This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, host Chris Hedges speaks with Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the author of Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Frontlines Battling Abusive Governments. Hedges and Roth discuss HRW’s work and how it has changed over time, from its Cold War origins to the social media age.
Roth explains his approach to human rights work:
I enter the discussion with the assumption that governments have good reason to violate human rights. It’s a way to stay in power. It’s a way to get rid of the opposition. So our job in the human rights movement is to increase the cost of that strategy, to shift the cost-benefit analysis behind repression. And the two main tools we use are first, shaming, and second, trying to deprive governments of access to benefits that they want from the international community.
Roth describes examples, including Rwanda’s invasion of eastern Congo and the Russian and Syrian bombing of civilians in Idlib, that illustrate the complexities of applying the strategies of shaming and pressure in different political contexts.
These strategies, moreover, are not applied evenly, and are only sometimes effective. Roth criticizes the Chinese government for evading due scrutiny for its detainment of Uyghurs, and for rejecting international human rights institutions. Roth and Hedges also discuss how Israel, with US support, has been able to continue its genocide and occupation despite repeated condemnation from NGOs, political leaders and international institutions.
Framing human rights work as a series of struggles “of the individual against the collective,” Roth emphasizes the importance of protecting dissidents who stand up to autocratic regimes. Because a dictatorship depends on the people’s “acquiescence,” it will go to great lengths to suppress dissidents whose individual acts of resistance have power “to spark a broad movement.” Despite the rise of autocracy in the west, Roth cites anti-authoritarian victories in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Brazil, as well as popular anti-authoritarian sentiment in the face of political defeat, as reasons for his relative optimism.
Host
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Sofia Menemenlis
Crew:
Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript:
Sofia Menemenlis
Transcript
Chris Hedges
Some 70% of the world’s population now live under some form of autocratic rule. These expanding autocracies, including in the United States, are revoking basic civil liberties, demolishing democratic norms, and assaulting human rights. The last 30 years of democratic advances epitomized by international campaigns for human rights are in retreat. Autocrats are becoming bolder, less concerned about what the international community thinks or does. Flagrantly flouting, as Israel does with the genocide in Gaza or Vladimir Putin does in Ukraine, international humanitarian law. China’s totalitarian capitalism seems hermetically sealed, largely immune to the international censorship over its treatment of Uyghurs and its crushing of freedoms of expression, association, and peaceful assembly. These autocracies weaponize national financial and investigative agencies, a tactic employed by the Trump administration. They crush civil society. They target human rights defenders, activists, journalists, and critics. Civic space, whether in Washington, Beijing, Delhi, or Moscow, is withering. Discrimination, hatred, and violence directed against religious and ethnic minorities, particularly Muslims, has become part of our mainstream political discourse. Kenneth Roth, who began his legal career as a federal prosecutor, is a leading advocate for international human rights. He served as the executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022, overseeing a significant expansion of the organization’s research and work around the globe. In his new book, Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Frontlines Battling Abusive Governments, he details the tactics, including the public shaming of repressive regimes and intricate alliances he formed to halt egregious human rights violations. We will discuss these tactics and how or if they can work in a world where democracies and open societies are under assault.
Let’s begin as you do in the book with the creation of Americas Watch. I was there, I shared an office with Jemera Rone, who was the counsel. That was, I think, a very significant moment. Human rights had been weaponized in the Cold War, used as a kind of cudgel against the Soviet Union and under Aryeh Neier, and you worked for Aryeh Neier before assuming the directorship of Human Rights Watch. This was a shift to report human rights abuses by regimes in Latin America, in the case of El Salvador in the early 80s, that were allied with the United States. I thought that was a really significant shift, and before we begin, wanted you to talk about it.
Kenneth Roth
Sure, well first Chris, let me just say it’s a pleasure to join you. I’ve long admired your journalism. And I’ll say just preliminarily that, you know, while I don’t want to sugar coat the current situation, it’s not as bleak as you outline it, and I’m sure we’ll get into that in more detail. But let’s go back to the beginning. Human Rights Watch actually began as Helsinki Watch. It was founded after the Helsinki Accords of 1975. Those basically recognized Yalta’s division of Europe, but also included a provision that the Soviets kind of overlooked, which gave people the right to monitor the human rights practices of their governments. And that prompted small Helsinki monitoring groups in Moscow, Prague, Warsaw, all of which were suppressed. So they issued a call to the West to create a Helsinki group to try to protect them. And that was Helsinki Watch.
Now, Chris, you talk about the origins of Americas Watch. That was very much related to the double standards of the Reagan administration. Jimmy Carter had introduced human rights as an element of US foreign policy. Reagan came in, and you may remember his UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former academic, had this brilliant theory. She distinguished between totalitarian regimes—by which she meant communist governments that were Soviet aligned, and in her view, they were immutable. You had to bash them over the head about their human rights repression. But mere authoritarian regimes, by which she meant right-wing Latin American military dictatorships that were friendly to the United States, you could coax them around. There was no need to be too tough with them. It was a blatant double standard, and we made clear we were not going to subscribe to that. And so that’s why Americas Watch applied the same international human rights standards to those Latin American military dictatorships as Helsinki Watch did to the largely communist governments of Eastern Europe.
