And we've seen that in Asia, which, you know. Well, we saw that in Hong Kong. We saw it in Myanmar, in Thailand, in Sri Lanka, in Bangladesh. And in many of these countries, they actually overthrow the tyrant. Sometimes they don't, but they make clear where the people stand. And I take heart from that, because it doesn't mean we always win. But the idea that government should be accountable to their people, that people should be able to have the capacity to influence their government, that is a broadly held belief. And I think our biggest challenge today is, ironically, not in the governments living under autocracies, where the people are pretty clear about what they want, but it's rather in the established democracies, where we are seeing a backsliding, mainly, I think, because the democracies are not delivering well that there is a significant segment of society that feels left behind, and they're willing to turn their back on the status quo, on the establishment, and embrace figures like Trump who purport to hold the answers. Obviously, they don't, but this is the phase that we're going through.
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I definitely want to talk a little bit more about this, because it seems to me that the human rights enterprise at large largely benefited from the three waves of democratization in the world from 1945, decolonization, Latin America, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unipolar moment. And so there was almost a mechanical expansion of human rights because of the expansion of democracy, which is the political regime that is trying to preserve human rights, and for which human rights has an important party firmly, because genuine democracy protects minorities, and it's not only majority rule. And that what we're seeing now is the opposite. You know? Well, vdem, the Democratic Monitoring Institute, says that we are back to 1986 levels. We are in our 15 or 16th year of autocratization. Um, and I would say not only this is presenting a huge challenge to the human rights enterprise, but it's also presenting a challenge to actual human rights work. You cannot work in Russia, you cannot work in China, you cannot work in Iran. You cannot have offices there. Therefore, you cannot have investigations of the same kind that used to give access to policymakers, because people were either on the ground or coming back and had information that nobody else had. And that is one, I think, major challenge. And I'LL put the second challenge right away, which is that most of the opposition to human rights used to come from the top, from governments and from business economic interests. Whereas now you have it from the top, but you also have it from the bottom because a large segment of the public has developed this sort of cynicism towards rights. Suddenly there's growing anti elitism sentiment and anti regulation, anti rules and human rights and perhaps Human Rights Watch above all are both sort of elite organization, top policymakers that highly technical and also that are about rules, that are about constraining governance or even the way that society works. To what extent are you not, you know, convinced that these trends are structural rather than, as you just said, circumstantial?
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Well, there's a lot to your question there. I mean, first your point about access. I mean, you know, yes, physical access is denied, but that's always been an issue. And indeed today, you know, because of open source analysis, because of the ability to use, you know, electronic access, we actually are able to monitor all kinds of places, you know, even when we can't get somebody on the ground. And so it is a much more open world in informational terms than has ever been the case. And you know, so even in, you know, Xinjiang, where the Chinese government is desperate to keep us out, you know, we know exactly what's going on. You know, the same with Russia, the same with Iran. I mean, these are not difficult places to monitor because of electronic access. The, you know, the, the idea that first of all that, that human rights is an elitist enterprise. I know it's often described that way, but I don't think that that's a fair characterization. In other words, one caricature of the movement is that there are these arcane treaties out there and you've got a bunch of lawyers who are reading the fine print and going in and having very detailed discussions with government officials. That's not how it works. Our ability to move governments has to do basically with our ability to move public opinion. And we don't spend a lot of time citing chapter and verse of treaties. Indeed, you could argue that we could do what we did without ever citing a treaty. Because what we do is reflect government conduct against the public sense of right and wrong. And so in that sense, it's a very anti elitist methodology. And now, you know, sometimes you've got to focus on, you know, an accessible public. You know, if I think about, say, you know, Hungary, where Viktor Orban was able to kind of, you know, build domestic support in part with his Anti immigrant, anti gay, anti Semitic policies. We were able to operate in Brussels, where he cared because Brussels gave him all this money through the European Union subsidies. And so that was an important source of