Kenneth Roth | |
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 Roth during the Munich Security Conference, 2018 | |
| Born | September 23, 1955 Elmhurst, Illinois, U.S. |
| Education | Brown University (BA) Yale University (JD) |
| Known for | Executive director of Human Rights Watch |
| Spouse | Annie Sparrow (m. 2011) |
Kenneth Roth (born September 23, 1955) is an American attorney, human rights activist, and writer. He was the executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) from 1993 to 2022.
Kenneth Roth was born on September 23, 1955, in Elmhurst, Illinois, to Muriel T. Roth and Walter S. Roth. His father was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany. [1] [2] [3] Walter's family had a butchery in Germany near Frankfurt when Adolf Hitler came to power.
Kenneth Roth grew up in Deerfield, Illinois. [4] He graduated from Brown University in 1977 with a BA in history [1] and received his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1980. [5]
On June 13, 2011, Roth was married in an Anglican church to Annie Sparrow. [3]
Roth worked in private practice as a litigator and served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the United States Department of Justice for the Southern District of New York and the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington DC. [6] Roth's career in human rights began inauspiciously. The one human rights course offered at Yale Law School was repeatedly canceled, and upon graduation he found that jobs in the field were few. As a result, as he worked as a lawyer, and volunteered nights and weekends doing human rights work, focusing on [7] the Soviet imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981. [8]
Roth joined Human Rights Watch (HRW) in 1987 as deputy director. His initial work centered on Haiti [9] and gradually extended to Cuba [10] and the Middle East, [11] among other places.
Since 1993 (when Aryeh Neier left to become head of George Soros's Open Society Institute), Roth became the executive director [6] of HRW. While he was in the office, the HRW staff increased from 60 to 552; HRW shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for banning of anti-personnel mines, helped to establish International Criminal Court and ban children in the military. Roth resigned from HRW on 31 August 2022. [12] After leaving HRW, Roth said he intended to write a book. [4]
Roth received honorary degrees from Brown University, [13] Bowdoin College, [14] the University of Ottawa, [15] and the American University of Paris. [16] He was a recipient of the Athens Democracy Award, [17] the William Rogers Award [18] from Brown University and the Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award [19] from Tufts University. He serves on the Watson Institute Board of Overseers [20] at Brown University, the Board of Governors of Bard College Berlin, [21] and the Humanitarian and Development Advisory Panel of the Novo Nordisk Foundation. [22]
In 2021, Roth was offered a fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. The offer was withdrawn in 2023. Roth said that the withdrawal was because of his criticism of Israel. [23] Michael Massing reported Roth's claims in the Nation . [24] Roth told the Guardian and Amy Goodman on Democracy Now that he believed Harvard Kennedy School dean Douglas Elmendorf had capitulated to Harvard's donors who are strong supporters of Israel. Kennedy school professor Kathryn Sikkink said she was told that Elmendorf thought Human Rights Watch has an "anti-Israel bias" and that Roth’s tweets on Israel were concerning, points she disputed with the dean. [24] [25] [26] Following Roth's complaint, the ACLU, Pen America, and other human rights activists condemned the Kennedy School's decision. [27] On January 10, 2023, HRW published a letter to Harvard President Lawrence Bacow that said it was concerned about a "lasting impact on scholars and activists, particularly Palestinians, who should not have to fear professional repercussions from Harvard University or another institution if they write or speak critically about the Israeli government". [28] Following those reports, hundreds of Harvard affiliates called on Elmendorf to resign. [29]
On January 19, 2023, The Kennedy School, which denies Roth's allegations, [30] reversed its decision, reoffering Roth the fellowship. [31] Elmendorf said that his initial decision had been in "error" and was not intended "to limit debate at the Kennedy School about human rights in any country". [32] Roth responded that Elmendorf failed to say anything to identify the people "who matter to him" who he said were behind his original veto decision. "Full transparency is key to ensuring that such influence is not exerted in other cases", Roth said, adding: "Secondly, I remain worried about academic freedom. Given my three decades leading Human Rights Watch, I was able to shine an intense spotlight on Dean Elmendorf’s decision, but what about others? The problem of people penalized for criticizing Israel is not limited to me." [33]
In the fall of 2023, Roth joined the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs as a lecturer and the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor. [34]
In 2014, the Egyptian government blocked Roth from entering the country. [35] He was traveling to Egypt to release a report on its government's August 2013 Rabaa massacre [36] of 817 sit-in protesters. [37]
In December 2019, China announced unspecified sanctions against HRW and several other NGOs because of links to the Hong Kong democracy movement. [38] In January 2020, Roth said that he was denied entry to Hong Kong. [39] He was planning to launch the organization's World Report, [40] which had an essay saying China is a growing threat to human rights around the world. [41] Geng Shuang, a spokesman for China's foreign ministry, told reporters he would not read the report, accusing Human Rights Watch of distorting the truth and claiming China's human rights situation is “the best it's been in history.” [42] In August 2020, the Chinese government announced that it had imposed unspecified “sanctions” on Roth. [43]
Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an international non-governmental organization, headquartered in New York City that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. The group pressures governments, policymakers, companies, and individual human rights abusers to denounce abuse and respect human rights, and often works on behalf of refugees, children, migrants, and political prisoners.