The crucible of this work at the outset was the series of civil wars in Central America. In El Salvador and Guatemala, the Reagan administration portrayed the governments as defending against communism. They were freedom fighters. And the Contras in Nicaragua were trying to overturn the Sandinista government. They too were supposed to be freedom fighters. It didn’t go along with the Reagan administration’s narrative to have these freedom fighters torturing and disappearing people, which is what they were doing. And so when America’s Watch carefully documented those atrocities, we were viciously attacked by Reagan officials. But because we were careful, because we were right, because journalists like you went to Central America and verified our findings, we won those debates. And ultimately the Reagan administration understood that they were not going to get rid of this endless criticism without reining in their allies in Central America, and we began to make progress.
Chris Hedges
You also did something else that was very important—and I used to argue with Central American solidarity groups about this—you reported on the human rights violations by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. That’s extremely important, both for human rights monitors and for journalists, because the lie of omission is still a lie. And I, you know, from reading your book, you were, you know, as much as you could, you tried to document human rights, even if the human rights violations in Nicaragua were dwarfed—when I was in El Salvador, the death squads were killing between seven to eight thousand people a month—I thought that was extremely important because you eviscerate your credibility by not doing that. I know that that’s an extremely important part of your own campaign for human rights.
Kenneth Roth
No, you’re exactly right. In fact, it was a basic principle that in any armed conflict we would report on both sides. And that’s required by what’s known as international humanitarian law, the Geneva Conventions and their protocols. And one thing that Human Rights Watch did was we introduced the idea in those conflicts of using not just classic human rights law that looked at what governments did largely in peacetime, but we looked at how both sides fought in an armed conflict. Are they taking the required steps to spare civilians? And that step was actually criticized at the time. I would describe how the Ford Foundation basically commissioned a major report to try to dissuade us from using humanitarian law. They were afraid that, you know, if local groups felt compelled to report on both sides, and what they had in mind was reporting on rebel groups that were challenging a government, that they would be attacked. And we said, no, you know, we can operate like the International Committee of the Red Cross. We can protect ourselves by our neutrality by reporting on both sides, which is what humanitarian law requires. And indeed, that approach now is the dominant approach, but it was controversial and very novel when we started it.
Chris Hedges
Well, this is something later on in the book you run into over Israel, where the, I think the founder of Helsinki Watch, Robert Bernstein, is that correct?
Kenneth Roth
That’s correct.
Chris Hedges
Who was the publisher at Random House, mounted a pretty, you know, even vicious campaign against you personally because of your insistence that you had to report on the kinds of long history of atrocities and abuses that Israel has carried out against the Palestinians.
Kenneth Roth
Yes, Robert Bernstein was one of the founders. He was the original chair. You know, he founded along with Aryeh Neier and others. But he wasn’t comfortable applying the principles that we applied universally. He wasn’t comfortable applying them to Israel. And he came up with one excuse after another. You know, in the Middle East, shouldn’t we focus only on women’s rights? Or, in the Middle East, shouldn’t we exempt countries that are democracies? Even though Israel is obviously only a democracy within the 1967 borders, not in the occupied territories. But it was basically, you know, he just wasn’t willing to accept that Israel should face the same scrutiny as everybody else. And he ended up writing an op-ed in the New York Times, which I think they published because it was just so unusual for somebody to attack their own organization. But it just shows the importance of weathering the storm, being principled, being factual, and that blew over. People saw that he was trying to introduce an Israel exception to the enforcement of human rights law. We see that today in the Trump administration. We see it in the German government. I don’t believe in that. And fortunately, the supporters of Human Rights Watch also wanted a consistent principled approach to the defense of human rights. But there are many people who will do anything to try to exempt Israel from scrutiny. All the more so today when they’re committing so many atrocities.
Chris Hedges
Well, the tragedy is that you had your reports, Amnesty International, the famous 400-page Goldstone report. But Israel, all these war crimes and atrocities were well documented, but Israel was never held to account. And that sent a message to Israel that you can do anything you want, which of course is what has happened. And I think for those of us—I spent seven years covering the Middle East—the tragedy is that, Human Rights Watch did a good job of this, B’Tselem, other groups, Al-Haq, it was documented. But the international community kept giving Israel a pass, pass, a pass.
Kenneth Roth
And these days, the number of governments that are giving Israel a pass is diminishing. But in a sense, the only government that matters is the US government. And even Biden, while he was saying the right thing, he was saying, don’t starve Palestinian civilians, don’t bomb Palestinian civilians. He basically still sent the military aid and the arms, with the single exception of the huge 2,000 pound bombs that were decimating neighborhoods. He suspended those. The one place where there has been accountability is that now the International Criminal Court has filed war crimes charges against both the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. And so, I mean, that’s an important statement that stresses the criminality of one important part of what they’ve done, the starvation strategy. It has not yet addressed the bombing, but I suspect that will come. The sad thing is that Trump has responded by imposing sanctions on the ICC prosecutor. That is, Trump has frozen his bank accounts, prohibited him from traveling to the US. And this is blatant obstruction of justice. Trump himself could be charged with a crime for this interference with an independent judicial institution. But it shows the impunity that still in Washington is the dominant view of how Israel should be treated.
Chris Hedges
Let’s go to your book. You say that for people who care about rights, you say you have to increase the, “to shift the government’s cost benefit calculation so the abuse no longer seems desirable.” “Much can be done.” “The process is rarely linear.” You detail all sorts of alliances that you make with all sorts of figures, Macron and others, in your book, in order to further human rights interests. I’m thinking of Syria and Idlib and other places. But let’s talk about this idea of shaming, the public shaming of a government. You argue that autocracies, even Putin, they are susceptible to this public shaming. Although I did gather from your book that it’s not very effective with China.