restraint. Similarly on Poland, where ultimately the government changed in part because of that pressure. So this is not, in essence, an elitist endeavor. You know, we talked about how people in many parts of the world clearly are taken to the streets for their rights. You know, we saw this when South Koreans stopped martial law. We saw it when Bangladesh overthrew its longtime rhodocrip. I mean, there have been many examples like that. I think, though, the challenge we have, and I talk about this in the book, is that everybody wants their own human rights. You know, I've never met somebody who wants to be summarily executed, who wants to be tortured, you know, who wants to be arbitrarily detained, who wants to be denied school or healthcare or housing. You know, everybody wants these things. So that's not our issue, you know, and we should kind of get concrete about this. That's what human rights are about. The problem is that people like to think that, you know, they can get their rights, but somebody else in their society can be denied theirs. And, you know, the humanized movement likes to say, you know, nobody's rights are secure unless everybody's are secure. But in many ways, the way to understand the kind of autocratic populists is that they try to redefine the community and take the people who they want to target and define them outside the community. So, you know, immigrants or gays or what have you, those are somehow others, you know, and we need to. Not only can we repress them, we must repress them to protect the mainstream. That's the argument that they make. And I think that one real challenge for the human rights movement, I conclude the book with this, is that we need to pay more attention to building a broader sense of community. And I do think progressives are somewhat at fault here because the identitarianism that has come to define so much progressive thought actually works against that. You know, if you're.
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B
We're going to come back to that because there is. Well, we can jump to this right away. One of the striking thing with your book, and it is a very original book in the Indo human rights literature, and one of the way in which it is original is that you are very candid about the fact. You have little patience for a number of things. You have little patience for sort of arcane academic debates about human rights, about whether the human rights are going to ally to neoliberalism or the imperial legacy. You have little patience about movement building versus having professional human rights organization. And you also have little patience for people who sort of want to have a greater participation, not coming from the so called global north into what the human rights enterprise is and what kind of topic it should tackle and where it should go. And in that way, the book is quite controversial, I think, at least for people in the movement, because you seem to have absolutely no qualms about saying and explaining in the book why you just don't think that these are useful tools or useful approach for the kind of work that you're doing.
- [37:33]
A
Well, you're right. I take a very pragmatic approach to the defense of human rights. And I don't have patience for these theories that 30 years from now might deliver a better world. I want to know, how do we stop the killing today? So I'm very focused on what does it take to generate pressure now to get things done? And there are a lot of progressive trends out there. Let's focus on building the movement. Great. But there are very few things that generate a movement. The human rights movement, the human rights cause takes on a whole range of issues, most of which are never going to mobilize people on the streets. So if you say you're going to focus on the movement, you're only focusing on a handful of big things, but not the bulk of what humanized organizations do. Also, as we've seen movements come and go, the George Floyd movement was great while it lasted, but nothing lasts forever. Occupy Wall street and you can just go around the umbrella movement in Hong Kong. It's very difficult to keep people mobilized into the street day after day after day. And indeed those kind of movements also don't necessarily generate the kind of policy sophistication that you need to then press governments to do what you want done. And so I'm not against movements, I'm just against movements as the panacea. And for a while there were the flavor of the month. You hear many funders are saying, I'm going to invest in the movement. And it was no longer sexy to invest in professional organizations. And that's just not a very pragmatic way to get things done. So I just keep coming back to this pragmatist what does it take to generate pressure now? And similarly, this effort of decolonization. I mean, I'm all for building up strong human rights groups around the world by all means, but to pretend that that's the answer when Very few of them have the capacity to speak to the German government or to speak to the Japanese government or kind of to really invoke the levers of pressure.
- [39:38]
B
Yeah, hold on. You, you know, the objection to this, the objection to this is they don't have access to the German government because groups like Human Rights Watch monopolize the interface with, with, with the government itself.
