Recently TINZ Executive Director Julie Haggie and Board members Debbie Gee, Daniel Fielding and Sarah Cotgreave were delighted to meet international human rights superstar and journalist Ken Roth.
The discussion focussed around the nexus between corruption and human rights abuses, including in New Zealand, a focus on modern slavery and also on geopolitical tensions across the Pacific.
The group then joined others in further discussion at Victoria University before Ken Roth’s lecture on Defending Human Rights in a Hostile World.
A couple of key takeaways from his lecture:
"Most rule of law countries tend to think of rights as something enforceable in courts. That is not the way it operates in most of the world, as Judges cannot stand up to the Executive Branch of Government." As a result, the approach adopted by Human Rights Watch had two key components:
- Careful documentation - on the ground investigators. These people need to have the capacity to work in difficult situations and conduct careful investigations, e.g. interviewing witnesses and survivors.
- Write and Issue a Report to:
- Shame a country / government - shine an intense spotlight on the abuse
- Put pressure on "human-rights loving countries", like NZ to refuse engagement with that country until they change - e.g. "make the photo-shoot conditional"
Where this approach doesn't work, then it is important to think about what and who will motivate the leader. "Sometimes the dictator is so brutal that they have no reputation to lose, and this is where civil society needs to work vicariously, under pressure from other leaders. That sort of pressure focuses on the things that the leader cares about and adds pressure until they change."
Kenneth Roth is the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He is also a Guardian US columnist.
Until August 2022, he served for nearly three decades as the executive director of Human Rights Watch, which he built into a global institution operating in some 100 countries. He has conducted numerous human rights investigative and advocacy missions around the world, meeting with dozens of heads of state and countless ministers, is quoted widely in the media, and has written hundreds of articles on a wide range of human rights issues, devoting special attention to the world’s most dire situations, the conduct of war, the foreign policies of the major powers, the work of the United Nations, and the global contest between autocracy and democracy.
His first book, “Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments,” offers an insider’s view of the strategies developed by Human Rights Watch to put pressure on governments to respect human rights.