Kenneth Roth
Well, first of all, I enter the discussion with the assumption that governments have good reason to violate human rights. It’s a way to stay in power. It’s a way to get rid of the opposition. So our job in the human rights movement is to increase the cost of that strategy, to shift the cost-benefit analysis behind repression. And the two main tools we use are first, shaming, and second, trying to deprive governments of access to benefits that they want from the international community. Now, the idea behind shaming is that in today’s world, every government has to pretend to respect human rights. This is part of their legitimacy. It’s part of their telling their people, we’re here to serve you, not just ourselves and our cronies. Now, governments fall short, sometimes in big ways. And so our job is to carefully investigate, document, and publicize the discrepancy between these haughty claims and the ugly reality. And when we do that, it’s embarrassing. You know, it’s shameful, it’s delegitimizing. Governments hate it. They always attack us. They say we’re biased, we’re misunderstood, we’re deceived. But we’re careful. And so ultimately, they recognize that they’re not going to get rid of that bad press we’re able to attract, which can be considerable—we get, like, a thousand media mentions a day—without changing their bad conduct. And there, we begin to move governments. And it’s interesting, you know, how many governments are worried about their reputation. Chris, you mentioned China, and I think China is actually ultra sensitive to its international reputation. And the reason I say that is because if you ask Xi Jinping, why are you the president of China? He can’t say, “I won a free and fair election.” They don’t allow elections. So all he can say is, the people of China prefer the dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party. But that’s not very credible when the two parts of China that had any freedom to express their views, Hong Kong and Taiwan, made clear definitively that they don’t want that dictatorship. Hundreds of thousands of people came into the street in Hong Kong to say no to the Chinese Communist Party. So he has a legitimacy problem. And as a result, Xi Jinping puts enormous importance on how the international community treats him. Do they treat him as a legitimate, respectful leader? And to illustrate how much he cares, when Human Rights Watch made a big effort to put China’s treatment of the Uyghurs on the agenda of the UN Human Rights Council—you know, this is China’s detention of 1 million out of 11 million Uyghurs to force them to abandon their religion, their culture, and their language—
Chris Hedges
Well, they’re put in re-education camps.
Kenneth Roth
Yes, and basically not released until they can persuade the jailers that they are essentially Chinese Communist Party-worshiping Han Chinese. Which they’re not. So to avoid just being discussed formally by the UN Human Rights Council, Xi Jinping personally was picking up the phone and calling heads of state. You don’t do that if you don’t care about being shamed. And so I think that that is illustrative of how much Beijing cares about its reputation. And we see that even though the persecution of the Uyghurs very much persists, it’s shifting in response to the shaming, to this international pressure.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk a little bit about how you use pressure. That, of course, resonates with me as a foreign correspondent. We always had to make alliances in order to do our reporting. And sometimes those alliances were done with some very unsavory figures. I used to get permission from the Iranian regime to go south to Abadan and join the Shi’ite rebels and go into the marshes. But the condition was that on that entire trip—I was deported twice from Iran once in handcuffs—I wasn’t allowed to report on Iran. But you have you you have to make those kinds of alliances to build the kind of pressure you want for particular human rights situations that you’re dealing with. I think of Idlib, would be the biggest example where you were dealing with the Iranians and the Russians. But just talk about that, because that resonated with me. That’s completely how we operated overseas as well.
Kenneth Roth
I think the Idlib example is illustrative. Idlib is the northwestern province in Syria, which until recently was the last area of Syria held by the armed opposition. And there, Syrian and Russian planes were deliberately bombing hospitals, schools, marketplaces, apartment buildings, with the aim of driving out the civilian population. There were about three million civilians.
Chris Hedges
We should be clear, Ken, there were three million people there. It was huge.
Kenneth Roth
3 million people there, yes, exactly. Half of them indigenous, half having been displaced from elsewhere in Syria. And this was a deliberate effort to drain the sea in order to get the fish, you know, get rid of the civilians and it’d be easier for the Syrian military to march in and attack the rebels. And so it was a deliberate war crime strategy. And, you know, Assad was about as close to shameless as you could get. You know, this is a guy who had already used chemical weapons repeatedly against his people. He was dropping barrel bombs left and right. He was picking up tens of thousands of people and torturing them and disappearing them. So this was a despicable man. And if we were to sort of publicize and say, “Assad, you’re bombing hospitals in Idlib,” it would have sort of been, “what else is new?” So we decided to pursue Putin, on the theory that what Assad really cared about was Russian military support. It was Putin’s intervention in 2015 that saved the Assad regime. And this was before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin still cared about his reputation. So our strategy was how do we twist Putin’s arm to get this bombing to stop in Syria? And it was a process that took two to three years. We focused mainly on [Angela] Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, [Emmanuel] Macron, the President of France, and [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan, the President of Turkey. And in each case, there were multiple meetings with the official, with people underneath the leader. And there were efforts in the press and those capitals to raise the visibility of this issue so the leader couldn’t duck it. And finally, these three leaders did begin to push Putin. And even that wasn’t immediate.
But ultimately, in March 2020, Putin agreed to a ceasefire and the bombing stopped. And it stopped completely for three years, it picked up a little bit, but Idlib is where the HTS [Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham] rebel group came from, that in December overthrew Assad. So it now has stopped definitively. And this is illustrative of the importance of not just shaming, but also using international pressure. You figure out, what does the target government care about? In this case, Russian military support. And then, how can we deprive them of that? In this case, it’s because Putin cared about his relations with Europe and Turkey. So that was the strategy. It worked. It was not simple, it took a while. But it made a huge difference because suddenly three million people were not facing daily death from the sky.
