Paperback of the week: Righting Wrongs by Kenneth Roth

It was strange to be reading Righting Wrongs, Kenneth Roth’s memoir about his time in charge of Human Rights Watch, on the same weekend that the United States bombed Venezuela and abducted its president, Nicolás Maduro. As condemnation of the action failed to arrive from Keir Starmer, or barely any significant European leader, I thought of Roth’s statement that it is “axiomatic that for Human Rights Watch’s methodology to work, some particular government or institution must feel shamed”. Unfortunately, it’s shamelessness that seems to be in the ascendant.

Roth achieved tremendous successes at Human Rights Watch during his 29 years as executive director (he stepped down in 2022), seeing the organisation’s annual budget grow from $7m to $100m. The organisation has campaigned for a diverse range of issues including the banning of landmines and LGBT rights, as well as documenting genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia, the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza and, in the early 2000s, helping to establish the International Criminal Court. The idea, he explains, is to present reports so solid as to be undeniable, and therefore shame the target government or group into stopping their actions. “Stigmatise with facts,” he writes.

Roth’s predecessor at Human Rights Watch, Aryeh Neier, taught him “the possibility of being an activist with intellectual sophistication”. And according to Roth: “It is not my nature to spend lots of time rallying in the streets or picketing government buildings.” He is, he says, no rabble-rouser. Readers of his somewhat colourless prose would have to agree.

While Roth might not have a gift for storytelling, he does have a wealth of interesting experience to call upon, and his judgments generate their own drama. “There is no greater threat to the global human rights system today,” he writes, “than the Chinese government under Xi Jinping.” Of the internet trolls who attack Roth – constantly, as you can imagine – he notes that supporters of the Israeli government “are by far the worst”.

Roth has worked closely with UN officials and is frank about their capabilities. He found Kofi Annan the most effective of the secretaries general he has known; the “uncharismatic” Ban Ki-moon, by contrast, is “instinctively timid”. Roth’s worst ire is saved for the incumbent António Guterres, who he essentially writes off as a waste of space, along with the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, who has consistently failed to hold China to account for its abuses against the Uyghurs.

Sometimes, though, Roth sounds altogether too chummy with certain world leaders. “I had met with Macron twice previously,” he writes, “and had been told repeatedly that he enjoyed meeting with me.” It clearly helps to get along, but do we need to know things went so well that Macron switched from vous to the informal tu? It’s cringeworthy.

Roth must be thick-skinned by professional necessity. The criticism he has heard most, by far, is of anti-Israeli bias. He addresses this at length, arguing that criticising Israel is no more antisemitic than it is anti-Buddhist to condemn Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya people, or Islamophobic to denounce the Saudi regime for the murder of its critics. Transgressors, he says, follow a predictable pattern: denial (the Chinese position when first confronted about the mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang); followed by lies (as with Russia, regarding the use of chemical agents in Syria, and war crimes in Ukraine); and then counter-accusations of bias (as in the case of Israel on the repression, abuse and killing of Palestinians).

In his closing words, Roth notes the struggle for human rights is “incessant”. There is no sign that China, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia and others will stop their abuses anytime soon. The United States will bomb, or threaten to bomb, whichever country it chooses, and our prime ministers will worm their way out of a condemnation. Some of the victories Roth describes here feel very distant, and, reading between the lines, his book might be an unintended elegy to a golden age of human rights activism. Darker days lie ahead.

Righting Wrongs : Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments by Kenneth Roth is published by Penguin (£14.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £13.49. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images