Shame, Reconsidered

KENNETH Roth led Human Rights Watch, the international organisation that investigates and publicises government abuses, as its executive director from 1993 to 2022, making him one of the longest-serving and most influential figures in the modern human rights movement. He is now a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs [Yale’s school of international relations]. His 2025 book, Righting Wrongs, draws on three decades of that work.

The Confluence spoke to him in 2026 about what happens to human rights advocacy when the leaders being shamed stop caring whether they are shamed at all; his comments on current governments reflect that moment.

What is Human Rights Watch? Founded in 1978 as Helsinki Watch, it is an independent organisation that investigates abuses in around 100 countries and publishes what it finds, so that public pressure pushes governments to change. It does not accept money from governments.

When Shame Stops Working

The Confluence: Righting Wrongs draws on decades of investigating abuses and publicising them to change how governments behave. That method depends on governments caring about their reputation. As more leaders appear openly indifferent to international criticism, how has the strategy had to evolve, and what does real leverage look like when shame no longer bites?

Roth: In today’s world, every government has to at least pretend to respect human rights. That is a way of saying that they care for their people rather than only for themselves. When governments violate human rights, they do not admit it. They lie and deny. Even powerful leaders like Donald Trump and Xi Jinping maintain a pretext of respect for human rights.

That gives human rights groups an opening. By carefully documenting and publicising a government’s human rights violations, we can spotlight the embarrassing discrepancy between their haughty pretence and the often ugly reality. That is shameful, delegitimising. Governments go to great lengths to avoid it.

They will start with public-relations techniques, trying to pretend that our reporting got it wrong, but we are very careful. Ultimately, they realise that the only way to get rid of the bad press is to change the bad conduct. That is when we begin to make progress.

In my book, I describe how this methodology has worked over and over to force abusive leaders to behave better. We do not pretend that we are turning dictators into nice guys – we are not therapists. Rather, we change the cost-benefit analysis [the weighing of gains against costs] behind their repression to make it less appealing. We play hardball.

Applying the Standard Evenly

The Confluence: Human Rights Watch was accused of bias from almost every direction, depending on whose abuses it was documenting at the time. Could you walk us through a moment when applying the same standard to a friendly government carried a real cost, and how you weighed that cost against the principle?

Roth: One dilemma Human Rights Watch could face is that we sometimes sought help addressing human rights violations in third countries – by conditioning benefits such as military aid on better respect for human rights – from some of the same governments whose own human rights violations we reported on. That was often true of the United States and key European countries. It was also true of Turkey, whose help we sought on Syria.

The question we confronted was whether we should pull our punches in reporting domestic abuses to secure a government’s help in addressing even more serious abuses elsewhere. The answer was no. We never let our advocacy concerns regarding third countries affect our reporting on a government’s own human rights record.

We figured that governments are sophisticated enough to understand that we are principled, and need to apply those principles even-handedly wherever serious human rights violations arise.

And if a government proved vindictive because of our reporting on its own violations, as today’s Trump administration tends to be, we would simply look for partners elsewhere.

Rights Beyond the Civil and Political

The Confluence: The human rights movement has long debated how far it should champion economic and social rights, such as access to food, healthcare and housing, alongside civil and political rights. How has your thinking on that question evolved over your career, and where should the movement draw its priorities today?

Roth: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights [the United Nations’ founding 1948 human rights charter] and the treaties derived from it, such as the two International Covenants [of 1966, one on civil and political rights and one on economic, social and cultural rights], make clear that civil and political rights are co-equal with economic, social and cultural rights.

That reflects the reality that people want not only to be free from things such as torture, censorship, discrimination and repression, but also to have adequate necessities such as food, housing and healthcare.

So as soon as I took over as executive director of Human Rights Watch, I made clear that this would be our approach.

However, the two covenants describing these sets of rights are written slightly differently. The rules for civil and political rights are largely absolute. The rules for economic, social and cultural rights require governments to progressively realise them [improve them step by step] on the basis of available resources.

That means it is not enough to show that someone might lack, say, adequate healthcare; rather, we must assess governmental efforts to address healthcare to see whether they are being pursued in good faith, based on capacity.

Yet that is doable. When governments waste funds on vanity projects, corruption or needless security expenditure, it is possible to show they are falling short of their duty to respect the economic, social and cultural rights of their people.

Advocacy in the Age of the Feed

The Confluence: Many young people now encounter human rights mainly through social media, where outrage is intense but often selective and short-lived. What does that shift do to the movement, and what separates activism that actually changes government behaviour from activism that only signals concern?

Roth: Social media is double-edged. On the one hand, it is much more difficult today for governments to hide their misconduct when everyone has a mobile phone and the ability to photograph or film what they see and disseminate it to the public. On the other hand, governments can also use social media to propagate falsehoods, without needing to persuade editors to report their disinformation the way they did when traditional media was more dominant.

However, I believe social media remains a net positive for the human rights movement. Autocratic leaders know that many people still look behind their disinformation to try to discover the truth, which is why leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, despite making huge efforts to spread propaganda, also impose censorship on their own people. They know the truth remains powerful.

In addition, social media is a tool all of us can use to help defend human rights. The human rights movement’s ability to shame governments depends on the public’s sense of right and wrong.

These days, the most influential people in determining that sense of right and wrong are not distant media companies but friends, family, and fellow students and workers. That means all of us are influencers in our own circle.

When you post on social media, you are reinforcing the moral views of the people close to you. That provides the foundation for the human rights movement to pressure governments to change.

The Limits of Intervention

The Confluence: Looking back on nearly three decades leading Human Rights Watch, which strategic judgement do you now think was wrong, and what did it teach you?

Roth: I probably changed most about my faith in the ability of external militaries to stop the most serious human rights violations: the concept known as humanitarian intervention, or the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) [the principle, endorsed by the UN in 2005, that the international community has a duty to act when a state cannot or will not protect its own people from mass atrocities].

Early in my career, I pressed for international military action to stop the genocides in Rwanda (unsuccessfully) and Bosnia (successfully).

However, later uses of the military caused me to reassess. When George W. Bush invoked humanitarian intervention to justify his invasion of Iraq – after it turned out not to have any weapons of mass destruction – and when Western nations cited R2P to invade Libya to prevent a “river of blood” [in 2011, NATO countries launched air strikes to protect civilians in Benghazi from an expected assault by Muammar Gaddafi’s forces], they ended up leaving chaos behind.

One thing that is often worse than repression is chaos. I came to appreciate that military force can overthrow a government but has a hard time establishing a viable, functional replacement.

So even in later situations when I was tempted to call for humanitarian intervention, as in Syria at the height of Bashar al-Assad’s atrocities [Assad ruled Syria until he was overthrown in December 2024], I did not.