Chris Hedges
I just want to read this little passage from your book because it shows the consequences of not reading power correctly.
When the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs persuaded reluctant doctors in humanitarian organizations to provide the coordinates of their hidden hospitals [Hedges: this is in Idlib], naively hoping that it might deter the attacks, the Syrian and Russian militaries targeted them more precisely. Nearly 1,000 medical workers, doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers were killed.
I believe you oppose that passage of that information, correct?
Kenneth Roth
That was a crazy policy by the UN.
Chris Hedges
Yes.
Kenneth Roth
And it was premised on this complete misreading of the situation. Like, “oh, the bombing of hospitals is inadvertent. If we just tell them where the hospitals are, they won’t bomb them.” When anybody would have seen that the hospitals were being bombed deliberately. In fact, the doctors had already been building hospitals underground to try to save them from the bombing. And if you tell the Russians where those underground hospitals are, they just use a big bomb and go after them. So this was a despicable policy. It was a really, kind of a shameful moment for the UN. And the doctors were lucky to survive.
Chris Hedges
You say that “human rights work is incremental. The progress is sporadic. Violations of human rights wax and wane. Persistent pressure is often needed to sustain progress. Moreover, when progress occurs, Human Rights Watch can rarely take credit alone. Local human rights defenders, sympathetic journalists, well-intentioned officials, engaged members… are allies.” But I thought that that is an extremely important point, that it is incremental, that it waxes and wanes, that victories can be Pyrrhic. Victories are probably never complete, I think you would accept. It reminds you of Max Weber’s book, Politics as a Vocation, by which he meant, “don’t ever turn your back because all the advances you make will be ruled backwards.” And I like that about your book because that—I come out of that world, and it is—that’s exactly right. There’s, you know, a constant kind of struggle, and oftentimes whatever you achieve, however good it is, is never what you fully wanted to achieve.
Kenneth Roth
Yeah, Chris, you’re completely right. In fact, let me illustrate it with the case of Rwanda’s invasion of Eastern Congo. Because a decade ago, Rwanda was sponsoring this awful rebel group known as the M23 that was wreaking havoc in Eastern Congo. It was taking the minerals that were there, which was very lucrative, but raping and executing and just, you know, one war crime after the other. So Human Rights Watch has an office in Goma, the main city in Eastern Congo. We investigated the Rwandan support of the M23 and published a report. Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president, denied it. He said, we’re not doing that. So, we put out another report and Kagame lied again. It took the third report before everybody realized that Human Rights Watch was telling the truth and Kagame was lying through his teeth. And at that stage, we were able to persuade US Secretary of State John Kerry and British Foreign Secretary William Hague to call Kagame and say, we are going to cut off your aid unless you stop supporting the M23. And within days, the M23 crumbled. But to come to your point that nothing is permanent, that absence of the M23 lasted about eight years, and now the M23 is back. Rwanda is again supporting it. In fact, it’s hard to distinguish between the Rwandan army and the M23. But that’s because Kagame has spent the intervening years trying to make himself indispensable. So he’s put peacekeepers into northern Mozambique. He offered the former conservative British government to take their asylum seekers. He sponsors conferences in Kigali. He’s sponsoring the Arsenal, soccer, you know, football team. And this is all a big PR effort to try to portray him well. So at this point, governments are condemning what Kagame is doing in Eastern Congo, but not yet really tightening the screws by cutting off the aid. And that’s what it’s going to take to get rid of the M23 again. So this shows that governments are always looking for their opportunity to violate human rights. And the human rights community has got to always be ready to push back. Merely because you win one year or win for eight years, in that case, doesn’t mean you win forever. It’s a perpetual fight.
Chris Hedges (25:19)
You had a line, I thought was very important, it’s just one sentence. “Rather than seeking empathetic statements of solidarity with victims, we generated pressure on abusive governments to change.” That was certainly my work with the New York Times. I didn’t write—I may have, of course, been as emotionally distraught over seeing atrocities as you were—but it was very clinical. It was, how many people were killed? What were the… I remember one time in Kosovo, the villagers… 23 bodies came back in a truck, they claimed they were tortured, I had to climb, it was night, had to climb in the back of the truck with a mag light, roll back the blankets and see if they were tortured. How many were tortured? What was the torture? It does affect you later, no question about it. But I thought that to be effective, it is about the collection of objective, impartial, incontrovertible data, not about the diatribes, however you may feel those are, they are not effective. And this was, I think, very much the ethos of your own work.
Kenneth Roth
Yeah, Chris, you’re completely right. I mean, the shaming is not done by name calling. The shaming is done with facts. And because the facts are going to be contested each step of the way, the facts have to be accurate. So obviously, we try to humanize the victims. We try to promote sympathy for them. But we’re not just a solidarity group. We’re all going to sit around and sing kumbaya and hope for the best. Human Rights Watch was there to put pressure on the perpetrators. And that really is, I think, our special skill. We could figure out, what is the pain point? And press it until the human rights violations are curbed. And that is really outrage at how government officials could be so cruel, could be so vicious. That is what pushed Human Rights Watch to develop the strategies that I explained in the book.