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, formerly the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, is an intergovernmental organization founded in 1969. It consists of 57 member states, 48 of which are Muslim-majority. The organisation claims to be "the collective voice of the Muslim world" and works to "safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world in the spirit of promoting international peace and harmony".
A dissident is a person who actively challenges an established political or religious system, doctrine, belief, policy, or institution. In a religious context, the word has been used since the 18th century, and in the political sense since the 20th century, coinciding with the rise of authoritarian governments in countries such as Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Francoist Spain, the Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Turkey, Iran, China, and Turkmenistan. In the Western world, there are historical examples of people who have been considered and have considered themselves dissidents, such as the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. In totalitarian countries, dissidents are often incarcerated or executed without explicit political accusations, or due to infringements of the very same laws they are opposing, or because they are supporting civil liberties such as freedom of speech.
Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), officially the John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the school of public policy and government of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Robert Louis Bernstein was an American publisher and human rights activist.
Israeli apartheid is a system of institutionalized segregation and discrimination in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and to a lesser extent in Israel proper. This system is characterized by near-total physical separation between the Palestinian and the Israeli settler population of the West Bank, as well as the judicial separation that governs both communities, which discriminates against the Palestinians in a wide range of ways. Israel also discriminates against Palestinian refugees in the diaspora and against its own Palestinian citizens.
Marc Garlasco is an American military advisor for the Dutch non-governmental organization PAX. Early in his career, Garlasco served for seven years at the Pentagon, as a mid-level intelligence analyst, later becoming chief of high-value targeting. Garlasco left in 2003 and joined Human Rights Watch (HRW) as a senior military expert, where he investigated human rights issues in a number of different conflicts zones. He resigned from HRW in February 2010 and has since worked as a specialist on civilian protection, war crimes investigations, identification of weapons and civilian harm mitigation for – among others – the United Nations, the Center for Naval Analysis (CNA), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), before starting at PAX in 2020. Garlasco lives in New York.
Richard Anderson Falk is an American professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, and Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor's Chairman of the Board of Trustees. In 2004, he was listed as the author or coauthor of 20 books and the editor or coeditor of another 20 volumes. Falk has published extensively with multiple books written about international law and the United Nations.
The international non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) has been the subject of extensive criticism from a number of observers. Critics of HRW include the national governments it has investigated, the media, and its former chairman Robert L. Bernstein.
Abraham (Avi) Bell is an Israeli Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law and at Bar-Ilan University's Faculty of Law.
Douglas William Elmendorf is an American economist who is the dean and Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He previously served as the Director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) from 2009 to 2015. He was a Brookings Institution senior fellow from 2007 to 2009, and briefly in 2015 following his time at the CBO, and was a director of the Hamilton Project at Brookings.
Accusations of violations regarding international humanitarian law, which governs the actions by belligerents during an armed conflict, have been directed at both Israel and Hamas for their actions during the 2008–2009 Gaza War. The accusations covered violating laws governing distinction and proportionality by Israel, the indiscriminate firing of rockets at civilian locations and extrajudicial violence within the Gaza Strip by Hamas. As of September 2009, some 360 complaints had been filed by individuals and NGOs at the prosecutor's office in the Hague calling for investigations into alleged crimes committed by Israel during the Gaza War.
Sarah Leah Whitson is an American lawyer and the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). She previously served as director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch.
Joe Stork was an American political activist who wrote on the Middle East. He became Deputy Director for Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch.
Shawan Rateb Abdallah Jabarin is the general director of Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights organization in the West Bank. From 2005 to 2009, Jabarin was a member of the board of directors of Defense for Children International – Palestine, the national section of the Geneva-based Defense for Children International, a non-governmental organization (NGO) established in 1979.
NGO Monitor is a right-wing organization based in Jerusalem that reports on international NGO activity from a pro-Israel perspective.
The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (LDB) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded by Kenneth L. Marcus in 2012 with the stated purpose of advancing the civil and human rights of the Jewish people and promoting justice for all peoples. LDB is active on American campuses, where it says it combats antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
Gerald M. Steinberg, a professor of politics at Bar Ilan University, is an Israeli academic, political scientist, and political activist. He is founder and president of NGO Monitor, a policy analysis think tank focusing on non-governmental organizations.
On 3 March 2022, 47 people were killed in a series of airstrikes in Chernihiv by Russian forces during the siege of the city, during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch described the strikes as a war crime.
Tirana Hassan is an Australian lawyer, social worker, and human rights activist. She is the executive director of Human Rights Watch, an international non-governmental organization based in New York City.
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