Interview conducted by Stéphane Bussard, journalist at Le Temps.
The son of a jew who fled Nazi Germany just before the war began, Kenneth Roth grew up knowing full well how inhumane governments could be. Former executive director of Human Rights Watch, he has investigated human rights abuses around the world, focusing especially on the world’s most dire situations, the pursuit of international justice, the major powers’ foreign policies, the work of the UN, and the global contest between democracy and autocracy. In three decades under his leadership, Human Rights Watch grew to a staff of more than five hundred, conducting investigations in hundreds of countries to uncover abuses and pressuring offending governments to stop them. Roth’s many strategies included the deployment of a concept as old as mankind, the powerful tool of “shaming”, and here he illustrates its surprising effectiveness against evildoers.
Righting Wrongs, Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments (Knopf, 2025) is a story of wins, losses, and ongoing battles in the ceaseless fight to rend the moral arc from the hands of injustice and bend it toward good.
In English.