Chris Hedges
You talk about dissidents, and, you’re specifically talking about Eastern and Central Europe, “the dissidents appeared to be isolated, embattled individuals standing up to an entrenched, monstrous system, but in fact their bravery, their insistence on stating the truth and envisioning a more just society show the fragility of a system that could not tolerate such individuality and free expression.” One thinks of [Václav] Havel’s great essay, “The Power of the Powerless.” But I also would, I remember covering autocratic regimes, Milošević of Serbia, for example, and the only time these dissidents were ever quoted were in the New York Times. But then it meant that once they got in the New York Times, they would be attacked, so they got quoted in all of the official press. But I want to talk about that, having been around many of these dissidents throughout my career as you have been, just the kinds of these people, who they are, how inspiring they are. I knew Havel, as you did. I don’t know if you knew him well. I covered the, I was in the Magic Lantern Theater with him every night during the Velvet Revolution. But let’s talk a little bit about those dissidents, because they at once are, as you correctly point out, the solitary figures often, because very few people, it’s almost suicidal to do what they do, standing up to this regime. But their own moral authority and their own courage gives them a kind of power in the face of that regime.
Kenneth Roth
I mean, Chris, you’re correct in this. And I think the reason is that, you know, we tend to look at dictatorships as omnipotent, you know, that they’ve got all the arms, they can do whatever they want. But in fact, dictatorships require to a large degree, the acquiescence of people. If you’re hanging on to power, you know, simply by shooting people, everybody’s going to be constantly plotting to get rid of you and you could face the fate of Assad, for example, who everybody hated and nobody stood up for him in the end and he was quickly toppled. And so that’s every dictator’s nightmare. And this is the power of the dissident. Because the dissident, you know, speaks to the choice, the freedom that each individual has, the ability to say no to the dictator. We want something better. And what dictators always worry about is that that individual dissident or that small group of dissidents is going to spark a broad movement.
And this is not so far-fetched. I mean, this is where I actually was less pessimistic than you in your opening statement. Because if you look around the world today, I think we do have to admit that autocrats are on the rise in the established democracies of the West. But if you look elsewhere, people have made very clear in huge numbers where they face autocracy that they don’t want it. And sometimes they have prevailed. If you look at, for example, the recent ouster of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh before a big popular movement, the ouster of the Rajapaksas in Sri Lanka. In Poland, it was getting rid of the Law and Justice Party, a very conservative right-wing party. We saw this in South Korea, where people stood up against a presidential, self-coup, military-backed. We saw this in Brazil, where Bolsonaro was ousted. So in many cases, where these autocratic leaders are in power, people don’t want it. And even when the popular movement loses, say in Iran or Belarus or Russia, Uganda, the popular preference is clear, which is why these autocrats are running scared. It’s why they hate the dissidents. It’s why Putin basically had Navalny killed because Navalny was the kind of charismatic leader that could spark, you know, Putin’s greatest fear, which is the color revolution. So I, you know, I believe it’s important to protect these dissidents, which Human Rights Watch always felt was a foremost responsibility. But I understand why dictators and autocrats are terrified of them because they have this contagion effect that at any moment can lead to a popular revolt and the end of the dictatorial regime.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk about the new ways people communicate. You go all the way back, I think, in the book to the Crimea War and the telegraph and, you know, things are sent by boat. So, the instantaneous quality of social media has enhanced your work. You talked about your use of Twitter or X because you could intervene quickly. I know that during the war in El Salvador I was working for NPR and if anybody was picked up, the general rules, if I got it on the air within 24 hours, oftentimes there could be an intervention or at least they didn’t kill them. But it had to be quick. And that is something that you talk about in the book.
Kenneth Roth
What I describe in the book, Chris, is how the trajectory of the human rights movement very much parallels the evolution of communications technology. We talked jokingly about ancient history, but the first human rights endeavors were to stop the slave trade, to promote women’s suffrage. These were big, long-lasting movements, because that’s all you could know about when information traveled by steamship. And it began to change with the telegraph and the phone call. But these were clunky. They were expensive. And it wasn’t really until email that cheap, instantaneous information was possible.
In fact, the campaign that I described in the book to abolish anti-personnel landmines, where we shared in a Nobel Peace Prize, was a campaign that would not have been possible a few years earlier. It was possible because of email, where we could build a global coalition of, initially NGOs and then of about 60 governments, that were willing to stand up to Washington and Moscow and Beijing and insist on this treaty. Today, everybody has a smartphone. Everybody has access to social media. The good news is, it’s much more difficult to hide anything. I describe how, when the Khmer Rouge killed two million Cambodians, no one was quite sure what was going on. That would be impossible today. But the difficulty is that, while it’s easier for defenders of human rights to learn about things, to disseminate information, it’s also easier for autocratic governments to spread disinformation. In the old days, a government that wanted to lie would have to deal with people like you, Chris, journalists and editors. Because there were really just a finite number of media outlets. Today, there’s a proliferation of media outlets and there’s social media where anybody can say anything and they can then augment it with bots and artificial intelligence. So some people say, is social media net negative? I don’t think so. I think it is a net positive, but it is a battle. One thing I take heart from is that some people say, are we living in a post-truth world? And I don’t think we are because people who want to find the truth still can. They just look to reliable entities, like the New York Times, like Human Rights Watch.
But I think the best evidence of the power of truth is the behavior of autocratic governments. Because if it was enough to spread disinformation, they wouldn’t bother with censorship. But in fact, Moscow, Beijing invest enormous amounts of money in censorship. They try to prevent their people from gaining access to the truth or from speaking the truth because they know that the disinformation isn’t enough to prevail against the dissemination of the truth.