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A
Yeah, I mean, we don't, we don't have any monopoly. You know, we have built the resources to have an office in Berlin, to have an office in Paris, to have an office in Tokyo. You know, we've invested in what it takes to have those relationships and anybody could do it. But it requires building a global organization. And the idea that, you know, we'll have, you know, hundreds of national based organizations with this global capacity is just utterly unrealistic. There has to be a division of labor. And so Human Rights Watch works very closely with local and national human rights groups every place we are. But a lot of, you know, the Human Rights Watch value added is the capacity to project local or national concerns to the global level. And as just a matter of economy of scale, you can't have an infinite number of groups doing that. And it really is at this stage, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch that have built that capacity. So I don't think there's the idea that we monopolize, that we're occupying the field is not how it works. It's just that it takes a huge amount of investment and time and you know, something that's built up over years to have that projection capacity.
- [41:01]
B
Well, you, I think just hinted to the fact that, you know, again, you are very pragmatic and you do what works, if it works and it has a positive outcome of a human rights situation, you are open to it and you're going to try to save it. And something that comes through your, your book is that you really are not an absolutist about human rights. You write that this is one framework among others, one method to get better outcomes. But you're not particularly hung up about the fact that it has to be human rights. And everything has to go through human rights. And even the way that you describe human rights earlier, you know, this is a matter of rights and wrong. And most people have a sense of right and wrong. And fundamentally this is a moral enterprise or an enterprise to moralize state behavior and other actors. And you know, if there are other more successful or more efficient ways to do it, by all means do it. But what you want to do is to take these issues in the most effective possible way to the power holders. And that means playing their game in a sense.
- [42:28]
A
Well, I mean, you're right, Nicola, that I don't view. I mean, I believe very much in human rights. I mean, I chose this to be the focus of my professional life. But I also recognize that it's not the only moral framework. I mean, I talk in the book where in a debate I had with Samuel Moyn, the Yale law professor, where he criticized human rights groups for basically pretty fast, that our efforts to spare civilians in war is counterproductive because we should be focusing on peace instead. And if we make war more palatable, we're undermining efforts to stop war. And I explain why. I just don't believe that at all that you can have peace groups out there as well as human rights groups. There's not a sole moral framework, but there is value, I think, in taking a principled approach to human rights. But as I said, it is really a matter of right and wrong, because it doesn't do you that much good to cite some article in a treaty. If the public thinks that that's fine. And so it really is important to build a public morality. And the human rights movement does it, I think, quite self consciously by focusing on cases, by highlighting individuals, by trying to make human rights violations as relatable and as personable as possible in order to try to kind of build support for the broader principles. But you don't write reports by saying article such and such, and the security says X and therefore the government's wrong. You don't convince people that way. You got to convince people by showing that what the government is doing is horrible. And you've got to generate this visceral dislike for what they're doing. And that's how we build pressure on governments to change.
- [44:19]
B
So in a sense, human rights law is very much a starting point. It's a way to get a handle on governance when they sign up to treaties or to obligations, and then from there try to build what is, you know, an effective strategy to get them to comply with it. But you have certainly no fetishization of international law and standards. And that comes pretty clearly in the book. At the same time, you have an entire chapter on international justice, an issue that is at the forefront of global politics these days because of Israel and Gaza, as well as President Trump's decision to basically impede the work and delegitimize the work of the International Criminal Court. Of course, when you started your career, there was nothing like the International Criminal Court, you played a role, and Human Rights Watch played a big role in establishing this court. Have it live to your hopes and expectations.
- [45:36]
A
Well, Nicole, you're right that. I mean, when I started, international justice was just, you know, a dream. It was not at all possible. Indeed, I describe how my colleague Richard Dicker and I tried to get some government to charge Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq with genocide before the International Court of Justice, a civil case, and we couldn't do it. It was just at a stage where nobody would take him on. International justice was too novel. And we've seen a huge evolution, really, starting foremost with the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals, and then moving on to the International Criminal Court. And so we've gone from a stage where the most you could hope for was a truth commission, to now having both international and national justice, some kind of national justice using universal jurisdiction being real possibilities. Now, to be candid with the icc, I have been disappointed. I still think it's an incredibly important institution. I'm spending quite a bit of time defending it, both the charges against Netanyahu and Gallant for the starvation strategy in Gaza, which I think was very appropriate charges to bring. I've been speaking out and writing about Trump's sanctions on the court, which are outrageous interference with an independent institution of justice. So I really defend it, and I think it remains a hugely important institution with great potential. But where I'm disappointed is that it has accomplished less than I had hoped. It has pursued actual prosecutions and convictions, really only of warlords. It has not convicted any government official. And while it has charged government officials, and it has moved well beyond the initial accusation that it was focused only on Africa. Now Putin has been charged, Netanyahu has been charged, the Myanmar hunter head has been charged. So it's clearly moving outside of Africa. But its challenge is gaining custody of these people so it can put them on trial. And that is not simply the fault of the court. It's also the fault of other governments not willing to support it enough to arrest and deliver people for justice.
