HHRJ Book Review – Righting Wrongs

HHRJ Book Review – Righting Wrongs

By Jonathan Tucker*

Kenneth Roth, the long-time director of Human Rights Watch, presents his new memoir, Righting Wrongs (Alfred A. Knopf, February 2025), as a testament to the most effective practices for safeguarding human rights worldwide.[1] While not a practical manual per se, Righting Wrongs does accomplish the goal that Roth asserts it will—identifying practical strategies for advocating for human rights in a fractious international climate and for adapting to the rapid developments and disappointments of human rights law from the late eighties to present.

Roth discusses many perennial and controversial topics in human rights, including the Israel-Palestine conflict, China’s treatment of Taiwan, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Assad’s Syria, and the effectiveness of the United Nations (“U.N.”) Security Council and the International Criminal Court. As memoirs do, Righting Wrongs features a great deal of justification. Roth shares lessons learned during his time at Human Rights Watch and makes a point to defend decisions made.

But this is not to say that Righting Wrongs is all apologetics—Roth considers these thorny issues head-on. He rationalizes his decisions in these areas on the one hand but also shows how those decisions accord with the practical and impartial approach to human rights advocacy that Roth espouses. Roth discusses key lessons learned over three decades leading Human Rights Watch, communicated through vignettes organized by region or country. For example, in Chapter Five, Roth highlights Human Rights Watch’s zealous spotlighting of Chinese abuses against the Uyghur community, despite the difficulty of gaining investigative access in the region and the “facile justifications” of global actors like Germany, the United States, and the U.N., who he argues have responded “inadequately.”[2]

In Chapter Thirteen, Roth considers Human Rights Watch’s relationship with the United States, where the organization is headquartered. At Human Rights Watch, Roth has seen presidential administrations come and go, starting with Ronald Reagan. Roth recognizes the United States’s (unrealized) potential to advance human rights while also underscoring the nation’s patchy human rights record. Human Rights Watch has been resolute in exposing human rights abuses in the U.S. criminal justice system, the operation of Guantanamo Bay, and torture at Central Intelligence Agency black sites, among others. Unsparing in his treatment of the two most recent U.S. presidents, Roth writes that President Trump was “a threat to human rights because he relished breaking taboos”[3] (focusing on Trump’s “Muslim Ban”) and describes the Biden administration’s failure to treat human rights as “not only as an important end but also an indispensable means” in its lackluster response to asylum seekers at the U.S. southern border and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.[4]

Roth colors his vignettes on current debates on how to best advance human rights with reflections on Human Rights Watch’s approach to this mission. Therein lies the real substance of Righting Wrongs.

Roth introduces Human Rights Watch’s primary leveraging tool, “shaming,” in Chapter Three and invokes the efficacy of shaming throughout the book.[5] Shaming, Roth stipulates, is not “lecturing” governments, as Emmanuel Macron, Xi Jinping, and Yale Law Professor Samuel Moyn have each respectively characterized it.[6] Rather, shaming is the systematic and universal approach by which Human Rights Watch takes advantage of the realities of international relations. For developing states or non-state actors, adopting a human rights regime is a way to gain legitimacy. For powerful states, showing some commitment to human rights can ease relations with other powerful states. Human Rights Watch understands these dynamics. Simply put, shaming represents a pragmatic tool in a politicized, polarized world. Human rights advocacy does not require good faith engagement with a state if it can exploit that state’s concern for its global reputation.

For shaming to function efficiently, Human Rights Watch must be seen as legitimate. Human Rights Watch’s mandate is to mitigate human rights violations wherever they occur, in international pariahs and global powers alike. Roth, himself Jewish, recalls the fractious exchanges he has had with former Human Rights Watch donors, the United States and Israeli governments, and the Harvard Kennedy School over Human Rights Watch’s criticism of Israel’s human rights and humanitarian law record. Roth’s detractors claim that Human Rights Watch singles out Israel, but Roth devotes a substantial part of Righting Wrongs to showing the opposite: Human Rights Watch does not refrain from investigations of any state or actor it perceives to abridge human rights.[7]

Roth devotes much of Chapter Four to Human Rights Watch’s funding. Human Rights Watch does not accept any government or international organization funding. Furthermore, it imposes strict conditions on private donations and has a policy for conflicts of interest for corporate contributions, refusing support from senior corporate officials (directors and officers).[8] Nevertheless, some individuals, like George Soros, have contributed sizable donations to Human Rights Watch. These individuals sometimes disagree with Human Rights Watch decisions, and such disagreements have been particularly salient in Human Rights Watch’s activity vis-à-vis Israel and LGBTQ+ rights.[9] Roth, in his public-facing role as director of Human Rights Watch, thoughtfully reflects on the process of soliciting funding while maintaining Human Rights Watch’s institutional independence.

Another interesting discussion in the memoir concerns those times when Human Rights Watch has called for “humanitarian military intervention.” Here, Roth recalls Human Rights Watch’s response to the Rwandan Genocide in the mid-1990s, when Human Rights Watch exercised its “internal policy” of calling for force where there is “genocide or comparable mass murder under way or imminent.”[10] Anticipating the perceived contradiction of a human rights group calling for military intervention, Roth is resolute: “we are not pacifist.”[11] If an intervention can stop a government’s mass slaughter with a lower cost in human lives than not intervening would result in, then such intervention may be the more humane option, argues Roth. However, as Roth notes, Human Rights Watch has not called for humanitarian intervention since the Rwandan Genocide. Indeed, Roth states that he has “lost confidence in the capacity of most military interventions to secure positive change.”[12]

Roth does not sugar-coat the global struggle for human rights. It is, he writes, “an incessant struggle.”[13] For Roth, this struggle is a collective one. Human Rights Watch may be a high profile advocate for human rights, but it can only do so with the power and historicity of a movement behind it. In this sense, Roth’s Righting Wrongs is a call to action. Roth shares the strategies adopted by Human Rights Watch and shows how these strategies were borne out in his real-life experiences. In doing so, Roth exhorts his readers to further the human rights cause, undaunted.

*Jonathan Tucker is a second year law student at Harvard Law School.

[1] Kenneth Roth, Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments (2025).

[2] Id. at 128.

[3] Id. at 272.

[4] Id. at 274–75.

[5] Id. at 29.

[6] Id.

[7] Id. at 192.

[8] Id. at 88–89.

[9] Id. at 48.

[10] Id. at 231.

[11] Id.

[12] Id. at 233.

[13] Id. at 325.