Chris Hedges
I want to read a passage and have you comment.
When governments succeed in making human rights violations popular, it is harder to shame them. If we were to point out, for example, that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was closing the door to asylum seekers, it would have no effect because such abuse was popular with his core constituency. Shaming is difficult whenever a leader succeeds in demonizing a segment of the population, such as immigrants or lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The same is true when a leader claims to be defending traditional or national values from the interference of international actors.
Kenneth Roth
Well, I mean, as I say there, you cannot take a frontal approach if the persecution of a particular minority is popular with the leader’s base. But there still are ways to proceed. In the case of Hungary, and I described this in the book, it may have been popular to persecute immigrants in Hungary, but it wasn’t popular in Brussels. And Brussels was sending billions of euros in subsidies to Hungary. And we were able to persuade the European Union to condition those subsidies on an end to what they called Orbán’s attacks on the rule of law. So that was a very powerful disincentive to some of this persecution.
The other approach actually plays to the people of the country, because it may be popular to demonize immigrants or, you know today, Orbán has just adopted a constitutional amendment allowing the persecution of LGBT people. Now, why is he bothering to do that? You know, he’s already persecuting them. Why entrench it in the constitution? Because he’s trying to change the subject. You know, this is a guy who is notorious for corruption. He’s completely mismanaged the economy. He’s not delivering to the Hungarian people. He takes what subsidies he gets from the European Union and instead of spending them on health care or education, he builds football stadiums to pay off his cronies. So, what do you do when you’re not actually serving your people? You try to change the subject by demonizing some unpopular minority. So by pointing that out, you actually strike at the Achilles heel of the autocrat. And indeed today, I think the reason Orbán is choosing now for this constitutional amendment is because he’s facing a unified opposition led by a charismatic leader. Orbán could lose the next election. And that’s why he’s resorting to these desperate strategies. And I think it’s important just to point that out. You know, just as you need to do the same thing with Erdoğan in Turkey, where he just locked up his main opposition candidate because he was afraid he was going to lose. And frankly, this is what Trump is doing. You know, while he’s focusing on immigrants or woke issues or attacking the universities, you know, what is he doing for the working class, ethnic white majority that elected him? Nothing. In fact, you know, his tariffs are fueling inflation. He’s not doing anything that’s going to add any jobs. And so it’s in those moments where the autocrat does not deliver, when they’re vulnerable. That’s when they start the scapegoating. And I think it’s important as part of the defense against this to just point that out, because people then see what’s going on.
Chris Hedges
Well, you’ve been very outspoken against the capitulation by universities such as Columbia. All of us who, you know, I covered Pinochet’s Chile and all this stuff, I mean, the idea that this was a good faith discussion or it wasn’t about the destruction of Columbia was kind of mind boggling. And I’ll just have you comment briefly on that. And you have called for these universities—Harvard, it appears, my alma mater has finally stood up, surprisingly. But you know, having dealt with despotic governments, I thought your warning was very prescient.
Kenneth Roth
I mean, I think it’s important first to recognize why Trump is doing this. And even though Trump doesn’t read, the people around him do read, and they’ve all read the autocrat’s handbook. And that handbook explains—you know, it’s a metaphorical handbook—but it explains, you attack the checks and balances on executive power. So you go after the judges, you go after the lawyers, you go after the journalists, civil society, and universities. Why did Orbán shut down Central European University? Because it was an institution of independent thinking that he couldn’t tolerate in Budapest.
Trump is doing the same thing. He sees the universities as churning out rights-respecting, liberal-oriented people, not his base. And he’s trying to change that. So he’s using claims to fight anti-Semitism. That’s really about just silencing criticism of Israel. But if you look at the letter of demands to Harvard, he wants what he calls ideological diversity in each department, which really means, hire more conservatives. That’s utterly inappropriate. It’s a blatant infringement of academic freedom. It’s frankly a violation of the First Amendment for a president to be using the course of power or federal funding to force ideological changes on a university. So fortunately, Harvard has fought back. I mean, think Columbia might have fought back if Lee Bollinger, the longtime president, was still there. But Columbia’s been kind of leaderless. They’ve churned through, now, three leaders in the last couple of years. So it’s in a weaker position. But I hope that what Harvard has now started, others will continue. Not capitulate to Trump, but rather sue him. And I think he’s very vulnerable to lawsuits. I wish, frankly, the law firms had done the same. You know, the fact that these big wealthy law firms are capitulating to Trump rather than saying that he’s completely violating the First Amendment by attacking them for having the audacity to sue him or to promote a case that he doesn’t like. It’s, you know, utterly inappropriate. It’s unconstitutional for a president to use that kind of power. But you got to sue him. If you just capitulate, he gets away with it. And sadly, at this stage, it’s the smaller law firms that are suing him. The big wealthy ones, the ones that could afford to say no, are cutting deals.
Chris Hedges
I just want to take issue with the word conservative. Harvard has no shortage of conservatives. Samuel Huntington was there when I was there. But these are ideologues that they want. Trump wants to impose ideologues, not conservatives, in these universities.
Kenneth Roth
The whole point of insisting on ideological diversity, that’s not his job. It’s up to each university to have whatever they want. And you can have conservative universities, liberal universities. I don’t care. It’s their choice. That’s what academic freedom is about. This is not where government should be going with the course of power over their funding.