- [47:47]
B
And I think one of the criticism about the work of the court is also that, you know, in. In order to revive its profile and. And hopefully its effectiveness, it has in recent years targeted governments that are not even part of the Rome Treaty. Right? Israel, Russia, Myanmar. And, of course, there is a solid case, I think, and the court will certainly decide in this way. I mean, not certainly, but probably will decide and have decided actually to take on these cases. But you can see that from a political perspective, governments have a pretty Easy game to say, well, we didn't sign up to this treaty, and therefore this court has no jurisdictions on our actions. What is the battle here, and how do you overcome this?
- [48:54]
A
Well, Nicholas, what you're describing is the Trump argument. But let me just do a quick diversion here and explain how the court gets jurisdiction. And There basically are three ways. One is if a government signs on, which 125 governments have done, then its nationals can be prosecuted any place in the world if they commit an ICC crime, a war crime, crime against humanity, et cetera. Second, if the UN Security Council refers a case that gives jurisdiction, but that requires getting over the veto of the permanent five, and that doesn't happen in a lot of important cases. So the third method is what's known as territorial jurisdiction. If somebody commits a crime on the territory of a member state, that person can be prosecuted regardless of their nationality. And this is not such a radical proposition. I mean, Nicolas, you're French. If I murdered somebody in Paris as an American, would it be outrageous for the French government to prosecute me? No, of course not. And similarly, there's nothing outrageous about the French government basically delivering that power as well to the icc. So this idea that there's no impunity, you don't get impunity to commit crimes on somebody else's territory just because you're not that nationality. That's not a principle of justice. And that's how Putin got charged, because Ukraine had conferred jurisdiction even though Russia never joined the court. That's how Netanyahu got charged, because Palestine had joined the courts, even though Israel never did. The US Maintained its opposition to territorial jurisdiction back in rome more than two decades ago and lost by a vote of 120 to 7. And so the Rome Statute codifies territorial jurisdiction. You know, the United States was in an embarrassingly tiny minority that opposed that. Now, what's interesting is that once Putin was charged, the US Changed its mind and it embraced territorial jurisdiction. And even somebody like Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, who's one of the foreign policy leaders in the Senate, he said, the charges against Putin have changed our mind. It's redeemed. The icc, he got a unanimous resolution through the Senate supporting it. A bunch of Republicans went off to the Hague to meet with Kareem Khan. Suddenly, everybody loved the ICC until it charged Netanyahu. And so this is not a principled objection. This is not some, you know, real objection to territorial jurisdiction. This is just the Israel exception to U.S. foreign policy. You know, and it is an utterly unprincipled effort to try to prevent Netanyahu from accountability for the starvation strategy that he clearly pursued in Gaza. And so that's what this is really about.
- [51:41]
B
And I want here to ask you about another aspect which is pretty prominent in your book, which is that you grew this organization, as you said, from two or three people to about 500.
- [51:57]
A
When I took over, there were about 60 people, you know, because.
