Do Human Rights Have a Future?

Ambivalence never polls well. Focus groups rarely select the irresolute choice. Leaders who change their minds, discarding policies in favor of new ones, are frequently slammed for being opportunistic, or worse, flip-flopping chameleons. Certainty is a virtue; doubt is a vice.

Kenneth Roth doesn’t lack certainty. For nearly three decades, he led Human Rights Watch, growing it into arguably the most influential human rights organization in the world, outlasting many of the dictators he took on. Starting out as a law clerk to a U.S. District Court judge in Manhattan, Roth adopted his unshakeable belief in the force of facts. By gathering evidence, applying it to rigorous tests, and establishing crimes, Human Rights Watch under Roth believed the sheer weight of facts alone would be enough to make a difference.

A seriousness of purpose and a firm commitment to rights and justice are the central personal characteristics one absorbs from Roth’s memoir Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments. The thorough documentation of human rights abuses—from the chemical warfare against the Kurds, the genocide in Rwanda, and the consequences of overweening executive power in the United States—were undertaken by a courageous, talented, and indefatigable staff of researchers and advocates on Roth’s watch from 1993 to 2022.

Roth’s early career as a prosecutor was a formative influence. There, he acquired his steely, forensic style which has stayed with him since. From the 34th floor of the Empire State Building, where Human Rights Watch’s headquarters are based, he took the world as his courtroom, expertly zooming in on human rights violations across dozens of countries, subjecting them to close analytical scrutiny, and then indicting the leaders responsible through a prodigious flow of interviews, articles, press conferences, and near-hourly tweets.

When former President Barack Obama hosted a state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping, the White House made sure to invite Human Rights Watch’s then-China director, Sophie Richardson. Obama approached Richardson and asked how her boss was faring, likely an attempt to soften anticipated criticism for not loudly denouncing China’s abuses. He’s “permanently prosecutorial,” Richardson replied, eliciting laughter from Obama.

Roth recalls the episode with pride, signaling his status as the most recognizable leader of Western human rights practice. In the memoir’s blizzard of stories of Roth hobnobbing with world leaders and cajoling impervious autocrats, he is at the center of the action. He generously offers plaudits and props to those at Human Rights Watch who led the way, but as executive director, he was always the face of the organization’s triumphs and setbacks. From the relatively small organization he took over, it grew to over 500 people covering 100 countries.

Kenneth Roth speaks at the “Syrian Refugee Crisis and the Toll of Indiscriminate Weapons” event at the U.N. headquarters in New York on Sept. 28, 2015.Darren Ornitz/Reuters

Syrian residents protest against a suspected chemical weapons attack on their town in Khan Sheikhun on April 7, 2017.Omar haj kadour/AFP via Getty Images

Human Rights Watch adopted “naming and shaming” as its favored method. “The first point of such reporting,” Roth writes in his opening chapter on Syria, “is to shame the perpetrators.” According to Human Rights Watch’s operational trinity of investigate, document, and report, naming and shaming should result in a change in state behavior. It’s curious, then, that Roth begins with Syria, since it is an example of a place where no level of advocacy and no manner of naming and shaming from states or human rights groups had any apparent effect in modifying the Assad regime’s brutality. After nearly a decade and a half of counter-insurgency and civil war, the Assad regime folded in December, putting up no resistance against a ragtag group of Islamists who now hold power.

Naming crimes serves an important purpose. It sets the limits of what is acceptable. It defines excesses and raises them to matter of wider concern. It gives the victims and survivors recognition of what was done to them. And it identifies the perpetrators.

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Shaming, however, assumes that its targets are vulnerable to its stigma—that the perpetrators cherish their reputations and fear disgrace as abusers and war criminals. But there are several examples that demonstrate how abusive governments have grown inured to human rights criticism, and invulnerable to shaming. Right up to his frantic flight to Moscow, Assad was unmoved by the opprobrium heaped on him for years.

