RIGHTING WRONGS

Applying pressure for change.

As the director of Human Rights Watch for three decades, Roth put public opinion to work in the service of his cause: The nongovernmental organization, he writes, “figured out how to deploy the public’s sense of right and wrong to pressure the political branches of governments to respect rights.” Sometimes this pressure was brought to bear on corporations instead of governments directly. Sometimes the effort worked the other direction, as when Xi Jinping’s China “realized that it had a powerful weapon to silence human-­rights criticism: it could deny access to any critic,” whether Roth’s organization or a foreign corporation. Some of Roth’s carefully orchestrated campaigns have been successful, as with the organization’s contributions to arranging a cease-fire in Syria. That was a cease-fire in which the ever-implicated Vladimir Putin had to sign off, given Russia’s armed intervention there, while attempts to improve rights conditions in Russia have faltered, Roth allows. He insists, though, that even Russia might one day come around: “Some backers of Ukraine have been inclined to treat all Russians as enemies, hoping that their suffering will push them to stand up to their government. I think a more productive approach is to treat them as potential allies.” Having retired, Roth is now free to name names in sometimes less-than-diplomatic ways: He calls out numerous figures in the Saudi ruling family as responsible for war crimes in Yemen, and he calls U.N. Secretary General António Guterres “a human-rights disappointment, reluctant to use his public voice in an effective way.” This reluctance, Roth notes, has daily implications in places like Gaza.

Given the never-ending assault on human rights, a valuable call to fight back.