The former executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) analyzed the contemporary nature of human rights defense at a Feb. 25 book talk at Georgetown University.
The event celebrated the launch of former HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth’s memoir, “Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments,” which examines Roth’s career at the HRW, an international human rights research and advocacy organization. The event was hosted by the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), which seeks to foster interreligious understanding, in partnership with the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, the African Studies Program, the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and Georgetown University Qatar.
In his memoir, “Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments,” Roth examines his time at the HRW from 1993 to 2022.
Roth said the book is both a memoir and an effort to explore the field of human rights defense.
“What I try to do in this book is to show that the defense of human rights is a process of playing hardball,” Roth said at the event. “Our job is to maximize pressure on governments that violate human rights.”
“Our task is to change the cost-benefit analysis of repression — to increase the cost so that it is less beneficial to violate human rights,” he added.
Under Roth’s leadership, the HRW’s staff grew from 60 to over 550 employees and extended its reach to more than 100 countries. The group also won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.
Nader Hashemi, the director of the ACMCU, moderated the talk and said Roth has served as an inspiration to his own career studying democracy and human rights struggles.
“For those of us growing up and who came of age during Ken Roth’s leadership of the Human Rights Watch, he’s played the role of a moral beacon and indeed a fatherlike figure on questions of human rights and international politics,” Hashemi said at the event.
Hashemi said Roth’s leadership on human rights advocacy in Palestine distinguishes his service.
“The late Edward Said once observed that defending human rights matters, but it especially matters in those contexts where it’s difficult to speak about them and to advocate for them,” Hashemi said. “This observation particularly applies to the case of the human rights of the Palestinian people, for which Ken Roth has been a tireless and principled advocate.”
At the event, Roth discussed the role of human rights in paths forward from the Israel-Hamas War ceasefire, which took effect Jan. 19 after 16 months of violent military conflict since Oct. 7, 2023 — resulting in a humanitarian crisis and mass displacement in Gaza and thousands of deaths.
Roth said President Donald Trump’s recent proposal for a U.S. takeover of Gaza and the permanent displacement of its population would amount to a war crime under Article 49 of the Geneva Convention, which classifies the forced expulsion of residents of an occupied territory as such.
“What Trump’s proposal did is to suddenly surface a fourth option that has always been lingering in the background but was just so beyond the pale that it was never actively discussed — and that was to solve the Palestinian problem by getting rid of the Palestinians,” Roth said.
Roth added that he feels supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state would aid Trump’s plans to become a regional power broker in the Middle East.
“You know, he sees himself as the master deal maker,” Roth said. “But if Trump recognizes that his quest for a regional deal with Saudi normalizations with Israel, he has no welcome strides, all depends on a Palestinian state.”
According to Roth, pragmatic and continued efforts to protect human rights around the world is of the utmost importance.
“This is not about holding hands and singing kumbaya,” said Roth. “This is about figuring out what do governments care about and how do we prevent them from getting that until they improve their human rights practices.”