Kenneth Roth, Chris Hedges – Righting Wrongs

14 May 2025

On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, host Chris Hedges speaks with Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the author of Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Frontlines Battling Abusive Governments. Hedges and Roth discuss HRW’s work and how it has changed over time, from its Cold War origins to the social media age.

Roth explains his approach to human rights work:

I enter the discussion with the assumption that governments have good reason to violate human rights. It’s a way to stay in power. It’s a way to get rid of the opposition. So our job in the human rights movement is to increase the cost of that strategy, to shift the cost-benefit analysis behind repression. And the two main tools we use are first, shaming, and second, trying to deprive governments of access to benefits that they want from the international community.

Roth describes examples, including Rwanda’s invasion of eastern Congo and the Russian and Syrian bombing of civilians in Idlib, that illustrate the complexities of applying the strategies of shaming and pressure in different political contexts.

These strategies, moreover, are not applied evenly, and are only sometimes effective. Roth criticizes the Chinese government for evading due scrutiny for its detainment of Uyghurs, and for rejecting international human rights institutions. Roth and Hedges also discuss how Israel, with US support, has been able to continue its genocide and occupation despite repeated condemnation from NGOs, political leaders and international institutions.

Framing human rights work as a series of struggles “of the individual against the collective,” Roth emphasizes the importance of protecting dissidents who stand up to autocratic regimes. Because a dictatorship depends on the people’s “acquiescence,” it will go to great lengths to suppress dissidents whose individual acts of resistance have power “to spark a broad movement.” Despite the rise of autocracy in the west, Roth cites anti-authoritarian victories in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Brazil, as well as popular anti-authoritarian sentiment in the face of political defeat, as reasons for his relative optimism.