Chris Hedges
I just want to quickly, on China, this is the opening of your chapter, you write, “no other government makes so concerted an effort to undermine the international human rights standards and institutions that might and do hold it to account, dedicating to the task significant proceeds from the world’s second largest economy. Beijing’s actions, if unchecked, portend a dystopian future in which no one is beyond the reach of Chinese censors and the international human rights system is so weakened that it no longer serves as a check on government repression.” I think the fear of many of us is that this model of, kind of, corporate totalitarianism is one that others will follow.
Kenneth Roth
Well, Chris, let me explain really what I meant there because the comment was not simply about the severity of China’s repression, which is awful. But there obviously are other awful governments around, too. But China stands alone in trying to rewrite human rights law and change the way that UN human rights institutions operate. And it does this for the reason we discussed. It’s ultra sensitive about international condemnation. But Xi Jinping would rip up the treaties that detail what it is the governments are obliged to do to respect the rights of their people. And he would substitute basically three things. One, a question, are people happy? Which is meaningless in China because there’s no independent polling. Two, does the government provide stability? Which just means repression. And then three, which is what he really talks about, is the economy growing? And it’s true that China has expanded the economy. It’s pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty. But he would erase the individual from that calculation. In his view, it’s all about the global size of the economy. Whereas rights are really about the individual against the collective. And so Xi Jinping would not give the individual any capacity to influence government policy about how government funds are spent. He would accept no obligation to spend the funds to improve the lots of the worst off segments of society. That’s what economic rights are about. He just says, if the pie is growing, that’s sufficient. So you don’t get to ask, you know, are the Uyghurs doing okay? Are the Tibetans doing okay? Are, you know, are rural Han Chinese doing okay? None of this is permissible. It’s just, is the economy expanding? And that’s a radical dumbing down of what human rights are all about. Then to make matters worse, at the UN Human Rights Council where it normally would conduct an investigation, it would issue a report, it would condemn a government, Xi Jinping would stop all of that. And he would simply have nice, pleasant conversations among governments about how each is finding its own unique path to respect human rights. In other words, no pressure whatsoever. And so if you have no standards and no pressure, you’ve got nothing to enforce human rights. That’s what Xi Jinping is proposing, and that is a radical agenda which is important to stand up to.
Chris Hedges
And you talk about the acquiescence of large corporations. Cathay Pacific threatened to fire employees who supported the 2019 pro-democracy protests. Volkswagen told the BBC it was not aware of reports about detention camps holding Muslims, even though they had a plant there. The corporations are completely—Hollywood, increasingly censored its films to placate Beijing sensibilities, such as the initial digital removal of a Taiwan flag from Tom Cruise’s bomber jacket. So you have powerful corporations that are buttressing this.
Kenneth Roth
They are, and they’re all worried about being borrowed from the Chinese market. Now, ironically, you know, one effect of this terror fight, and even before that, when China was really doing what it could to prevent access just generically to its market, this is becoming less of a concern. I think companies are realizing that, you know, China is not their future. But what Beijing was trying to do was, you know, use this threat of denying access to its enormous market to globalize its censorship. So you would expect it to censor what is disseminated within China, but it would go a step further. It would prevent these companies from speaking negatively about China around the world. And you’ve seen this even with Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, where it would pull down posts not just within China, but around the world, that Beijing didn’t want.
Chris Hedges
I just want to quickly close. In your chapter on Israel, write, “reporting on Israel is challenging.” And we should say that they went after you when you were given a position at the Carr Center at the Kennedy School. I mean, you mounted a kind of very public campaign that got them to rescind their, you had been invited to have a fellowship there and then the Zionist lobby organized to have it rescinded and then you fought back. But anyway. “Reporting on Israel is challenging because no other government has such an organized group of supporters that are dedicated to attacking critics, often with little regard for factual accuracy. Indeed, there’s a cottage industry of small organizations, typically, deceptively…” I lost my page here.
Kenneth Roth
“Deceptively neutral sounding names,” is what I say. Yes.
Chris Hedges
That’s what it was. I’ve been a victim of them. Your family, you write about it in the book, they were refugees from Nazi Germany and you have this very poignant thing where you go back to Frankfurt and look at your grandfather’s, what was it, a meat shop or something? Butcher shop. I mean, it doesn’t, and you’re of course, the whole reason that you’re propelled into the human rights world is because of the experiences of your family. I see what Israel and the Zionist lobby doing is deeply counterproductive to Israel, ultimately, itself. But just talk, having been a victim of it. And in the book you say you were able to fight it, but what about all of those figures who speak out and can’t fight it?
