Righting Wrongs. By Kenneth Roth. Knopf; 448 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £30
A doctor in Syria under Bashar al-Assad was forced to sedate 63 prisoners. Not to ease the pain caused by shackling, but to ensure they did not complain about it when a UN delegation visited the hellish prison where they were being held. At first glance, the moral of this story is obvious: despots spit on human rights. But Kenneth Roth, a former head of Human Rights Watch (HRW), sees another, more hopeful lesson. Even the vilest rulers care about their reputations, and so try to hide at least some of their abuses. This gives human-rights campaigners an opening: by exposing horror, they can sometimes shame governments into perpetrating less of it.
This task is not straightforward. Those who rule by fear are hard to shame. Exposing their cruelty may actually bolster their power for a while, by reminding their subjects of the dangers of disobedience. However, ruling by fear alone “is risky, because a disgruntled public is always on the lookout for a way to oust the tyrant”. (As Mr Assad, pictured, discovered in December, when his overthrow sparked jubilation in Damascus’s streets.) So most dictators want to appear to serve the public good.
Having run one of the world’s most effective human-rights groups for three decades, Mr Roth has sparred with more nasty regimes than most people could name. In “Righting Wrongs” he distils his hard-earned insights. With warlords carving up Sudan, Russia kidnapping Ukrainian children and America’s president musing about ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the book could hardly be more timely.
The key to shaming powerful wrongdoers, Mr Roth argues, is to avoid name-calling and “stigmatise with facts”. Researchers at HRW are told “that their top priority is accuracy”, and that it is better to come home empty-handed than to publish inaccurate information. They dig up the truth painstakingly, by interviewing victims and combing through tedious official documents. Even if their reporting achieves nothing in the short run, it can furnish evidence for future prosecutions.
Despots fear exposure. Otherwise they would not devote such vast resources to hiding their abuses, sometimes ineptly. When China blanked out its Uyghur prison camps on online maps, it made it easier for researchers to find them–by looking for unexplained blank spots.
An activist must know which levers to pull. If a head of government is genuinely unaware of abuses, simply proving them may be enough, especially in a democracy. In 2011 Mr Roth sat down with Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, to discuss a report on “disappearances” and summary executions meted out by the Mexican army in its “war on drugs”. Previously Mr Calderón had insisted that his troops were innocent. But after Mr Roth went through the report with him paragraph by paragraph, the president admitted he was wrong and adopted some of Mr Roth’s suggested remedies, such as no longer interrogating suspects on military bases.
To shame nastier regimes, more skill is required. Rulers who feel no guilt about tearing out dissidents’ thumbnails may simultaneously crave international respectability. After America overthrew Saddam Hussein, another Arab dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, was eager to avoid the same fate. As well as publicly giving up a nuclear-weapons programme, his regime invited Mr Roth to visit Libya.
Mr Roth seized the chance and shared a list of 131 political prisoners, demanding their release. Mid-level officials exploded with rage and “seemed to think they could bludgeon us into not publishing [the findings] at all”, Mr Roth recalls. He let them hyperventilate for a while, and then gave them a choice. HRW was going to hold a press conference in Egypt a few days later. When journalists asked about their meetings in Tripoli, they could say: “All they did was yell at us.” Or: “The conversations were productive, and they promised various reforms.” Which would it be? The next day the officials apologised, and soon all 131 political prisoners were freed.
Defending human rights is getting harder. Russia has gone completely rogue. The two most powerful democracies, India and the United States, have leaders who care little for human rights. And China under Xi Jinping has become what Mr Roth calls the greatest “threat to the global human-rights system”, constantly seeking to undermine it in international forums.
Meanwhile, some Western progressives have lost their common sense. Some embrace the ridiculous notion that for Westerners to criticise oppression in the global south is a form of imperialism. Others talk self-righteous guff. Mr Roth recalls an adviser urging HRW to campaign against “structural racism, patriarchy and classism embedded in the design of Western public-health systems”. Such rhetoric is likely to repel “the moveable middle”—the people campaigners need to win over. Far better to focus on things that more or less everyone agrees are wrong, such as torture.
The gripes of Roth
As the world polarises, human-rights campaigners must be seen to be impartial. This is hard. Nasty regimes often accuse them of being agents of foreign powers. Other abusive regimes try to change the subject: what about America’s crimes? Mr Roth’s response is to arrive with a stack of HRW reports on America and “place them with a good thump” on the whataboutery-spouting official’s desk.
After he retired from HRW in 2022, Mr Roth was cancelled. An invitation to take up a human-rights fellowship at Harvard was vetoed, allegedly because donors objected to his “anti-Israel” bias. The objection rang hollow: Mr Roth is Jewish, his family fled from the Nazis and he is a stern critic of brutality everywhere. After an outcry, Harvard backed down.
The world needs more watchdogs like Mr Roth: principled yet worldly, insanely hard-working and resolutely non-tribal. It probably helps that he never took an academic course on human rights. Rather than nitpicking about the minutiae of international law, he tells human stories, like that of the Syrian anaesthetist, that shock the listener into fury. It is stories, more than theories, that help humans comprehend tyranny. And as the mighty fill the world’s small screens with falsehoods, someone needs to tell true tales. ■
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