- [52:01]
B
It was a much bigger base. But, you know, today is about 500 people or so and $100 million in budget. But you certainly don't romanticize leadership. You give, first of all, you give a lot of credit to your colleagues and to various political leaders, government leaders, even United Nations General Secretary, at least one. And so there is no heroization here of the leader of the organization. But you're very clear about the fact that, and I think you write somewhere that you actually don't like management, but you are very clear about the fact that you want to take the macro orientation of the organization and that you want to model what the organization should be like. So you yourself, your work ethic, your command of the facts, your passion, your high professionalism, that this is really the way the organization sort of took its identity from. There are other aspects about, I think, the leadership of an organization, which is always a very complicated matter, which is that you are absolutely willing to take directions from the people who are experts in their field or the people who are experts on country, but you do not really have a sense of what communities of workers within the organization want or the changes that they want. You seem to have very. Not a great deal of patience for this or this is something you're happy to delegate, to be fair about from what you, you say in the book, is leadership something that you've been thinking a lot throughout your career, either in general terms or through particular challenges that the organization met over three decades. I'm sure there were many. Or is this something that sort of came naturally to you and it just happened that way?
- [54:39]
A
I mean, a lot of what I did was learned through trial and error. I mean, I had no training in management other than having had a mentorship under Aria, which was significant.
- [54:50]
B
So you never took a course on human rights? You didn't practice as a lawyer?
- [54:58]
A
My lawyer, when I was a human life lawyer, yes, it's true. I've never taken an academic source.
- [55:08]
B
What's not a lawyer either? Ari Nair was.
- [55:14]
A
But I never was a human rights lawyer until I came to Human Rights Watch, I guess. But no, in terms of leadership, I mean, I figured out pretty early on that I would kill the organization if I tried to make it all about me. That the way to maximize our capacity to get stuff done was to give people ownership and let them run with it. And that meant deferring to expertise. I mean, I would probe people, I would question them, but I really would defer to their expertise. It meant giving them a profile. I wanted every single researcher and advocate to have their own press contacts, to have their own, you know, appearances before Congress, to have their own quotations in the media. And I, you know, I know some NGO heads want to do it all themselves, and there's an incredible limit to what one can do, and it kills an organization. So I figured out, you know, very early on that to get the best out of people, I needed to give them, you know, a lot of latitude. And I set certain standards. And in terms of professionalism, you know, I wanted us to be very principled, fact based, you know, not politicized, impact oriented, but within those principles, I let them go. And I tried to be as supportive as I could, and I would sort of step in myself sometimes if there was a, you know, a reason for me to do that. But I was very happy for them to just run with it. And a lot of, you know, the great successes of the organization was because people had passion and ran with it and I encouraged them. So, I mean, it became just commonsensical to me. But that was my management style. And it meant, I mean, if somebody really were to violate the core principles, yes, I'd have to step in. But that didn't happen because we were really quite clear about what those principles were. People knew and they stuck within them. And so sometimes people are better at it than others. And you do sometimes have to change forces. I mean, yes, but I tried to be as supportive as I could and to give people as much latitude as I could.
- [57:13]
B
One of the controversial issues during your tenure that you address in the book is the perception that you were not in favor of addressing the social, economic side of human rights, that you put more emphasis on civil and political rights, on the responsibility of governments, on so called negative rights, being free from torture and so on and so forth, but that socioeconomic rights were not easily measured, that Human Rights Watch was not in a good position to tell governments how to allocate their resources, that many of these rights are under the banner of progressive realization in international covenants. And if I look at the work of Human Rights Watch over the years and today, and I've been heavily involved in Some of this work, this is not the reality. There's an enormous amount of work that is taking place on this. But somehow the perception is still that what captivates you is matter of high politics and not so much circular economy progress.