Kenneth Roth
Well, I think that first, let’s just, to clarify for everybody, my father fled Nazi Germany. He lived in Frankfurt and fled in July 1938 as a twelve year old boy to New York. And so, you know, I grew up with Hitler stories. I grew up with stories of what it was like to be a young boy facing the brown shirts in the playground, you know, worrying about his father, my grandfather, being arrested. And so I was very aware of the evil that governments could do. And that was a big part of what propelled me to pursue a career trying to prevent the recurrence of these kind of atrocities. Now, the Harvard experience was, you know, was illustrative. The dean who vetoed my fellowship, I actually don’t think that there was a lobby effort there. I think he was just afraid of one. He says he didn’t consult with any donors. He consulted with people who mattered to him. Probably that was his fundraising staff. And there wasn’t a campaign against me. They were just worried that there would be. And for that reason, he canceled me. Now, I was able to mount a campaign to fight back. And it only took two weeks between Michael Massing’s big article in The Nation, and the dean reversing himself, was two weeks of massive media attention, protests at Harvard, an emergency faculty meeting at the Harvard Kennedy School where nobody supported the dean. And then he reversed himself. So fine, I could fight back. But I then went to Harvard and said, well, what about your ordinary student, your junior faculty member who has no capacity to fight back? Will you affirm academic freedom in the context of discussion of Israel and Palestine? And they wouldn’t do it. I also said, you know, when I ran Human Rights Watch, if somebody were to come to me with a check and say, you know, here’s some money, but don’t cover this country again, I would say, no, thank you, here’s your check back. You know, these are not our principles. Couldn’t Harvard, the wealthiest academic institution in the world, say that they don’t want contributions from people who are going to use it to compromise academic freedom? But of course, Harvard didn’t want to go there either. So, there’s a lot of work to be done. I’m happy to see Harvard, as we noted, finally standing up to Trump. But, you know, my victory was far too much a personal victory and not enough of a principled victory.
Chris Hedges
I just want to close with the UN. I knew Boutros Boutros-Ghali who deserves the criticism you leveled against him for not really caring about human rights. Mary Robinson, she was the former Prime Minister of Ireland, is that correct?
Kenneth Roth
President of Ireland
Chris Hedges
President of Ireland, excuse me, who was great. António Guterres. Just, when we finish, talk about the UN, because of course part of this whole campaign by the Trump administration is to defund and destroy the United Nations.
Kenneth Roth
Well, I think first of all, Chris, when we’re talking about the United Nations, it’s useful to think of it in two parts. On the one part, you have the various agencies that are headed by UN officials. They are humanitarian agencies, there’s a human rights agency, and the effectiveness of these agencies is very much dictated by the courage and principles of the leader. So I describe how Volker Türk, the current high commissioner for human rights, has never in his two and a half years as high commissioner condemned China for its persecution of the Uyghurs, even though his predecessor issued a very powerful report on what she called possible crimes against humanity. So this is a complete abdication of responsibility by Volker Türk. And António Guterres, the current Secretary General, is just as bad when it comes to China. So, you know, these are failures of leadership.
The other side of the UN is basically the UN as a conference room. It’s a place where the governments of the world meet. And there were three conference rooms that really matter for the purposes of human rights. One is the Security Council, but that has been stymied these days by the veto, so not much happens there. The second is the General Assembly, which can be very important, but it’s all 193 members, so it’s hard to lobby. It takes a lot of work. It has to be a big issue to really take on the General Assembly.
So where most of the human rights work is done is in Geneva at the UN Human Rights Council. And there, we get a lot done. You know, the Human Rights Council, it issues reports, it investigates, it condemns. But one illustration from my report, when we were able to persuade the Human Rights Council to create a group that scrutinized the Saudi-led coalition’s bombing of civilians in Yemen, that lasted for four years. And when the Saudis finally got it lifted, the number of civilians killed by that bombing suddenly doubled. And it showed how effective the scrutiny was, how people behave better when they’re watched. So this is a place that can make a difference in the lives of people. And that’s why Human Rights Watch spent a lot of time, and still does, trying to enlist the Human Rights Council in places like Ukraine or Gaza or Myanmar or Iran or Sudan, mean, you name it, the worst places. But it’s active there, and it very often does make a difference.
Chris Hedges
Great, thanks. That was Kenneth Roth on his book, Righting Wrongs. I want to thank Diego, Thomas, Sofia, and Max, who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
Photos
World Leaders Speak At The 79th Session Of The United Nations General Assembly In New York
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 27: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at the United Nations headquarters on September 27, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
Chongqing Tourism
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Human Rights In Music
From left to right, attorney Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, producer Trudie Styler (the wife of musician Sting), singer and songwriter Bruce Springsteen and American jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis, USA, 1994. (Photo by Vinnie Zuffante/Getty Images)
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Kenneth Roth, executive director of US-based rights group Human Rights Watch speaks during a press conference to release their annual World report on January 21, 2014 in Berlin. (Photo by John MACDOUGALL / AFP) (Photo by JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP via Getty Images)
President Reagan Waving and Standing with William Casey
(Original Caption) President Reagan accompanied by CIA Director William Casey, waves to employees of the Central Intelligence Agency after signing a bill prohibiting exposure of the identities of CIA agents.
US Ambassadors
American ambassadors Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926 – 2006) and Thomas R. Pickering in El Salvador, during the Salvadoran Civil War, 1985. (Photo by Scott Wallace/Getty Images)
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Portrait of Human Rights Watch Executive Robert Bernstein
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Supporters welcome the leader of Syria’s Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group that headed a lightning rebel offensive snatching Damascus from government control, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani (C), before his address at the capital’s landmark Umayyad Mosque on December 8, 2024. (Photo by Aref TAMMAWI / AFP) (Photo by AREF TAMMAWI/AFP via Getty Images)
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(Original Caption) Two Khmer Rouge soldiers, one with an AK-47 automatic weapon and the other with a rocket grenade are seen on the Cambodian side of the Thailand-Cambodian border.
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UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk listens during a press conference in Damascus, on January 15, 2025. (Photo by LOUAI BESHARA / AFP) (Photo by LOUAI BESHARA/AFP via Getty Images)
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This post has been syndicated from The Chris Hedges Report, where it was published under this address.