Other strongmen revel in it. Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, gloried in the criticism he received for his murderous “war on drugs” that reportedly claimed the lives of as many as 30,000 people. Justice finally caught up with him this week, when he was arrested on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.

The Taliban unapologetically confine women to their homes, denying them even their right to be heard in public. As Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, once despaired: “When thug-like leaders ride to power, democratically or otherwise, and openly defy, not only their own laws and constitutions, but also their obligations under international law, where is their shame?” The answer is that they often have none.

A Taliban fighter (center) stands guard as women wait in line during a World Food Program distribution in Kabul on Nov. 29, 2021. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

Instead, in his view, naming and shaming is an imperative that must always be used, whatever the circumstances. Morality, as Nietzsche might have put it, is the principal weapon in his arsenal. Roth digs in and swats away critics of the practice, even reaching deep into the archives to criticize a piece on the theme by the writer David Rieff, published in the New York Times more than a quarter century ago. If the methods don’t yield the desired outcome, he argues, it’s only because the road is long and so patience and sustained pressure are required.

Roth concedes that there was a supportive infrastructure that Human Rights Watch’s practice could depend on for much of the last four decades. The U.S. government was, at least rhetorically, committed to the promotion of human rights. There was also an interest in human rights abuses from the American liberal media, especially outlets like the New York Times and CNN that have powerful international reach.

Successive U.S. administrations—though mostly Democratic ones—were leaned on to apply more pressure on abusive governments. It wasn’t so much speaking truth to power, but counselling power to do the right thing. Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, he writes, could also be persuaded to address human rights violators. A sympathetic media amplified the condemnation, with Roth astutely positioning himself as a voice of equal prominence when confronting some “implacable tyrant.”

The politics and the power relations involved don’t trouble Roth. As the scholar Rochelle Terman observes, “we cannot understand human rights shaming—including its likely effects—without appreciating the relational context in which it occurs.” Rivals, she adds, can be castigated “to inflict political damage and gain a strategic advantage on the world stage.” Denouncing Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba is easy and serves U.S. foreign policy aims.

Applying the same standard to friends is more complicated. A small, allied state, like Rwanda or Sri Lanka, can also be criticized. It may even move toward compliance, disingenuously signing up to human rights treaties for the sake of appearances and to quiet the criticism. The scholar Emilie M. Hafner-Burton has argued that even as states sign up to human rights treaties, many tend to perpetuate—even increase—their abuses. But more powerful friends can reliably count on silence.

Roth accuses the Bush administration of torture and deliberate mistreatment during a press conference to release the Human Rights Watch World Report in Washington, D.C., in 2006.

Whether criticizing Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s encouragement of violence in Haiti or playing derring-do with the Cuban authorities to get access to the regime’s notorious punishment cells, Roth’s education was established in the field in frequently harrowing circumstances. This is also a rare section of the memoir where we encounter a clear example of Roth’s own learning on the job. Recalling his limited chops at public speaking, Roth explains how he learned through insistent practice to convey ideas that would resonate through stories. It gives some sense of how Roth matured and what he gleaned along the way.

There is an admirable, often brave, consistency that Roth applies across contexts. Using international human rights and humanitarian law as its universal standard, Human Rights Watch confronted the George W. Bush administration for its permissive torture practices and successive Israeli governments for perpetuating a sweeping, discriminatory system that the organization has designated apartheid.

But this is where many Western allies, and sections of the liberal media, part company with Roth. The assumption underpinning naming and shaming is that states hide their abuses and once there’s exposure, they will relent. The war in Gaza, extensively documented in the global media and by rights groups, demonstrated that even when it comes to usually friendly governments and media, Roth’s assumptions can falter. The suffering of civilians and the destruction of infrastructure occurred in full view of a Democratic administration supposedly supportive of human rights, yet Joe Biden’s White House not only refused to condemn the abuses but actively supported them.

Indeed, the Biden administration resisted pressure to condemn Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 massacres, even as Israeli leaders openly declared their contempt for international law, depleting Washington’s moral authority in the eyes of much of the world. Now, under Donald Trump’s second administration, there is only veneration of power and targeting of the weak. The liberal international order, which was supposed to promote human rights through its rules and norms, is being contemptuously discarded.