- [58:33]
A
Yeah, I mean, Nikolai, I think you may be putting that a bit too negatively in the sense that, I mean, when I took over as executive director, one of the areas where I did differ with Aryeh is that he was opposed to taking on economic and social rights. He thought it was just too political. And I didn't feel we could do that. I think I thought that because our legitimacy is based in the existence of these treaties, we couldn't pick one and not the other. We couldn't do just civil and political rights and not economic and social rights rights. And so right away I said, we have to find a way to do economic and social rights. I then objected to people who just used it as a sort of banner to push for whatever they wanted, you know, spend more money on my pet project. And what I tried to do is to introduce more rigor into what it meant to uphold social and economic rights, which focused really on this requirement that governments use available resources to progressively realize, you know, the right to housing or healthcare or education. And that, you know, it sounds mushy, but it's actually a standard that has some real bite to it because it's incompatible with governments that spend money on corruption or vanity projects or the military. I mean, and so while, you know, there are many good faith ways to pursue economic and social rights, you know, we're not going to tell people, you know, invest more in schools today and healthcare clinics tomorrow and roads the next day to get goods to market. Those are all kind of within the realm of good faith differences. But if governments are really wasting money, they could be going toward the realization of economic, social rights. That's an area where Human Rights Watch can make a big difference. And that's where the bulk of the work that you're describing is, in fact, focused. So do people think that we don't focus on that? I think in many ways it still is an echo of the early days of the organization, but it hasn't been true for decades.
- [60:24]
B
And related to this, you clearly had to make choices about the situations and the crisis and the. The work of Human Rights Watch that you address in the book. You have 15 chapters, but not each of them is on a particular country. There is one on war crimes. There's one on the United nations, which is probably its own crisis, but a different Question. You have one on international criminal justice, and you even have one on your formative years, on your early years. So how did you make, I'm curious, the decision of, you know, what you were going to put in the book and what you wear going to leave out. And don't tell me that you wrote more than you wrote.
- [61:18]
A
Well, I did. I think that's not inherent in the process. But no, I. I mean, I had not written, you know, a word of this until I left Human Rights Watch at the end of August 2022. And starting September 1st, I sat down and started writing. And at first I. I really just wrote pretty much stream of consciousness. And I knew that I had to tell. I had to deliver ideas through stories. And so I started writing down stories. And I knew that I wanted to take on the big issues, so I needed to deal with China, I needed to deal with Russia. I chose Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo as sort of the big African issue. I needed a big European issue. So I dealt with Poland and Hungary. But a lot of the book was really dictated by this gradual storytelling. And I would see, okay, where do I have enough stories to turn this into a chapter? And where I didn't, I would then, you know, fit the stories in someplace else because I do have some thematic chapters, as you know. But it was, you know, I don't know. I've never talked to anybody about how you do this. I was kind of making it up as I went along, but. But that's how I did it.
- [62:27]
B
Now the book is down. What is next for Ken Roth? You are teaching at Princeton. You presumably are going to engage with the public with the book. What's next?
- [62:44]
A
Well, the next few months are really going to be taken up with marketing the book. I've got a book tour which has taken me throughout Europe and North America. And so that'll take a lot of time. Hopefully there'll be media interest. So I've kind of allocated to time for that. As you note, I've been teaching at the Princeton School of Public and International affairs, and I enjoy that. I'm also still a senior fellow at the Harper Kennedy School and so do some work there. But I've been writing a lot publicly, and I like that and want to continue that. So even while this book has been going through the process, I've been writing a lot of op eds and articles, and I plan to continue that. I mean, I'm still not sure whether I should try to get a column in one place or do what I do now. Which is just move around. But I feel that I'm fortunate to have the experience and background that I have, and I feel almost a responsibility to use that to speak to some of the big human rights issues of the day so that I completely plan to keep doing. People ask me, is there another book? And I have no idea right now. I just have not gotten to that stage. But I did like writing this book. I've always liked writing and it was a daunting process. It's one thing to write a thousand word op ed, it's totally another thing to write under 25,000 word book. But it was fun. So I wouldn't say no if I could figure out the right next book.
- [64:13]
B
So I want to ask you to conclude this conversation with where people can find your book and more about what you're doing. I know you have your own website, but before we get to this, I want to ask you what kind of advice you would give to people who are interested in human rights or even interested in a human rights career at a time that is, I think, particularly challenging. We are seeing certainly in the United States, which is not the center of the world, but it has been the steward of the international system since the end of the Second World War, and erratically and sometimes brutally, but nonetheless has been broadly supportive of human rights endeavor. So there's, I guess a lot of energy, pent up energy that is bound to come up when we see the sort of dismantling of the government and even democratic norms in the United States. And that's not by far the only country. So what advice would you give to people who want to do something on human rights or start a career there?