A photo of Chinese President Xi Jinping is seen on the ground as Uyghur activists protest outside a court appearance for Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou at the British Columbia Supreme Court in Vancouver, Canada, on May 8, 2019.

Roth, who is banned by Beijing, begins his chapter on China boldly asserting that “there is no greater threat to the global human-rights system today than the Chinese government under Xi Jinping.” Whether or not this is a fair representation, the maximalism that Roth counsels for advocacy on China is hardly likely to change its behavior. Roth even cites a Chinese official making clear that being “too critical” would stymie dialogue but responds by thundering that Human Rights Watch “would never temper [its] criticism to secure access.”

Volker Türk, the current U.N. high commissioner for human rights and a frequent target of Roth’s tweets and articles, is taken to task for his alleged cowardice when it comes to China. “The Chinese government’s persecution of Uyghurs in China is one of the worst human rights abuses in the world, but the new UN rights chief, @Volker_Turk, can’t find his voice,” Roth wrote in a January 2023 post. “No public criticism. This is not a weak institution, it is a weak individual.” Türk has criticized China on multiple occasions, but his attempts to also engage a powerful, permanent member of the U.N. Security Council are spurned by Roth as acts of unforgivable timidity.

Were one instead to conceive of human rights as an intrinsic and necessary part of the hurly-burly of politics where power and resource distribution are always open for contestation, all-or-nothing stances that seem to ignore politics—or transcend politics—would be diminished greatly.

During the first part of Roth’s tenure, Human Rights Watch began to make room for another basket of rights long pressed by states and global NGOs, especially those in the global south. Social and economic rights had been seen by some hard-core originalists, including Roth himself, as somehow not of the same natural rights status as civil and political rights.

But the tide turned and giving them equal status as rights would become a sea change for the world’s second-largest human rights organization. (Amnesty International is the largest.) Once again, politics played a role: The skeptics of social and economic rights qua rights believe that guarantees of employment, housing, education, and so on are best left for public policy debate since the cost of those rights is not the same everywhere. In other words, granting them is an eminently political dilemma.

Roth gives scant attention to those who disagree with his outlook. Jack Snyder—a Columbia University political scientist who argues that the human rights movement should mobilize local groups and focus on corruption issues first and foremost instead of shaming—is briskly dispatched.

There are a couple mentions of Samuel Moyn, the professor of law and history at Yale, but only fleeting engagement with his thoughtful critiques. Moyn has censured the human rights movement for prioritizing “status equality,” where people have equal political rights, but limiting economic rights to subsistence. In Moyn’s view, the question of material equality has been disregarded because the human rights movement was comfortable, even complicit, with the rise of neoliberalism.

The two, he argues, rose in influence over the same period of time and reinforced each other. And he has questioned the human rights movement’s approach to international humanitarian law—which may be better described as the laws of war with humanitarian characteristics—merely seeking to diminish deaths in war, not stop them.

Part of the problem is that when your job is to spotlight evidence of abuse, when you are laser-focused on assessing atrocity, letting a hundred approaches bloom is not in your interest. Human Rights Watch under Roth’s tenure had become the gold standard in reporting and advocating. Why rock that boat, or change course? Roth does make clear, and hats off to him for having done so, that he went out of his way to appear on hostile media outlets, like Fox News. Yet it is unclear what he learned from his detractors.

The human rights movement is arguably needed now more than at any time since it emerged. But to become relevant once again, it must relinquish its reluctance to confront the complicated and unpredictable domain of politics. The conceit that human rights exist on a separate moral plane—floating above the battle—is no longer adequate. This moment demands a reckoning with power, and the messy world of politics that entails.

International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan (left) and Kenneth Roth attend a meeting focused on ensuring accountability for atrocities committed in Ukraine, seen at the U.N. headquarters in New York on April 27, 2022.