- [65:36]
A
You're right, this is a bad moment in Washington, but Trump will not last forever. So I, I would not be discouraged by that. I mean, there will still be a strong human rights movement to be a part of. People ask me a lot, you know, what did you look for when you were hiring researchers at Human Rights Watch? You know, one thing I'm asked is, do you need to be a lawyer? And the answer is no. You know, there are, yes, there are a lot of lawyers who do it, but they're journalists and they're academics and they're activists. And, you know, Human Rights Watch never really looked at a degree when he looked at skills. And so what we wanted are people who first of all can speak the relevant languages. And one of the most important things to do is to get out of the west and go live in a country that interests you as a Place where you might want to work and perfect the language. That's a very important thing. Second, we look for people who had the analytics skills, the writing skills, the speaking skills. And the best way to do that is to just find opportunities to do that kind of writing and analysis. It can be as a freelance journalist, it could be as an analyst. I mean, and people have to think somewhat creatively. I mean, they shouldn't think, oh, I'm waiting for my perfect human rights job. The key is to open the door someplace. It could be a humanitarian job, it could be a development job, but something that is vaguely related, that gets you into the field and forces you to do the kind of work and develop the kind of skills that a human rights organization would look for. And then the other thing which I really draw from my career is the importance of just finding ways to start. I mean, it took me seven years to get a job. I mean, I was, as I said, a lawyer. And I volunteered doing human rights work for basically six years. And it was only after that point when a job opened up. But if I hadn't been doing that volunteer work, I wouldn't have been known. I wouldn't have been offered the job. And so what I take from that is that if you really are passionate about this, find a way to start doing the work. And it may not be in a paid way. You may have to have a job on the side and just kind of do bits and pieces while you can, but try to get started. And there's nothing like that for opportunities to emerge.
- [67:44]
B
I recognize here the kind of advice that you give to your students. Get out of the west and so on. What about the other categories of people who take up human rights work? And in particular in authoritarian and dangerous settings? What is the advice you would give to, you know, a young Thai activist, you know, a Nigerian person, was, you know, concerned with climate rights. What about people who live in Russia or in conflict area?
- [68:22]
A
Yeah, I mean, obviously we can't, on a program like this, give, you know, kind of specific advice there because it's very particular. And sometimes it's just too dangerous to do human rights work in place. And you've got to think about living abroad and doing work from elsewhere. Sometimes the work have to be done very quietly, so it's hard to generalize there. But I think what I take heart from is there really is an incredibly broad human rights movement that has emerged in the time that I've been doing this work. And in every country, including the most repressive, there are activists who are doing this work, sometimes from exile, often from inside. And so there are opportunities to link up with these people to figure out how one can get started. And one has to be careful. You don't want to end up in prison, but there are often things that can be done if that's the interest of the person.
- [69:16]
B
Great. I think you've earned the rights to tell us where people can buy your book and find more about your activities and your wide ranging writing.
- [69:28]
A
Okay, well, I mean the easy. I just set up a new website. It's KenRoth.org where I collect not only where one can buy the book, but also I collect my recent articles there. But if you just Google Kenneth Roth writing wrongs, the easiest way to buy it in your locale will pop up. And it doesn't have to be Amazon, it could be your local bookstore. But there are lots of places where it can be bought and it comes out February 25th. So today people can pre order and then it'll be physically available from that point on.
- [69:58]
B
Perfect. Ken, thank you very much for the discussion and good luck with the launch of the book.
- [70:05]
A
Thank you very much for having me. Nibalai.
- [70:06]
B
This is all for today from me, your host, Nicholas Becklin. You can listen to many more interviews about human rights issues and human rights work on the Human Rights Channel of the New Books Network. If you have any comments or suggestions about the show, please do get in touch. Until next time, goodbye.